Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Our friends and colleagues at British, Irish and Empire Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (Prof. Philippa Levine, Director) have announced their full lineup for this term’s virtual speaker series on ‘Black Britain’. Further details (including a link to register, etc.) below. UK readers, please note that the first seminar is this evening (6pm GMT).
Continue reading “Black Britain Virtual Speaker Series (starting 4 Oct.)”
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
All seminars take place at 3.30pm-5.00pm, and are currently scheduled live and on-campus
Wednesday 22 September (Week 1), 3.30pm-5.00pm:
CIGH Social and Welcome Back to Campus
We welcome new and returning researchers back to campus and celebrate the start of the new term. Wine, nibbles, and cake provided!
Wednesday 06 October (Week 3), 3.30pm-5.00pm:
Margot Tudor, University of Exeter
‘Testing the Waters: Experiments in an International Military, 1946-1955’
Wednesday 20 October (Week 5), 3.30pm-5.00pm:
Myles Osborne, University of Colorado Boulder
‘Mau Mau and Jamaica: An African War in the Caribbean’
Wednesday 03 November (Week 7), 3.30pm-5.00pm:
Henry Knight-Lozano, University of Exeter
‘Emulation and Empire: California, Hawai‘i, and U.S. Settler Colonialism in the Late Nineteenth Century’
Wednesday 17 November (Week 9), 3.30pm-5.00pm:
Alexander Keese, Université de Genève
‘Writing a global history of forced labour in the 19th and 20th centuries – between the megatrends and two micro-laboratories of plantation labour (São Tomé e Príncipe, Suriname).’ N.B. we will assemble together on campus with Prof. Keese streaming in live from Geneva.
Wednesday 1 December (Week 11), 3.30pm-5.00pm:
Postgraduate Research Symposium
Three Exeter PGRs working on Imperial and Global History share works in progress. More details to follow soon!
To join the CIGH mailing list contact r.j.hanley@exeter.ac.uk
Paul M.M. Doolan
In December 1949, the Netherlands was forced to hand over sovereignty of its colony, the Dutch East Indies, to the Republic of Indonesia. Their long domination of the Indonesian archipelago had come to a brutal end with the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949). Hundreds of thousands of Dutch who had called the former colony home repatriated to the metropole and 150,000 soldiers returned from a war that had proven futile. Their memories were not forgotten, though their compatriots did not care to hear their stories. During the decades that followed, the war faded from Dutch collective memory. Today it frequently makes the news.
The foundations for unremembering had already been constructed during the war, by means of official representations of the war. Carefully contrived representations, including visual representations, gave the impression that the Dutch military were involved in a great humanitarian exercise, not in a war. The Dutch military authorities contrived this false impression, but the press distributed and the public consumed this manipulated image, producing a fiction that would complicate the act of remembering in the future.
Continue reading “A Fictional War: Dutch propaganda and the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949)”
Job reference S63958
Date posted 20/09/2021
Application closing date 04/10/2021
Location Exeter
Salary The starting salary will be from £36,382 up to £47,419 on Grade (F), depending on qualifications and experience.
Package Generous holiday allowances, flexible working, pension scheme and relocation package (if applicable).
This full time role is available immediately on a fixed-term contract until August 2022. The successful applicant must be able to start no later than 1 November 2021.
The University of Exeter is a Russell Group university in the top 200 universities worldwide. We combine world-class teaching with world-class research, and have achieved a Gold rating in the Teaching Excellence Framework Award 2017. We have over 22,000 students and 4600 staff from 180 different countries and have been rated the WhatUni2017 International Student Choice. Our research focuses on some of the most fundamental issues facing humankind today, with 98% of our research rated as being of international quality in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework. We encourage proactive engagement with industry, business and community partners to enhance the impact of research and education and improve the employability of our students.
The role
The role of Lecturer in Modern History (Education and Scholarship) in the Department of History will include supporting the student learning experience using a range of approaches and modes of delivery appropriate to the teaching allocated. The post-holder will support the design and delivery of innovative and high-quality teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level. The ability to teach introductory, first-year modules on US history (post-1850) is desirable.
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
College: College of Humanities
Reference No: R63958
Date posted 19/08/2021
Application closing date 02/09/2021
Location Exeter
Grade: F
Salary The starting salary will be from £36,382 on Grade F, depending on qualifications and experience.
Package Generous holiday allowances, flexible working, pension scheme and relocation package (if applicable).
This full time role is available immediately on a fixed term contract until August 2022.
The role
The role of Lecturer in Modern American History (Education and Scholarship) in the Department of History will include supporting the student learning experience using a range of approaches and modes of delivery appropriate to the teaching allocated. The post-holder will support the design and delivery of innovative and high-quality blended teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Expertise in American History (post-1850) and the history of the civil rights movement is essential.
About you
You will:
Please ensure you read our Job Description and Person Specification for full details of this role.
Continue reading “Post: Lecturer in Modern American History”The Pierre du Bois Annual Conference, organised by the Graduate Institute in partnership with the Pierre du Bois Foundation and with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation, will take place at Maison de la paix.
Michael Goebel, Professor of International History and Politics and Pierre du Bois Chair Europe and the World, is organising the Conference.
A keynote lecture titled “Being in Time: The Experience of Nationhood” will be given by Bernard Yack, the Lerman Neubauer Professor of Democracy and Public Policy at Brandeis University.
The background note can be found here and the biographies of participants here.
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
Jon Piccini
Australian Catholic University
On July 26 1971, a top secret cabinet meeting ended what was then Australia’s longest conflict. The public would hear about it for the first time in August, when Prime Minister William McMahon announced the withdrawal of Australian forces from Vietnam.
Eighteen months — and a change of government later — Australia’s Vietnam War was over. Alongside untold Vietnamese, some 521 Australians had died in conflict, including 202 national servicemen.
The end of Australia’s war also saw the wrapping up of a novel and now largely forgotten organisation. The Ex-Services Human Rights Association of Australia was founded in October 1966 by former servicemen and women who “oppose militarism” and “believe that National Service […] should not involve conscription for foreign wars”.
The final issue of the group’s newsletter, Conscience, in February 1972 paid special tribute to Martin Leslie (Les) Waddington, a World War II veteran and leather goods manufacturer, and the group’s “spiritual leader, and greatest workhorse”.
Fifty years since Australia officially began withdrawing from Vietnam, my forthcoming article reflects on how Waddington exemplified an undercurrent of anti-war citizen soldiery in Australia.
Continue reading “The forgotten Australian veterans who opposed National Service and the Vietnam War”
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
Lori Lee Oates (@drlorileeoates)
Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador
In 2019, I had the opportunity to participate in public scholarship collaborations with political scientists, geographers, and community activists on the climate crisis. This led to lecturing to graduate students on the climate emergency and writing guest essays on the topic for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The criticism from climate change deniers was swift and fierce but not unexpected. It was usually some variation of “What does a humanities scholar or historian know about climate change?” or “These are issues best left to business schools and engineering departments.” The response forced me to grapple with the question: what is the role of global and imperial history in providing commentary on the climate crisis?
The question hits particularly close to home for me; Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, where I teach in the Master of Philosophy (Humanities) program, is located in one of Canada’s petro provinces. The economy has always been heavily dependent on natural resource sectors and very much dependent on oil since 1997. The one economic golden age the province experienced was fostered by high oil prices. The province has also had a troubled imperial history as it went from being the home of the lost Indigenous people known as the Beothuk, to becoming European fishing grounds, used by imperial powers for its vast natural resources, then to a British colony, to Commonwealth dominion, back to commission of government, all before joining Canada as its tenth province in 1949.
The legacy of imperialism on Newfoundland’s resource-dependent economy was explored back in the mid ‘90s by Valerie Summers in Regime Change in a Resource Economy: The Politics of Underdevelopment in Newfoundland since 1825 (1994). In the intervening decades, Newfoundland and Labrador’s approach to economic development continues to be rooted in imperial ways of thinking, which arguably prevent its development as the global economy has moved away from localized natural resources sectors, and towards globalized service sectors. Political economists have effectively documented the phenomenon known as “the resource curse”. Overdependence on natural resources, or a single resource, are problems that afflict many former colonies, that have historically been used as a source for the extraction for their resources. This overdependence, then, is an imperial legacy.
Continue reading “Addressing the Contemporary Climate Crisis by Decolonizing Environmental History”
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
Anne L. Foster (Indiana State University) and Petra Goedde (Temple University)
Editors, Diplomatic History
Covid-19 has laid bare the tension between globalism and nationalism, the promise and limits of modern medicine, the persistence of inequality, legacies of imperialism and racism. We have witnessed human beings adapt with remarkable resilience, but also the toll the took on families and individuals beyond the threat of death and disease: isolation, job loss, financial insecurity, uncertainty.
As university teachers and mothers, we scrambled in the spring of 2020 to adjust our living and teaching. As foreign relations scholars and journal editors we were thinking about what all this meant for our work. And so we invited a group of scholars to reflect on this question: What has living through this pandemic revealed or changed about your conception of your scholarship?
We are happy to announce that the twenty-three short essays they wrote have just been published in the June 2021 issue of Diplomatic History, all of which are currently free to read and download online.
Continue reading “How Has the Pandemic Reshaped U.S. Foreign Relations Histories?”
Imperial & Global Forum 
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