Past Events
For upcoming events, see the events home page.
Spring 2024
W1 15 Jan – Research Lecture – Paul Stock – ‘History, Space and Causality’ Chair: Riccardo Bavaj (Online)
W2 22 Jan – 2-4pm – Reading Group – ‘Japan’s Private Spheres: Autonomy in Japanese History, 1600-1930 (2021)’ Chair: Konrad Lawson (Online)
W3 29 Jan – Research Lecture – James Krull – ‘Mourning with the “force of history”: National Days of Remembrance in Germany and the UK since 1945′ Chair: Riccardo Bavaj (Arts Building; Seminar Room 4)
W4 5 Feb – Research Lecture – Roseanna Webster – ‘Roseanna Webster discusses her forthcoming book on Women’s Activism in Francoist Spain’
W6 19 Feb – Research Lecture – Rosi Carr – ‘Slavery, Settler Colonialism, and Skulls: Lachlan Macquarie (1761 – 1824) and the ongoing violence of empire’ (Online)
W7 4 Mar – Research Lecture – Anne Knowles – ‘How Can We Map the Holocaust?’ Chair: Riccardo Bavaj (Online)
W8 11 Mar – Research Lecture – Nat Andrews – ‘Prefiguring Utopia: “Everyday Anarchism” in Spain and Argentina, 1890-1930′ Chair: Kate Ferris (Arts Building; Seminar Room 6)
W9 18 Mar – Research Lecture – Teresa van der Kraan – ‘More than just Hitlerism: National Socialisms and Perceptions of Italian Fascism, 1919-33’ Chair: Riccardo Bavaj (Online)
W10 25 Mar – Research Lecture – Anna Knutsson – ‘Global Peripheries: Transformative illegal trade in the High North, 1770-1820’ Chair: Matthew Ylitalo (Arts Building; Seminar Room 4)
W14 22 April – Research Lecture – Sarah Hamilton – ‘Governing subterranean space: Groundwater imaginaries and materiality in southwestern Spain’ Chair: Konrad Lawson (Online)
W15 29 April – Research Lecture – Sayaka Chatani – ‘A Space of Decolonization: Drawing Boundaries of the Korean Diaspora in Postwar Japan’ Chair: Konrad Lawson (Online)
Fall 2023
W3 25 Sept – Manuscript Workshop – Riccardo Bavaj – Nazi Germany: A Spatial History Comments: Kate Ferris (Old Class Library)
W4 2 Oct – Research Lecture – Rosalind Parr – Indian Women’s Internationalism in the ‘Age of Bandung’. Liberal and Socialist Networks in the 1950s Chair: Konrad Lawson (Online)
W5 9 Oct 3-6pm – Lightning Talks Global, Spatial and Transnational History at St Andrews Chair: Sarah Easterby-Smith (Hybrid Event – To join this event in person, please sign up here)
W7 23 Oct – Reading Group – Making Spaces through Infrastructure : Visions, Technologies, and Tensions Chair: Konrad Lawson (Online)
W8 30 Oct – Research Lecture – Justin Cammy – Yiddish and the Holocaust Chair: Tomasz Kamusella (Old Class Library)
W9 6 Nov – Conversation with the Author – Faizah Zakaria – The Camphor Tree and the Elephant Chair: Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz (Online)
W10 13 Nov – Manuscript Workshop – Lauren Holmes – German-Speaking Émigrés and the British Art Scene in the Mid-Twentieth Century Comments: Olivier Feis (Old Class Library)
W11 20 Nov – Research Lecture – Ushehwedu Kufakurinani – Transnational Intimacy: A Life History of Love, Gender and Family Chair: Kate Ferris (Online)
W12 27 Nov – Reading Group – On Commercial Capitalism: Discussing the Work of Jairus Banaji – Chair: Milinda Banerjee (Online)
W13 4 Dec – Book Launch – Joshua Ehrlich – The English East India Company and Global Histories of Knowledge Chair: Milinda Banerjee (Online)
Spring 2023
W2 23 Jan – Reading Group: ‘The Patchwork City: Class, Space, & Politics in Metro Manila by Marco Z. Garrido’ – Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz and Marco Z. Garrido Note: on Teams
W3 30 Jan – Research Lecture: Returning to the Homeland: Expanding the Spatial Boundaries of Turkish-German Migration History – Michelle Lynn Khan Note: on Teams, 5-7PM
W4 6 Feb 4-5pm – Manuscript Workshop: The Professionalisation of Botanists in the Eighteenth Century: a Comparative European Study – Elena Romero-Passerin D’Entreves. Location: New Arts Building 6 4-5PM Note: one hour
W6 20 Feb – Research Lecture: The President Who was Toppled Twice: Transnational Perspectives on French Influence in Early Post-Colonial Africa – Joe Gazeley. Location: New Arts Building 9
W7 6 Mar – Research Lecture – A language better than football’. A Nigerian Engineer, A German Chemist and a Guy from Hollywood – toward a transnational history of Esperanto” – Bernhard Struck New Arts Building 9
W8 13 Mar – Conversation with the author: Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar by Burleigh Hendrickson – Antonio Scalia, On Teams. NOTE: 3-5PM
W9 20 Mar – Research Lecture: Linguistic correctness, political correctness: Communicating anti-imperialism and postcolonialism in the Esperanto media, 1963-1990 – Guilherme Moreira Fians – New Arts Building 9
W11 3 April – Research Lecture: Myth vs. Reality: Jewish Transnationalism in Modern Times – Jonathan Dekel – Chen New Arts Building 9
15 May 1-4pm – MLitt Prospectus Workshop
– Emil Eleftheriotis-Pratt – Left-wing Radical Spaces in 1970s London
– Simone Mangold – Depicting the British Raj. A Comparison between Depictions of British Raj spaces in Swiss and British Travel Sources between 1918 and 1947
– Sean Paterson – The Languages of Empire: Information and Communication among Anglo-American Merchants and Mercenaries in the Chinese World, c. 1820-1870
– Maud Belair – Institutional Bodies: Diet and Nutrition in Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh’s Jails, Poorhouses, and Hospitals
– Cal Loftus – Colonial Cartography and Modern Ethiopia’s National Geobody
Fall 2022
W3 26 Sep Project Introduction: Reframing the Age of Revolutions – Andrew Edwards, Juan Neves Sarriegui, and Peter Hill. In Person (Old Seminar Room) Note: 3-5pm.
W4 3 Oct – Research Lecture: From Munich to Poznań: Liberating, Cleansing, and Germanizing Cities, 1919-1945 – Teresa Walch. Remote Event on Teams
W5 10 Oct – Research Lecture: (Dis)Order on the Border: Outlaws and the State in Eastern Europe, 1917 – 1925 – Aleksandra Pomiecko. In Person (Arts Seminar Room 6 – New Arts Building) Note: 3-5pm
W7 24 Oct – Discussion with the Author: Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World – Jeremy Friedman. Remote Event on Teams Note: 3-5pm
W8 31 Oct – Research Lecture: From the Local to the Global: Protest on the Commons and Verges in England, with a Case Study of the Greenham Common Protests – Katrina Navickas. Remote Event on Teams
W9 7 Nov – Research Lecture: Urban Space in Manchuria: Pan-Asianism, Architectural Practices and Colonialism – Chen, Zhan. Remote Event on Teams
W10 14 Nov – Research Lecture: ‘The machine is only as good as the way it is used’: Language Training at the U.S. Army Language School, 1941-1970 – Diana Lemberg. In Person (Arts Seminar Room 6 – New Arts Building)
W11 21 Nov – Reading Group: AIDS, Cross-border migration and Notion of ‘race’ (in collaboration with the Histories of Sexuality Reading Group). Remote Event on Teams
Spring 2022
W1 17 Jan – Discussion with the Author – Tom Simpson – The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century
W2 24 Jan – Research Lecture – Nikolaos Papadogiannis – The making of a transnational counterpublic: Transnational connections of AIDS activists in West Germany, the UK and Greece
W4 7 Feb – Reading Group – Waves across the South by Sujit Sivasundaram
W5 14 Feb – Historian’s Craft – Elizabeth LaCouture – How to Write a Transnational History of a Local Space
W6 28 Feb – Project Introduction David R. Ambaras and Kate McDonald – Bodies and Structures: A Platform for Researching and Teaching Spatial Histories of Japan (Note: event to be held 15:00-17:00)
W7 7 March – Research Lecture – Tim Cresswell – Writing (and) Maxwell Street
W8 14 March – Skills Workshop – Konrad Lawson – QGIS Mapping for Historians II
W9 21 March – Discussion with the Author – Lenny A. Ureña Valerio – Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920
W10 28 March – Manuscript Workshop – Leonard Michael – title TBD
W11 4 April – Research Lecture – Miles Larmer – Living for the City: Social Change and Knowledge Production in the Central African Copperbelt (Note: In-person lecture 1-3pm in Lower College Hall, St Salvator’s Quad)
W12 11 April – Research Lecture – Markéta Křížová – Cancelled.
W13 18 April – Discussion with the Author – Nikhil Rao – House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898-1964 (2013).
Fall 2021
W1 13 Sep – 13 Sep 3-5pm – Research Lecture – Duoer, Daigengna – Buddhist Inner Mongolia(s) in the Early Twentieth Century: (Re)Imaginations of the Region in Multiple Transnational Spatializations
W2 20 Sep – Manuscript Workshop – Akhila Yechury – Title TBD
W2 Wednesday, 22 Sep 4-6pm – Skills Workshop – Konrad Lawson – How to Create Social Network Visualisations with Cytoscape
W4 4 Oct – Reading Group – Nikolaos Papadogiannis – Immigrants in the Sexual Revolution. Perceptions and Participation in Northwest Europe by Andrew Shield
W5 11 Oct – Manuscript Workshop – Jan Koura – Thinking through Cold War Connections and Divisions: Actors and Places
W7 25 Oct – Research Lecture – Christopher Bahl – Mobile Manuscripts – Arabic Learning Across the Early Modern Western Indian Ocean
W8 1 Nov – Discussion with the Author – Tomasz Kamusella – Eurasian Empires as Blueprints for Ethiopia: From Ethnolinguistic Nation-State to Multiethnic Federation
W9 8 Nov – Reading Group – Matthew Ylitalo – Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth
W10 15 Nov – Research Lecture – Elena Marushiakova – Roma Civic Emancipation before WWII: National and Transnational Dimensions
W11 22 Nov – Skills Workshop – Konrad Lawson – Regular Expressions and Text Analysis Tools
W12 29 Nov – Historian’s Craft – Huw Halstead – Oral History
W13 6 Dec – Research Lecture – Shin Satō – Governance and Space in Modern Japan: Private Residences, Villas, Government Buildings
W14 13 Dec – Research Workshop – Anita Buhin and Nikolaos Papadogiannis – Transnational Sexual Encounters, Masculinities and ‘Race’ in post-1945 Southern Europe
Spring 2021
All events, unless noted otherwise, will be scheduled: Mondays 13:00-15:00 UK time, delivered remotely on the ITSH Microsoft Team
W1 25 January – Manuscript Workshop
Sarah Easterby-Smith – “Enlightenment Science in Surat”
W2 1 February – Reading Group
Rosalind Parr and Nicholas Russell – Empire of Guns (2018)
W3 8 February – Manuscript Workshop
Zhentian Xie, chapter from Through Pots and Pans: Culinary and Cultural Bonds between China and Japan, 1868-1949
W4 15 February – Digital Humanities Project Introduction (NOTE: 3-5pm)
Katherine Bellamy – “Digging into Early Colonial Mexico”
W5 22 February – Manuscript Workshop
Bernhard Struck – “Icelandic Sulphur: From Paris to Laki and Back”
W6 1 March – Reading Group
Milinda Banerjee and Ruby Ekkel – The Intimacies of Four Continents
W7 9 March – Workshop on the Entanglements of the European and Global South Lefts (Note: on Tuesday from 2-4pm)
Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Leonard Michael, and Antonio Scalia
W8 15 March – Manuscript Workshop
Jake Berg – “SA Propaganda in the Public Space, 1935-1939”
W9 5 April – Reading Group
Anna Kelley – Outsiders & Strangers: An Archaeology of Liminality in West Africa
W10 12 April – Discussion with the Author
Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz – Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912
W11 19 April – Roundtable Discussion
led by Eduardo Manzano Moreno – Global Middle Ages
31 May – MLitt Dissertation Prospectus Conference
Note: If you are not on the ITSH mailing list and wish to attend one of our events, or if you are unable to gain access to the Microsoft Team for the institute, please get in touch with Konrad Lawson ([email protected]) at least a week before the event you are interestd in to receive any pre-distributed materials.
Fall 2020
All events will be scheduled: Mondays 13:00-15:00 UK time, on the ITSH Microsoft Team
28 Sept (W3) – Skills Session
Konrad Lawson – Introduction to Regular Expressions for Advanced Text Search
5 Oct (W4) – Reading Group
Angus Waugh – Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds by Anne Salmond
12 Oct (W5) – Skills Session
Konrad Lawson – Visualising Social Networks with Cytoscape
23 Oct (W6 – Friday) – Workshop
“Tourism and Sexuality in West Germany” Craig Griffiths (Manchester Metrop.), Kristoff Kerl (Copenhagen), Nikolaos Papadogiannis (Bangor) – will be on Zoom
26 Oct (W7) – Reading Group
Sarah Easterby-Smith – Provincialising Global History: Money, Ideas, and Things in the Languedoc, 1680-1830 by James Livesey
2 Nov (W8) – Manuscript Workshop
Claudia Kreklau – Making Modern Eating – “Culinary Spirit of the Age”
9 Nov (W9) – Project Team Report
Kate Ferris and team – Everyday Dictatorship
16 Nov (W10) – Reading Group
Charmaine Lam – Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew
30 Nov (W12) – Research Lecture
Darragh Gannon “Mapping the ‘two geographies’ of Global History: Ireland and the World, 1919-1923
7 Dec (W13) – Manuscript Workshop
Zhentian Xie – draft chapter from PhD dissertation “Through Pots and Pans: Culinary and Cultural Bonds between China and Japan, 1868-1949” NOTE: This event is rescheduled for Spring.
Note: If you are not on the ITSH mailing list and wish to attend one of our events, or if you are unable to gain access to the Microsoft Team for the institute, please get in touch with Konrad Lawson ([email protected]) at least a week before the event you are interestd in to receive any pre-distributed materials.
Spring 2020
Time and Venue: 1-3pm, Venue: Old Seminar Room, St John’s House, 71 South Street
3 February Reading Group
Elizabeth Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World – Comments by Sarah Easterby-Smith
17 February Reading Group
Bryan C. Keene, Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts – Comments by James Palmer
2 March Skills Session
Cleaning and Searching Digital Texts with Regular Expressions – Konrad Lawson
– Cancelled due to UCU Strike.
30 March Reading Group
J. E. Fox, “The edges of the nation: a research agenda for uncovering the taken-for-granted foundations of everyday nationhood.” Nations and Nationalism, 23(1), 26–47. – Opens with comments by Kate Ferris
– Event will take place through Microsoft Teams online here.
6 April Project Introduction
Esperanto & Internationalism 1880-1920s – Bernhard Struck and project on Microsoft Teams
13 April Reading Group and Discussion with the Author
Carlos Machado, Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome : AD 270-535 – Opens with comments by Carlos Machado – on Microsoft Teams
Fall 2019
16 September Reading Group
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. Columbia University Press, 1983. Opens with comments from Konrad Lawson
23 September Skills Session
Introduction to QGIS for Historians
Registration required: https://bit.ly/2yKsOnQ
30 September Reading Group
Moyn, Samuel, and Andrew Sartori. Global Intellectual History. Columbia University Press, 2013. Opens with comments from Milinda Banerjee
14 October Skills Session
Georeferencing and Digitizing Historical Maps
Registration required: https://bit.ly/2yKsOnQ
4 November Visiting Speaker
Visiting speaker Adam Bronson (Durham) will lead an open discussion with students and staff on research around concepts in motion or in translation.
11 November Manuscript Workshop
We will discuss work shared by our PhD student Per Rolandsson.
18 November Late Modern History Seminar
Our slot and location will be used by the modern history seminar series: Christa Wirth (Agder) – A Chicago Anthropologist at the Nexus of the Cold War and Decolonisation in the Philippines
25 November Manuscript Workshop
Sarah Frank will be sharing selected chapters from her book manuscript.
2018-2019
3-5pm, Venue: Old Seminar Room, St John’s House
Our main theme this academic year is “Space” and “Spatial History”.
Texts will be pre-circulated for the sessions. Please email Konrad Lawson ([email protected]).
- 12 November 2018, Manuscript Workshop, Bernhard Struck, Did Prussia have an Atlantic History? The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania, the French Colonisation of Guyana, and Climates in the Caribbean, c.1760s-1780s
- 11 February 2019, Reading Group – Chalana, Manish (ed), Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia, Hong Kong University Press, 2017 (comments by Vahishtai D. Ghosh)
- 18 February 2019, Reading Group – Stock, Paul (ed), The Uses of Space in Early Modern History, New York 2015 (comments by Jessica Rees)
- 25 February 2019, Skills Workshop – Introduction to QGIS (open to all Staff and PGs) (Konrad Lawson)
- 4 March 2019, Skills Workshop – Introduction to Regular Expressions (open to all Staff and PGs) (Konrad Lawson)
- 11 March 2019, Manuscript Workshop – Antonio Scalia, The reinvention of left-wing internationalism in Italy: transnational activists, cultural practices, political violence and gender (1960-1987)
- 1 April 2019, Manuscript Workshop – Rosalind Parr, Citizens of Everywhere. Indian Nationalist Women and the Global Public Sphere, 1920s-1950s
- 15 April 2019, MLitt Dissertation Prospectus Workshop
Other Past events
- Thursday, 25 April 2019,5.15pm, Research Seminar, Venue: New Arts Lecture Theatre, Markéta Křižová (Charles University Prague), Short-term and circular mobility from the Czech Lands to Latin America (1880s-1930s). A Case study in Entangled History
- Monday, 15 October 2018,13:15-3pm, ITSH Reading Group – Old Class Library, South Street, Text: Su Lin Lewis Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920-1940 (Konrad Lawson presenting)
- Monday, 19 November 2018, 13:15-3pm, ITSH Reading Group – Old Class Library, South Street, Text: A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak eds. Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History (Emma Hart presenting)
- 25 September 2017, Dr Kerstin von Lingen (Heidelberg), Legal Flows: Crimes against Humanity in Transnational Legal Thought, 1899-1945
- August 2017, Editing Workshop “Spatial History and its Sources”
- September 2017, GRAINES summer school, held at University of Basel
- 3 April 2017, Dr Sarah Easterby-Smith (St Andrews), Gathering green gold: Botany and the French Empire in the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean
- 20 February 2017, Professor Carol Gluck (Columbia University), Modernity in Common: Japan and World History
- 30 January 2017, Professor Yang-Wen Zheng (University of Manchester), Wind of the West Ocean: How the Maritime World Shaped Modern China
- 2 December 2016: Peter H. Hansen (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Commercialization and Mount Everest, co-organised with the Institute for Environmental History
- 1-2 December 2016: Working with Space, joint workshop with the EUI, Florence
- 27 October 2016: Donald Sassoon (Queen Mary University of London), Civilization and the unleashing of anxieties: Europe and Asia
- 2 September 2016: Spatial History and its Sources (workshop)
- 14-17 June 2016: 4th GRAINES Summer School (University of Cologne) Dividing the World? Imperial Formations in Continental and Maritime Empires from the 17th to the 21st century
- 3 June 2016 & 7-8 December 2015: Nation, Culture and Civilisation: Talking about and beyond ‘the West’ (1860-1940), a two-part conference tracing the discourse on ‘the West’ across Europe, the US, Asia, and the Middle East, in cooperation with the Institute of Contemporary History Munich
- 16 November 2015: Professor Sebastian Conrad (Free University Berlin), The Revolution of Time in the Nineteenth Century: Global Perspectives (Lecture as part of Modern History Research Seminar); Venue: New Seminar Room, St John’s House, School of History, St Andrews, 5.15pm
- 19 October 2015: Dr Emma Hunter (University of Edinburgh), Concepts of Democracy in Mid-Twentieth-Century Africa: Re-Imagining Political Accountability from the Bottom Up (Lecture as part of Modern History Research Seminar); Venue: New Seminar Room, St John’s House, School of History, St Andrews, 5.15pm
- 22 April 2015: Roma Migration in the Past and Nowadays, Lecture by Leverhulme Professor Elena Marushiakova-Popova
- 14-15 May 2015: The Global City, Past & Present #1
- 29 May 2015: Between Federalism, Autonomy and Centralism: Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th and 21st Centuries
- 7-10 June 2015: GRAINES Summer School INTERCONNECTED
- 23 October 2014: Spatial History Reading Group Meeting
- 4-7 September 2014: Bringing Space back in. Mappings and Visualisations of Transnational Flows and Connections between History and Computer Science (panel at ENIUGH conference, Paris)
- 29 August 2014: Mapping Flows and Visualising Data in the Era of Digital Humanities
- 10-14 June 2014: GRAINES Summer School, Vienna
- 8-10 June 2014: Mapping and Visualising Transnational (Hi)Stories
- 7 April 2014: Perceiving and Conceptualising Historical Space (panel at Social History Society Annual Conference, Northumbria University)
- 30-31 August 2013: Monarchical Successions and the Political Culture of 19th-Century Europe
- 17-20 June 2013: GRAINES Summer School “From the Margins”, Menton, France
- 24 April 2013: “Partitions, Forced Population Transfers and the Question of Human Rights in Central Europe (1930s-1940s)” (Dirk Moses, EUI)
- 22-24 March 2013: “The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700”
- 14 November 2012: “Capitalizing Manuscripts, Confronting Empires: Anquetil-Duperron and the Mercantilist Economy of Oriental knowledge (1755-1780)” (Stéphane Van Damme, SciencesPo Paris / EUI)
- 24 October 2012: “In Search of a Moral Community: Little Popo and the Atlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century” (Silke Strickrodt, GHI London)
- 18-19 May 2012: “The Changing Experience of Time in the Long Nineteenth Century: Local, Regional, Transnational and Global Perspectives”– 11-12 May 2012: “The Making of Landscapes in Modernity“
- 27 April 2012: “Academic Life, Public Spheres and Political Cultures in Western Europe and the United States (1945-1990)”
- 30 September – 1 October 2011: “Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Borders”
- 2-3 September 2011: “Imperial Sites of Memory”
- 13 May 2011: “Doing History through Literature – doing Literature through History: Re-visiting disciplinary boundaries”
- 6 October 2010: “The USA and the Making of a Transnational Nation: Themes and Problems” (Ian Tyrrell, University of New South Wales)
- 16 September 2010: “The Sixties in National and Transnational Perspective: Communications and Protest Movements”
- 13 May 2010: “The Individual and the Local in Transnational and Comparative History”
- 10-13 September 2009: Historiography & Iran in Comparative Perspective
- 4-5 September 2009: “Engineering Space in the nineteenth century. Environment, science, technology and the shaping of space”
- 2-4 July 2009: “German Images of the West in the long nineteenth-century”
- 6 May 2009: “Learning from the Enemy? Labour Services in New Deal America and Nazi Germany in Transnational Perspective” (Kiran Patel, EUI)
- 5-6 September 2008: “Transnational relations of experts, elites and organizations in the nineteenth century”