People

Institute Staff Members

Professor Riccardo Bavaj (Director) 20th-century Germany, Western Europe and the US; radicalism, liberalism, modernity, academia, and spatial imaginaries.

Dr Konrad M. Lawson (Director) 
The politics of retribution in the transwar 1940s, decolonisation,  transnational idealism and world federalism, urban spaces, and migration. Geographical focus is predominantly modern East and Southeast Asia but also interested in connections and comparisons with Europe.

Dr Sarah Easterby-Smith
European history (mainly France, Britain and their global connections), eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, cultural and social history, history of science, history of consumption.

Professor Ali Ansari
Iranian history, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, travel and relations with the West, historiography of Iran.

Dr Milinda Banerjee
Global intellectual history; Indian political and social thought; critical theory; political theology. Series editor of ‘Critical Readings in Global Intellectual History’ and ‘Transregional Practices of Power’ (De Gruyter)

Dr Emma Bond
My research is comparative in nature, and explores narrative expressions of transnationality, migration and mobility, particularly in the case of Italy and its colonial enterprises in the Horn of Africa and Albania. I am also interested in processes of cultural transfer and reception, and the role of new social media in transnational dialogue and activism.

Dr John Clark
British and North American history, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, history of science, medicine, and environment.

Dr Kate Ferris
European history (mainly Italy and Spain), late-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth century; everyday life and the ‘lived experience’ of fascism; images and ideas of modernity and of past, present and future in identity construction; conceptual questions around cultural production and reception locally, nationally and transnationally.

Dr Tomasz Kamusella
Central and Eastern European history, African history (mainly, the Horn of Africa and southern Africa), Russian neoimperialism, the history of language politics, intellectual history, and the study of nationalism. His recent contribution to spatial history is Words in Space and Time: A Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe (2021).

Dr Chandrika Kaul
British imperialism and print culture, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modern South Asian history and politics, British media, including contemporary media;globalisation and international communications.

Dr Montserrat Lopez Jerez

Dr Gillian Mitchell

North American Social and Cultural History, History of Popular Music and Popular Culture in Post-War Britain, the United States and Canada.

Professor Frank Lorenz Müller
European history (mainly German lands and Britain), Long Nineteenth Century, Anglo-German relations, liberalism, nationalism, militarism, imperialism, monarchy.

Dr Frances Nethercott
European history (mainly Russia), eighteenth to twentieth centuries, intellectual, cultural history, cultural transfer (Russia, France, Germany), historiopraphy.

Dr Rosalind Parr
Nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia, decolonisation, transnational networks and solidarities, gender, feminism, women’s history, international organisations, world governance.

Dr Bernhard Struck (Founding Director 2009-15) My main interests lie in the history of travel and travel writing as spatial practices, ways of connecting and making & disseminating knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Furthermore, I research and write on borders and border regions always with L. Febvre’s dictum in mind that borders have a double function: they divide as well as connect. Geographically my research covers central and western Europe, in particular Germany, France and Poland.

Dr Stephen Tyre
French History, late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonial history (mainly French colonialism, colonial North Africa), history of decolonization, post-colonial history, memory and legacy of colonialism.

Professor Andrew Williams
European and international history with a particular focus on Britain, France and the United States, twentieth centtury, editor of the International History Review.

Dr Akhila Yechury

Dr Sayaka Chatani
Department of History, National University of Singapore

My topical interests are the rural sphere of the Japanese empire and Korean diaspora in postwar Japan. I explore geographical conditions that shaped people’s reactions so state power and also the sharing of mental geographies of diasporic communities. My website: https://sayakachatani.com/.

L. Nicole Vaughan
PhD Student, Department of History, University of Hong Kong

Nicole Vaughan is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong and a former student of the MLitt in Transnational, Global and Spatial History at the University of St Andrews. Her research interests include spatial and sensory history, sanitation, travel writing, and leisure. Her current research examines the role of nuisance in the production of Chinese space in nineteenth-century Hong Kong and San Francisco. Nuisance, which is an elastic term used both to refer to a legally actionable offense and used in common speech to refer to annoyance, serves a powerful function in the control of space. Her thesis therefore follows the concept of nuisance in a range of contexts, from its use in public health discourse to its appeal among tourists taking part in “slumming parties.

Dr Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz
Research Fellow, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge

I am a Research Associate at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, a Fellow at the Royal Historical Society, and a Visiting Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. I earned my Ph.D. in Southeast Asian and International History at Yale University. My broad research interests centre on global intellectual history and Southeast Asian environmental and social history. My current research analyses the co-constitution of class and relationships with the natural environment over the 19th to the 20th centuries in the Philippines. My first book, Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912, charts the emplotment of ‘place’ in the proto-national thought and revolutionary organising of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers. It analyses how their “peripheral” Pan-Asian political organising and their constructions of the place of ‘Asia’ and of the spatial registers of race/Malayness connected them to their regional neighbours undertaking the same work.

Katherine Bellamy
PhD Student, Lancaster University

Katherine Bellamy is a PhD researcher at Lancaster University, currently investigating Indigenous representations of space, place, and landscape and their changes in Central Mexico between the Late Postclassic (1325-1521) and the Early Colonial period (1521-1585), with a particular focus on the geopolitical unit called the altepetl. Her broader research incorporates the use of Digital Humanities methods, especially in relation to historical geographies and the digitization of spatial information in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for the aggregation and analysis of archaeological, historical and geographic data.

Dr Guilherme Fians
Leverhulme Research Fellow, School of History, University of St Andrews

I work at the Leverhulme Trust project ’Sharing knowledge in Esperanto: From expert to participatory cultures, 1900/2000’. Drawing on my background in social anthropology, I look at how the use of certain media and languages help shape the ways in which political and scientific knowledge are produced during two critical moments in globalisation’s history: the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. Through archival research and digital ethnography, I analyse letters about postcolonialism exchanged in Esperanto between Indian and British scholars in the 1960s and online exchanges between Wikipedia contributors to better understand how languages and media are historically mobilised for the (re)production of certain viewpoints about political and scientific issues. I am the author of Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks: Language Politics, Digital Media and the Making of an International Community (2021)

Dr Huw Halstead
Research Fellow, School of History, St Andrews

I am a Lecturer in Public History in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. I was previously a Research Associate and an Associate Lecturer in the School of History at St Andrews. My research examines displacement, memory, public history, and everyday life from an interdisciplinary standpoint, combining archival research with oral history, anthropological fieldwork, and digital ethnography. In particular, I work on the history of the Mediterranean world and former Ottoman territories, placing this research in broader contexts by exploring transcultural memory, transnational migration, diaspora activism, and the impact of mass media and digitisation. I am the author of Greeks without Greece (Routledge, 2019)

Markus Christian Hansen
PhD Student, National Graduate School of History, Lund University

My doctoral project seeks to account for the stark difference of opinion on the issue of agrarian reforms amongst the lordly class of Denmark in the period of 1720-1810. I aim to understand this through a strong historical contextualization that is able to bring out the specific microeconomic rationalities within the aristocracy of the time. Transnational factors are of major importance when explaining such a divergence. These include access to colonial streams of income, the reception and dissemination of Continental and Scottish political economic ideas, dependence on foreign markets, and information gathered and disseminated through an international network of scientific societies about especially British agrarian improvements.

Professor Elena Marushiakova-Popova
Leverhulme Visiting Professor, St Andrews

Elena Marushiakova is President of the Gypsy Lore Society, the world’s oldest organization of Romani studies. In 2015 Elena Marushiakova was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of St. Andrews and in September 2016 she returns as holder of ERC advanced grant working as Principal Investigator.

Dr Nikolaos Papadogiannis
Associate Lecturer in History, St Andrews

My research interests include travel, consumption, youth cultures, gender, migration, emotions and European identities. My doctoral thesis offered a cultural history of politics, examining left-wing youth politics in relation to leisure and sexuality in post-authoritarian Greece in the 1970s. Since 2011 I have been working on a comparative and transnational history of young tourists from West Germany and Greece in the 1960s-1980s.

Antonino Scalia
PhD Student, University of Catania

I am mainly interested in political cultures, migration and gender in Europe during the Twentieth Century. My doctoral thesis explores Italian leftist internationalisms between the 1960s and the 1980s, by analysing the solidarity campaigns with Vietnamese and Palestinian national liberation struggles and against Greek and Chilean dictatorships.  The thesis reconstructs the complexity of this internationalisms, exploring the multifaceted world of the leading protagonists within it: political parties and organisations; local authorities governed by the Italian Communist Party; foreign students and exiles; former anti-fascist fighters; the young generations; women’s and feminist organisations; theatre companies.