Centre for Modern History

The Spatial Reformation: Euclid Between Man, Cosmos, and God

Tuesday 10th March, 2020
17:30-19:30
in D220, Rhind Building

The Centre for Modern History invites you to a Book Launch with:

Speakers: Dr Michael J. Sauter (City, UoL and CIDE) and Professor John Tresch (Warburg Institute)

In The Spatial Reformation, Michael J. Sauter offers a sweeping history of the way Europeans conceived of three-dimensional space, including the relationship between Earth and the heavens, between 1350 and 1850.

He argues that this "spatial reformation" provoked a reorganization of knowledge in the West that was arguably as important as the religious Reformation. Notably, it had its own sacred text, which proved as central and was as ubiquitously embraced: Euclid's Elements.  Aside from the Bible, no other work was so frequently reproduced in the early modern era.  According to Sauter, its penetration and suffusion throughout European thought and experience call for a deliberate reconsideration not only of what constitutes the intellectual foundation of the early modern era but also of its temporal range.

Bridging Cold War Borders: Yugoslavia and Municipal Internationalism

Tuesday 18th February, 2020
18:00-20:00
in D220, Rhind Building

Speaker: Dr Vladimir Unkovski-Korica (University of Glasgow)

Self/Determination: Emotions, Law and the 
League of Nations @ 100

30 January, 2020

“League of Nations @100” - A workshop co-organised by Centre for Modern History at City, University of London and the Centre for Modern and Contemporary History, University of Birmingham.

Dr Ilaria Scaglia (Aston): “Feeling Internationalism at the League of Nations and Beyond”

Dr Maja Spanu (Cambridge): “The Hierarchical Society: The Politics of Self Determination and the constitution of new states after 1919”

The event is the second of two workshops on the League of Nations @100, co-organised by Centre for Modern History at City, University of London and the Centre for Modern and Contemporary History, University of Birmingham.

The first workshop took place at Birmingham, on 23 January.

Theme: Humanitarian Histories & the LON @100.
Speakers: Dr Jeanne Morefield (POLSIS) and Dr Jasmin Nithammer (History).  Chair: Dr Simon Jackson.

War and the modern world

Speaker: Professor Margaret MacMillan (University of Toronto)

19 November 2019

Professor MacMillan will be speaking on the topic of ‘War and the Modern World’. The lecture will expand on the themes she covered in her widely acclaimed 2018 Reith Lectures - entitled The Mark of Cain - which explored the tangled history of war and society and our complicated feelings towards it and towards those who fight.

About the Speaker

Eating the World: Food and International Thought in the Twentieth Century.

Participants: Alma Igra (Columbia), Patricia Clavin (Oxford), Ingrid De Zwarte (Oxford), Dayna Barnes (City), Lise Butler (City), Mary Cox (Oxford), Eric Haney (Oxford), Rachel Herrmann (Cardiff), Anna Isaacs (City), Samantha Iyer (Fordham), Christopher Otter (Ohio), May Rosenthal Sloan (V&A), Lola Wilhelm (Graduate Institute), Sami Zubaida (Birkbeck), Or Rosenboim (City).

11 June 2019

The inaugural conference of the Centre for Modern History explored how people perceived food and nutrition in the twentieth century. Through the conceptual prisms of hunger, empire, nutrition, war and ethics, the speakers looked at ideas about food in politics over the last century. The conference provided a stimulating opportunity to confront a new area of research, in the intersection of intellectual history and food studies, and provided scholarly incentives for new research paths. The presentations were accompanied by a lively debate with the multi-disciplinary audience, followed by a drinks reception.

Book Launch of “Architects of Occupation: American Experts and the Planning for Postwar Japan”

Speakers: Dr Dayna Barnes (City, University of London) and, Dr Aurélie Basha i Novosejt (University of Kent)

19 February 2019

The Allied occupation of Japan is remembered as the "good occupation."  An American-led coalition successfully turned a militaristic enemy into a stable and democratically.  Of course, the story was more complicated, but the occupation did forge one of the most enduring relationships in the postwar world.  

Recent events, from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to protests over American bases in Japan to increasingly aggressive territorial disputes between Asian nations over islands in the Pacific, have brought attention back to the subject of the occupation of Japan. In Architects of Occupation, Dayna L. Barnes exposes the wartime origins of occupation policy and broader plans for postwar Japan. She considers the role of presidents, bureaucrats, think tanks, the media, and Congress in policy-making.

Members of these elite groups came together in an informal policy network that shaped planning. Barnes traces the rise and spread of ideas across the policy network. The book contributes a new facet to the substantial literature on the occupation, serves as a case study in foreign policy analysis, and tells a surprising new story about World War II.

About the speakers

Author, Dr Dayna Barnes, is a lecturer in Modern History in the Department of International Politics at City, University of London. She is currently researching the experiences of American diplomats interned in Tokyo after Pearl Harbor. Architects of Occupation is her first book.

Discussant, Dr Aurélie Basha i Novosejt, is a lecturer in American History at the University of Kent. Her upcoming book I Made Mistakes (Cambridge University Press, 2019) reconsiders Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s decisions during the Vietnam War.

'Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees'

Speakers: Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge (University of Birmingham) in conversation with Dr Or Rosenboim (City, University of London) on her new book, Placeless People,

5 March 2019

In 1944 the political philosopher and refugee, Hannah Arendt wrote: 'Everywhere the word 'exile' which once had an undertone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously suspicious and unfortunate.' Exiles from other places have often caused trouble for ideas about sovereignty, law and nationhood. But the meanings of exile changed dramatically in the twentieth century, to an extent we are yet to reckon with. In her new book, Lyndsey Stonebridge argues that mass statelessness provoked writers and intellectuals into new thinking about sovereignty, humanism and the future of human rights. Writing before the capricious humanitarianization of mass displacement set in, thinkers such as Arendt, Simone Weil, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett and Dorothy Thompson all understood that refugee ‘crises’ were in reality crises provoked by nationalism and failing forms of political citizenship.

About the speaker

Lyndsey Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights in the Department of English Literature/IRiS, University of Birmingham

Book launch of The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950.

Speakers: Dr Or Rosenboim (City, University of London) Dr Marc-William Palen (University of Exeter)

30 January 2018.

The launch of the Centre for Modern History took place at City, University of London on 30 January 2018. The key-note speakers Or Rosenboim (City, University of London) and Marc-William Palen (University of Exeter) focused on the theme of 'Globalism in History and Politics'. Dr Palen focused on the re-emergence of anti-globalism and conspiracy of free trade, comparing and contrasting the ways in which trade protectionism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century re-emerged more recently, and how protectionism in the economic sphere of global politics – often in the form of economic nationalism – transferred into and often transformed the politics of anti-globalism.

Expanding upon these themes and questions, Dr Rosenboim drew attention to the wider role of globalism and connectivity in modern history. Dr Rosenboim explored the intellectual history of globalism in mid-twentieth century American and British political thought and discussed these findings with respect to her widely acclaimed book, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton, 2017), scrutinising and contextualising the current age of globalisation, globalist ideologies and global politics. A lively discussion was followed by a wine reception.

Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia.

Speakers: Dr Natalia Roudakova (University of Birmingham), Dr Dina Feinberg (City), Dr James Rodgers (City, University of London)

February 2018.

In February, the Centre for Modern History hosted a talk on the new book by Dr Natalia Roudakova, Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge). Dr Roudakova (University of Rotterdam) discussed the state of journalism in Russia, from the Soviet era to our days, arguing that cynicism was the zeitgeist of the post-Soviet society, similar to Weimar Germany. Both periods were characterised, for her, by a feeling of ‘unending crisis’. She presented the audience with examples from the Russian press as well as from television shows, such as ‘Lenin as a Mushroom’ (1991), which is a Soviet ‘stiob’, a cynical mockery of social and political order. The joke is powerful, she suggested, because it is elusive and open to interpretation. Dr James Rodgers (Journalism) Dr Dina Fainberg (History) led the discussion after the talk, which was followed by a wine reception and the inauguration of the History Lightbox Exhibition.

Radicals and Reformers: History Lightbox Exhibition at the City University Pavilion

In Spring 2018, the Centre for Modern History curated an exhibition on the ‘Radicals & Reformers’ of the historical surroundings of City, University of London. The exhibition focused on the history of local charity and philanthropic organizations, on the foundation of the Labour Party in Clerkenwell in 1900, on the transnational history of NGOs in the neighbourhood, and on Mary Wollstonecraft, a local radical thinker and famous feminist. The exhibition celebrated the foundation of the Centre for Modern History, and the forthcoming launch of the new BA degree in History at City.

War in the Nazi Imagination

Speaker: Professor Sir Richard J. Evans

2 October 2018

‘War in the Nazi Imagination’, Professor Sir Richard J. Evans, 2 October 2018. This lecture explores the ways in which Hitler and the Nazis imagined a future war. It would be heroic and victorious, and all Germans would take part in it in one way or another. Warfare was the means by which they would survive and triumph in the Darwinian struggle of races for supremacy. The Nazi vision of war, expressed in visual and verbal imaginings, was a vision of war without limit and without end. It would demand sacrifice and dedication but without it the 'Aryan' race would perish. Richard J Evans is Provost of Gresham College, London, and Visiting Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of numerous books on modern German and European history, including, most recently, The Third Reich in History and Memory, and The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914. His biography of Eric Hobsbawm, was published by Little, Brown in 2019.

Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual.

Speaker: Dr Daniel Bessner (Assistant Professor in the Hentry M Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington)

Comments: Prof. Inderjeet Parmar, (City, University of London)

Chair: Dr Or Rosenboim, (City, University of London)

22 October 2018

One of the major institutional innovations in U.S. foreign policy-making since 1945 has been the rise of a network of think tanks and academic centers connected to government decision-makers termed the “military-intellectual complex.” This talk explores the intellectual trajectory of Hans Speier, the founding head of the RAND Corporation’s Social Science Division, in order to explore why intellectuals joined and built the national security state. It argues that the interwar crisis of European democracy compelled many social scientists to conclude that the public could not be trusted to make correct political decisions. Intellectuals like Speier therefore worked to establish institutions like RAND, which stood outside the traditional democratic process and enabled scholars to offer advice to decision-makers without paying attention to public opinion.