History in Conversation

Reshaping the past: the lingering colonial present

Tom Bentley (University of Sussex)

Converting Emotions: Possession and Power in Female Missionaries’ Writing about Native Converts

Angharad Eyre (Queen Mary, University of London)

What might a global history of the 20th century look like?

Dr Lockyer lectures on the history of Japan at SOAS and has written many important and provocative pieces on modern Japanese representations of art, technology and nature.

Angus Lockyer

28 February 2011

Diseases long ago and far away: Does doctor's knowledge answer historians' questions?

Audio Quality: please note the audio quality of this particular podcast is not optimal Professor Hamlin, who teaches the history of science and of the environment at Notre Dame, is the author of exemplary studies of public health, including A Science of Impurity and Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick. His latest book was Cholera: the Biography. Chris Hamlin takes a rather contentious position in this session of the Global History seminar which produced a good and interesting debate amongst those present. Hamlin asks the question ‘why should we care?’ in regards to historians attempts to diagnose old diseases and illnesses through knowledge of modern medicine. The problem with such diagnoses is that historians are rarely in a position to be able to say for certain and at any rate are imposing modern understandings of medicine onto medieval and early modern knowledge. Does it matter what disease actually caused the Black Death and how useful, really, is statistics that suggest high percentages of deaths connected specifically to that one disease? Hamlin argues that the understanding of the time is more important and that other illnesses and infections caused by (amongst other factors) malnutrition are often ignored in such simplistic categorisations. Hamlin’s paper is about the practice of historians and asks the question whether changes should be made to the way we approach such subjects. Debate throughout the presentation suggests that not everyone agrees with Hamlin’s position, but nevertheless does force them to find reasons why they think that way.

Chris Hamlin

Technology – a Global History

Professor Edgerton has written some of the most impactful books of recent years on the history of technology, including Warfare State; Science, Technology and British Industrial Decline and the iconoclastic The Shock of the Old.

David Edgerton (Imperial College London)

3 March 2010

Synchronicity in Global Development - from Divergence to Convergence?

Lucy Badalian and Victor Krivorotov

21 February 2011

Trust – a Global History

Geoffrey Hosking is Emeritus Professor of Russian History at SSEES, and author of many major works, including Russia and the Russians and The First Socialist Society. He is at work on a global history of trust.

Geoffrey Hosking (UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies)

24 February 2010

The Image of the globe in the Renaissance

Familiar to UK television audiences for his celebrated documentaries, the Head of Map Collections at the British Library is the author of Tales from the Map Room, and The Lie of the Land. The record-breaking “Magnificent Maps” was the latest of many exhibitions he organized at the Library.

Peter Barber

7 March 2011

Professor Thomas teaches Japanese history at the University of Notre Dame. Her book on Japanese Concepts of Nature, Reconfiguring Modernity, won the John Fairbanks Prize. She is at work on a book on the history of Japanese Photography.

Julia Thomas (Notre Dame)

24 March 2010

The Consumption of Culture – a Global History

NOTE: The final part of this talk is missing. Professor Trentmann directed the research programme ‘Cultures of Consumption’ and is the editor of OUP’s forthcoming history of consumption. Among his many works in the field are Free Trade Nation and Before ‘Fair Trade’. He edited Food and Globalization with Alexander Nützenadel.

Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck)

17 March 2010