We will be running our next Decolonization Workshop here at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in Senate House, London, on Monday 16 March 2020. The day will run from 11.00am to 6.00pm.
As on previous occasions, we aim to have a series panel discussions over the course of the day. Each panel will consist of three papers lasting for 15-20 minutes. We are particularly appealing for proposals for presentations from research students and early-career researchers, although we welcome the participation of more established scholars. The workshop will provide an informal and supportive forum in which to discuss work in progress. Continue reading “CFP: Decolonization Workshop @ICwS_SAS, Monday 16 March 2020”→
Exeter’s postgraduate history journal, Ex Historia, are hosting an afternoon interdisciplinary PGR conference at the University of Exeter. The conference aims to explore how the history of states and empires can help us understand the current Brexit phenomenon. We welcome proposals for 10 minute papers with a flexible interpretation of the below themes. We invite papers from PGR students across university institutions and departments.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
• Conceptualising statehood throughout history
• The construction and dissolution of state and empires
• National identity and the rise of nation states
• The variable nature of statehood
• The history of Britain-European relations
The event aims to promote interdisciplinary discussions, develop the skills and knowledge of PGR students, and provide an enriched understanding of how we can learn from history, connecting academia with current international affairs. The keynote speaker will be Dr Robert Saunders, Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published widely on British politics and Brexit; his most recent book is titled Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain. Furthermore, he has provided commentary and interviews on Brexit for BBC News, CNN and NPR. Please submit a 300 word abstract and a short biography to exhistoria@exeter.ac.uk by 15 February.
Development and Securitisation, and (Counter)-Insurgency
Joint research workshop:
Understanding Insurgencies network and The worlds of (under)development: processes and legacies of the Portuguese colonial empire in a comparative perspective (1945-1975)
Lisbon, Portugal, 14-15 March 2019
Call for Papers
Proposals for papers are invited from members of the Understanding Insurgencies network and others for a two-day research workshop exploring the connections between development initiatives and counter-insurgent efforts to restore, impose, or otherwise establish forms of social control.
Enmeshed in rhetoric of poverty reduction and enhanced social opportunity, colonial development is increasingly viewed by scholars more sceptically: less as evidence of imperial goodwill than as an instrument of social and geo-political control in the face of mounting anti-colonial opposition. Sometimes described as integral to colonial claims to modernization, development policies could be highly coercive. At one level, technical aid and financial support was expected to diminish the appeal of anti-colonial alternatives, thereby stabilizing imperial order. At another, more tangible level, the instruments of development were often directives requiring forced relocation, the abandonment of customary practices, or the fulfillment of obligations that rendered individuals legible to – and controllable by – colonial authority. Arguments over development thus encapsulated the tension intrinsic to colonial authority: limited interventionism and purported respect for local ‘tradition’ or the pursuit of heightened social control characteristic of development projects. Continue reading “Call for papers: Development and Securitisation, and (Counter)-Insurgency”→
Ex Historia is now accepting articles and book reviews for our 2019 volume. Original articles should be between 4000 and 8000 words, including footnotes and bibliography. Book reviews should be between 500 and 1000 words. Review articles (addressing three or four books which share a common theme) can be between 2000 and 4000 words. Please refer to MRHA Style Guide for style requirements and use British spellings in all cases except for direct quotations which use alternative spellings. Continue reading “Call for Papers: Ex Historia”→
Over the last half century, discourses and practices connected to the idea that violent or dictatorial pasts should be marked as criminal have proliferated. A variety of actors – from victims groups to social movements, to expert groups such as lawyers, museums specialists and even economists – have contributed to the emergence and circulation of the notion that political violence could only be overcome through its criminalization in courts, lustration procedures, history writing, activism or memorial sites. Produced across different fields of action and expertise, this assumption has become dominant in the political and judicial sphere at a global level and has permeated many political cultures and everyday life practices. Even where decriminalisation (amnesties, pardons, closure of archives) prevailed, debates worked within the set of assumptions about the past established through this globally expanding paradigm.
Despite its dominance, we still lack a truly international history of its roots. This is in part because modern day practices of criminalisation often play down their own historicity. Coming of age at the so-called ‘end of history’, their promoters came to see their application as a natural end point in the achievement of human rights, democracy or good governance. When histories are offered, they too often provide a rather linear narrative that links these developments to – mainly Western – political processes established to address the legacies of Nazism after World War Two. Such accounts have also commonly resisted incorporation into broader frameworks supplied, for example, by histories of globalization, neoliberalism or postcolonialism. Only recently have a few authors sought to make sense of the emergence of the modern criminalisation paradigm in new ways, connecting it, for example, to the rise of the homo economicusand a concomitant individualistic approach to human rights.
This conference seeks to explore the history of the (often forgotten) pathways and contested visions through which the criminalization paradigm developed. This conference welcomes contributions that explore the emergence of multiple, potentially competitive visions of criminal pasts. Taking as its starting point the moment of an acceleration of decolonisation, globalisation and de-Stalinisation in the 1950s, we encourage papers that explore the variety of actors, activisms and political projects that lay behind the global expansion of such ideas. Human rights organisations, international legal associations, post-colonial and Communist states, all variously developed the idea of overcoming criminal pasts as they sought, to legitimate new political projects, reconceptualise the relationship between the individual and the state, or seek collective or socio-economic justice for past wrongs. We welcome papers that, for example, address the complexity and interplay of these ideas in different arenas and seek to connect these phenomena to wider literatures. We are also wary of easy teleologies, and are as interested in the histories of the marginalization of some visions, as in the growing dominance of others.
Reed Hall, University of Exeter, where the 2018 conference will be held.
A reminder that the deadline for the Call for Papers for the 2018 Britain and the World Conference, Exeter is 15 December.
After our tenth anniversary conference in Austin in April 2017, Britain and the World returns to the UK for 2018: Thursday 21 to Saturday 23 June. It will be at Exeter University: the venue is Reed Hall and accommodation is at the neighbouring Holland Hall, and, as always, the conference is concerned with interactions within the ‘British world’ from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the present and will highlight the importance of transnational perspectives.
The Keynote Speaker will be Professor Richard Overy (Exeter), and the Plenary Speaker is Professor Audrey Horning (Queen’s University Belfast). There’ll be lunchtime roundtables on cinema and history, and on public history. Publishers present will include our journal publisher Edinburgh University Press, and our book series publisher Palgrave Macmillan, and the commissioning editor will be present throughout to discuss your publishing plans.
We accept both individual twenty-minute papers and complete panel submissions. Panels are expected to consist of three papers and should be submitted by one person who is willing to serve as the point of contact. Complete panels should also include a chair. In addition to abstracts for each individual paper, panel submissions should also include a 100-150 word introduction describing the panel’s main theme. The conference does not discriminate between panels and individual paper submissions, nor between graduate students and established academics.
Reed Hall, University of Exeter, where the 2018 conference will be held.
This serves as the Call for Papers for the 2018 Britain and the World Conference, Exeter, June 2018 (#BATW2018).
After our tenth anniversary conference in Austin in April 2017, Britain and the World returns to the UK for 2018: Thursday 21 to Saturday 23 June. It will be at Exeter University: the venue is Reed Hall and accommodation is at the neighbouring Holland Hall, and, as always, the conference is concerned with interactions within the ‘British world’ from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the present and will highlight the importance of transnational perspectives.
The Keynote Speaker will be Professor Richard Overy (Exeter), and the Plenary Speaker is Professor Audrey Horning (Queen’s University Belfast). There’ll be lunchtime roundtables on cinema and history, and on public history. Publishers present will include our journal publisher Edinburgh University Press, and our book series publisher Palgrave Macmillan, and the commissioning editor will be present throughout to discuss your publishing plans.
We accept both individual twenty-minute papers and complete panel submissions. Panels are expected to consist of three papers and should be submitted by one person who is willing to serve as the point of contact. Complete panels should also include a chair. In addition to abstracts for each individual paper, panel submissions should also include a 100-150 word introduction describing the panel’s main theme. The conference does not discriminate between panels and individual paper submissions, nor between graduate students and established academics.
As ever the conference icebreaker will be held on the Thursday evening, the Dinner Party on the Friday, and the outings downtown on the Saturday. These events will provide numerous opportunities for networking and more in the capital of Devon.
Exeter is two hours by direct train from London, and there is a direct National Express bus line from Heathrow Airport. Exeter also has its own international airport, and is one hour by train from Bristol.
Exeter Cathedral.
On campus is the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, home to one of the largest collections in Britain of material relating to film. The University’s special collections are noted for archives relating to twentieth-century South West Writing (and include the papers of Daphne du Maurier), literature and visual culture, Victorian culture and imperial endeavour, Arab and Islamic studies, and religious and parish book collections. In city centre there are Exeter Cathedral and archives, the Devon and Exeter Institute (which houses a large collection of local archival materials), Exeter Castle, and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM). Continue reading “Call for Papers – Britain and the World Conference 2018 (Exeter, June 2018) #BATW2018”→
GLOBAL COMPARISONS FROM THE COLONIAL CONTEXT, 1920-2000
Workshop
Global History & Culture Centre, University of Warwick
14-15 June 2018
This workshop is part of a Leverhulme Trust Research Network on Understanding Insurgencies: Resonances from the Colonial Past. Led by the University of Exeter’s Centre for War, State and Society, other collaborators in this international network are the University of Warwick, University of Oxford, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Paris, University of Glasgow, Universite de Québec à Montréal, and KITLV Institute Leiden.The network is funded by the Leverhulme Trust to stage a series of workshops and conferences over a three-year period, (commencing June 2016), and leading to publications.
The theme of this sixth workshop in the Understanding Insurgencies series is ‘Amnesty to Counter Insurgency’. The intention is to examine the manner in which amnesties have been used to bring about temporary cease-fires during counter-insurgency campaigns, to induce surrenders or the ending of hostilities that will bring conflict to an end, or as a means of engaging political discourse in order to generate a negotiated peace. We invite presentations that give detailed consideration to individual case studies during the twentieth century, but would also welcome papers which take a comparative approach and those that look at the principles and pit-falls that lie behind amnesty settlements, including papers that consider the political consequences of amnesties – where these may be contested as well as where they are accepted. Continue reading “CFP: Understanding Insurgencies (1920-2000)”→
Fernando J. Padilla University of Exeter/University of Bristol
CALL FOR PAPERS
CONFERENCE “EMPIRES AND NATIONS, BEYOND THE BRITISH CASE”
UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
25th April 2017
This one-day postgraduate conference “Empires and Nations: Beyond the British Case” will be held on 25th April 2017 at the University of Bristol’s Wills Memorial Building. It aims to provide a friendly and constructive environment for scholarly debate. The conference is open to MA, MPhil, and PhD researchers.
The goal of the conference is to bring together postgraduate researchers working on any topic related to the main theme of imperialism, preferably beyond the British case. Due to the logical dominance of the British imperial past within the broader field of Imperial, Colonial, Postcolonial, and Global History studies in the UK, the aim of this conference is precisely to focus on other imperial and postcolonial experiences, European as well as non-European, of the 19th and 20th centuries. By focusing the conference on cases other than the British, we aim to foster debate with a broader and more inclusive approach to the complex imperial past and colonial legacies of modern societies. Thus, we strongly encourage the participation of researchers looking at European as well as non-European imperial experiences. Continue reading “Call For Papers: Empires and Nations, Beyond the British Case”→
Call for Papers for an Interdisciplinary Workshop as part of the research project
Cultural Exchange in Times of Global Conflict:Colonials, Neutrals and Belligerents during the First World War
Colonialism, War & Photography
London – 17 September 2015
If the First World War is usually defined as the military clash of empires, it can also be reconceptualised as a turning point in the history of cultural encounters. Between 1914 and 1918, more than four million non-white men were drafted mostly as soldiers or labourers into the Allied armies: they served in different parts of the world – from Europe and Africa to Mesopotamia, the Middle East and China – resulting in an unprecedented range of cultural encounters. The war was also a turning point in the history of photographic documentation as such moments and processes were recorded in hundreds of thousands of photographs by fellow soldiers, official photographers, amateurs, civilians and the press. In the absence of written records, these photographs are some of our most important – and hitherto largely neglected – sources of the lives of these men: in trenches, fields, billets, hospitals, towns, markets, POW camps. But how do we ‘read’ these photographs?
Second-Lieutenant Frank Bassill, British official cameraman, with a Moy & Bastie camera and members of the Chinese Labour Corps (IWM Q 10260).
Using the First World War as a focal point, this interdisciplinary one-day workshop aims to examine the complex intersections between war, colonialism and photography. What is the use and influence of (colonial) photography on the practice of history? What is the relationship between its formal and historical aspects? How are the photographs themselves involved in the processes of cultural contact that they record and how do they negotiate structures of power? Continue reading “Call For Papers – Colonialism, War & Photography”→
The European Labour History Network is hosting its first conference at the University of Turin from 14-16 December 2015. The aim of the conference is to connect historians working in the sub-fields associated with Labour History, one of which is imperial labour history. CIGH’s Gareth Curless and Yann Beliard, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, are responsible for co-ordinating the Imperial Labour History Group. As part of the conference, Gareth and Yann will be organising a workshop on the subject of imperial labour history. The objective of the workshop is to consider imperial labour history within the wider context of imperial historiography, investigating how labour historians can contribute to ‘new imperial history’, as well as emerging trends resulting from the ‘global’ or ‘transnational turn’. The Call for Papers can be found below and the organisers would welcome contributions from not just historians but also political scientists and social movement theorists:
The ‘cultural turn’ has revitalised the study of imperialism, moving imperial history away from its traditional focus on administrative and diplomatic elites, conquest and administration, and the geo-politics of empire, to subjects such as race, gender, and sexuality. Few studies, however, have focused on the concepts of class and labour. Such neglect is unsurprising but it is detrimental both to the study of empire and to the exploration of how imperialism affected metropolitan societies. Continue reading “Call for Papers: New Directions in Imperial Labour History”→
France outside of its traditional sphere of African influence (19th-21st centuries)
Sciences Po, Paris, Centre d’Histoire, Friday 20 November 2015
The study of France’s policy in Africa has frequently focused on the interactions with its (former) Empire, the “pré-carré”. This has given rise to a narrative of uniqueness and exceptionality, whilst simultaneously contributing to critiques of France as a “neo-colonial” actor in Africa. However, a growing body of new scholarly research suggest that the time is now ripe for a reassessment of this restrictive vision.
The aim of this interdisciplinary conference will be to bring some of the generation who were involved in attempts to bring about change in the 1960s and 1970s together with researchers, theorists, practitioners, activists from the younger generations today. It will examine and debate how progress and development were conceptualised, practised and imagined during the periods of national liberation struggles, of decolonisation and its aftermath, of political and social upheaval and change. It will analyse successes and failures on all levels and explore new ways of thinking that are being developed at the present time, particularly those that break with the prevailing consensus. Continue reading “CFP: Progress, Change and Development: Past, Present and Future”→
Lori Lee Oates History Department, University of Exeter
The Local and the Global
ASMCF- SSFH PG Study Day, University of Exeter
Saturday March 7th 2015
Call For Papers
Keynote Speaker: Dr Claire Eldridge (Southampton)
Planned Professional Development Sessions: archival research; social media for academia; publishing journal articles; the Viva; and from PhD to monograph.
Deadline for Submissions: 9 January 2015
‘Tout le Monde à Paris’, proclaimed a poster for the 1900 Exposition Universelle. The world on your doorstep; the global meets the local through a cultural conduit. A century later, and with the World Wide Web in your pocket, the global has never been more connected to the local. Conceptually these terms are antonymous: the local is specific, on a small scale, and often suggests civic or regional affiliations to a place; the global is universal, world-wide, and lacks definitive spatial rooting. Yet considering the local and the global as opposites may belie the potential impact that they can have upon one another. Continue reading “CFP: ‘The Local and the Global’, University of Exeter, 7 March 2015”→
In under two decades, authoritarian political systems collapsed across Europe – in the south of the continent in the 1970s, and then in the east between 1989 and 1991. Although much work has been done on these processes in each region, and comparative work carried out on post-authoritarian transitions and memories, there has yet to be any sustained scholarship that examines the ‘entangledness’ of these processes in the context of broader European and global processes of the late Cold War and its aftermath. Taking a longue durée approach, this conference will explore these inter-relationships between the 1960s and the present day. 2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of state socialism and the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the transition from dictatorship on the Iberian Peninsula and in Greece: an ideal time to consider the relationship between these processes that have been central to modern European history. Continue reading “CFP: Entangled Transitions: Between Eastern and Southern Europe 1960s-2014”→
Imperial & Global Forum 
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