Past events
2021/22 events
The Breakup of Yugoslavia as a Global Event: Legacies, History and Memory
May 17th 2022
Speakers:
- Prof. Marie-Janine Calic (Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich) - "The Breakup of Yugoslavia: Global Dimensions"
- Dr. Chris Jones (University of East Anglia) - "Building the post-Cold War world order: France and the Breakup of Yugoslavia"
- Dr. Federico Brusadelli (University of Naples L'Orientale / Polish Institute of Advanced Studies) - "Sovereignty at Stake: the Chinese Communist Party and the Collapse of Yugoslavia"
Chair: Dr. Or Rosenboim (City University, London)
Watch the event recording:
Federalism in a Global Perspective Seminars
Organized by Dr Federico Brusadelli and Dr Or Rosenboim
Sponsored by Centre for Modern History, City, the University of London and The University of Naples “Orientale”
The aim of the seminars is to interrogate the history of the federal idea in a global perspective, putting together interventions from leading scholars whose work focuses on different parts of the world to reveal the varying interpretations of federalism in the twentieth century and the idea’s relevance to contemporary political debates.
Seminar 1: Ideologies of Federalism
11 October 2021, 4 pm (London)
Watch the event recording for Seminar 1:
Seminar 2: Federalism and Empire
12 November 2021, 4 pm (London)
Watch the recording of Seminar 2:
Cold War Correspondents Book Launch
An event sponsored by the Centre for Modern History, City and Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, The Netherlands on 22 June, 2021.
Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines by Dina Fainberg (City). Speakers: Kristin Roth-Ey (UCL SSEES), James Rodgers (City) and Maxim Matusevich (Seton Hall), Chair: Or Rosenboim (City).
Watch the event recording:
2020/21 events
Book Talk: Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970
Wednesday February 10th 2021, at 5:30pm
Join us as Lise Butler discusses her recent book, “Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970,” (Oxford, 2020). She will describe the life and work of the social scientist and policy maker Michael Young, and explore the close relationship between the social sciences and left wing politics in post-war Britain.
Book presentation: The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021)
Wednesday March 17th, 2021 at 5:30pm
Speaker: Robin P. Chapdelaine, Assistant Professor of History, McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, Duquesne University
Despite efforts to abolish slavery throughout Africa in the nineteenth century, the coercive labor systems that constitute “modern slavery” have continued to the present day. To understand why, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine explores child trafficking, pawning, and marriages in Nigeria’s Bight of Biafra, and the ways in which British colonial authorities and Igbo, Ibibio, Efik, and Ijaw populations mobilized children’s labor during the early twentieth century. The Persistence of Slavery provides an invaluable investigation into the origins of modern slavery and early efforts to combat it, locating this practice in the political, social, and economic changes that occurred as a result of British colonialism and its lingering effects, which perpetuate child trafficking in Nigeria today.
The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria Discount Flier
Book Launch: The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia
Wednesday January 27th 2021, at 5.30pm
Jelena Đureinović will present her new book on the politics of memory. The book explores the concepts of collaboration, resistance, and postwar retribution.
Since the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, memory politics in Serbia has undergone drastic changes in the way in which the Second World War and its aftermath is understood and interpreted. The glorification and romanticisation of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland has become the central theme of Serbia’s memory politics during this period. The book traces their construction as a national antifascist movement equal to the communist-led Partisans and as victims of communism, showing the parallel justification and denial of their wartime activities of collaboration and mass atrocities.
Jelena Đureinović is a postdoctoral researcher and scientific coordinator of the Research Platform for the Study of Eastern Europe and Transformations at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in History from Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. She also works as the coordinator of the Memory Program at the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Serbia.
Watch the event recording.
Book launch: Sex, Law and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 (Cornell University Press) by Judith Surkis
Wednesday December 16th 2020, at 5.30pm
In Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, Judith Surkis traces how colonial authorities constructed Muslim legal difference and used it to deny Algerian Muslims full citizenship.
In disconnecting Muslim law from property rights, French officials increasingly attached it to the bodies, beliefs, and personhood.
This book also highlights the ways in which Algerians interacted with and responded to colonial law. Ultimately, this sweeping legal genealogy of French Algeria elucidates how "the Muslim question" in France became—and remains—a question of sex. Judith Surkis is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University (USA).
Book Talk: In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean
Thursday Nov 19th at 5:30pm
At this event, Jeppe Mulich will present his recent book, “In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean” (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Jeppe explores the interconnected nature of imperial politics and colonial law in the maritime borderlands of the Leeward Islands, where British, Danish, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Swedish colonies both competed and cooperated with one another.
His work offers a new account of the age of revolutions in the Caribbean, emphasizing the border-crossing nature of life in the region.
Watch the event recording of Book Talk: In a Sea of Empires
Working with History Series Event
Thursday November 12th 2020, at 5pm
Join us as we welcome Dr. Emma Peplow to the Working with History event series. Emma is the Head of Development at the History of Parliament Trust.
She has also worked as a Research Associate at the Marylebone Cricket Club Museum, running an oral history project and collection of digital stories on the importance of grassroots cricket clubs to their communities in the UK and Sri Lanka.
Watch the Working with History Series event recording
Conversation Series: Working with History
Thursday 8th October 2020
4:00 PM
The Centre for Modern History is hosting a series of informal conversations with history graduates about their lives and careers beyond university. In this event we will be speaking with George Brown, an expert in data analytics, performance marketing strategy, and client management.
George studied Classics and European History in London before going on to work first in finance and then digital marketing. His life and work have brought him to Columbia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Australia, and the UK.
Watch the event recording here.
Conversation Series: Working with History
Thursday 10th September 2020
4:00 PM
The Centre for Modern History is hosting a series of informal conversations with history graduates about their lives and careers beyond university. This event features Shilpa Belliappa, a specialist in youth participation, digital product development, and programme delivery.
Shilpa is Development Manager at the Lighthouse Organisation, a group that is creating a new approach to children’s residential care in North London. She has been an advisor on youth policy, education, and digital communities for several organisations.
2019/20 events
Conversation Series: Working with History
Thursday 23rd July 2020
4:00 PM
The informal conversation series with history graduates about their lives and careers beyond university continues with a discussion between Centre Director Dayna Barnes and Dr Maria Chen. Maria is EMEA Manager, Legal Operations at Google and Contributing Analyst to several news outlets. She will talk about what drew her to study history, and how she has turned that passion into a successful career. Maria has worked at Google and YouTube, and contributes to Oxford Analytica, the BBC, and Sky News.
This event was recorded, watch here
Conversation Series: Working with History
Thursday 11th June 2020
4:00 PM
The Centre for Modern History is hosting a series of informal conversations with history graduates about their lives and careers beyond university.
In our first discussion, Centre Director Dayna Barnes will be speaking with award winning author and documentary film developer Bradley Hague about how his background in history has informed his work. Bradley has worked with National Geographic researching and developing television documentaries including the award-winning book and TV series Alien Deep, The Human Fmaily Tree, and Explorer: The Moment of Death. His work also has appeared on the Discovery Channel, The History Channel, and BBC News.
This event was recorded, watch here
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)
Vladimir will present work on a new project, exploring Yugoslav participation in municipal internationalist practices in the Cold War.
Municipal internationalism originally took root in Europe before the Cold War in an attempt at overcoming national borders by putting citizens in direct contact with each other. The Cold War experience showed that municipal internationalism could as often be about enforcing differences, as overcoming them. Thus, forms of governance, techniques and knowledge often circulated across the Iron Curtain and indeed the Third World. Nonetheless, municipalities in East and West also competed in terms of showcasing different forms of urban governance, forming different transnational networks and institutions to globalise their own model.
Yugoslavia’s non-aligned foreign policy saw Yugoslav cities try to play a bridging role across Cold War borders. Relying on a plethora of local, republic and federal archives, Vladimir will trace the opportunities and difficulties opened up for Yugoslav municipal authorities in their (para-)diplomatic activities in the Cold War.
Speaker:
Vladimir Unkovski-Korica is a lecturer in Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow. His first book, The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia: From World War II to Non-Alignment (Tauris, 2016) explored the deep contradictions and tensions of trying to build a participatory developmental model while playing catch-up with the advanced world. His work has appeared in Europe-Asia Studies, Cold War History and Revue d'Études Comparatives Est-Ouest.
Register to attend the event Bridging Cold War Borders
Please contact CIPS@city.ac.uk for more details.
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
Margaret MacMillan is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto and emeritus Professor of International History and the former Warden of St. Antony's College at the University of Oxford.
Her books include ‘Women of the Raj’ (1988, 2007); ‘Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World’ (2001) (‘Peacemakers’ in the UK) for which she was the first woman to win the Samuel Johnson Prize; ‘Nixon in China: Six Days that Changed the World’ (‘Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao’ in the UK); ‘The Uses and Abuses of History’ (2008); ‘Extraordinary Canadians: Stephen Leacock’ (2009); ‘The War that Ended Peace’ (2014). Her most recent book is ‘History’s People’ (2015).
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Senior Fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto, Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, University of Toronto, Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, St Hilda’s College and St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. Margaret is also a Trustee of the Central European University in Budapest and the Imperial War Museum and sits on the editorial boards of International History and First World War Studies.
Communism's Cartoonist: Boris Efimov and the world he made
Speaker: Stephen M. Norris, Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Russian History and Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University (Ohio)
10 October 2019
Between 1918 and 1991, Boris Efimov drew and published thousands of political caricatures for leading Soviet newspapers and journals. His drawings therefore help us reconstruct a world he created and the worldview he attempted to foster, both connected to the project of creating Soviet socialism. Efimov was also a careful curator of his own work and his life story. This talk will explore Efimov's cartoons, their significance within Soviet culture, and the ways the cartoonist himself attempted to construct his life story, allowing us to reconsider the entire Soviet project.
About the Speaker:
Stephen M. Norris is Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Russian History and Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University (Ohio). He is the author of two books on Russian cultural history, including A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945, and editor of six more books, including Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present.
He is the co-editor of a new series with Bloomsbury Press entitled "Russian Shorts," which will publish its first books next year. Norris is currently writing a biography of Boris Efimov.
2018/19 events
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.