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Reading group: Handbooks of Conference Diplomacy

Ernest Satow, International Congresses (London: H.M. Stationary Office; 1920) Maurice Hankey, “Diplomacy by Conference”, paper read at British Institute of International Affairs on 2 November 1920, printed in The Round Table: A Quarterly Review of the politics of the British Empire XI (1920-1921), pp. 287-311 Johan Kaufmann, Conference Diplomacy: an introductory analysis (Leyden: A.W. Sijthoff …

RACE group pre-conference: Black Archives workshop

On 27th August 2019 the Royal Geographical Society’s Race, Culture and Equality (RACE) group held their annual RGS-IBG pre-conference event at the Black Cultural Archives (BCA) in Brixton, London. BCA was founded in the early 1980s and, after a successful Heritage Lottery Fund bid in 2010, found a permanent home in the former Raleigh Hall, …

CFP: AAG 2020, “Pan-movements: between nation and globe”

Pan-movements: between nation and globe AAG Annual Meeting, Denver, 6-10 April 2020 Pan-movements (pan-Slavism, pan-Islamism, pan-Africanism, etc.), which proliferated in the late 19th and early-20th centuries, were a hugely popular genre of political affiliation. They appealed to supranational identities unified by ethnic, religious, geographical or other form of likeness. These movements were marked by their …

“A Non-Representational Historical Geography?” Sessions at the 2019 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, London

After its excursion to Cardiff in 2018, the RGS-IBG (Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers) Annual International Conference returned to its London headquarters for the 2019 edition, held from 27-30 August. This year’s theme was ‘Geographies of trouble / Geographies of hope’, though as news broke on the opening morning of Prime Minister …

Between Science and the City: Connecting Conferencing the International

The beginning of the summer has offered two opportunities to establish dialogues between our project and two new and exciting initiatives. On June 21st Steve travelled to Birkbeck College, London, to meet the four Principal Investigators on the new HERA funded project entitled “The Scientific Conference: A Social, Cultural, and Political History”. Steve had been …

Jeux avec frontières: a map of the historic borders of France prepared for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919

Cross-posted on the UoN Map of the Month blog. While preparing for a recent visit to the School’s map collection by members of the Charles Close Society, an unusual map of north-eastern France was uncovered in drawer B109 in a miscellany of war-related material that includes a Napoleonic map of central Europe, several World War …

Talking and researching European union in the USA

When attending large conferences, the lag times between abstract submission and the conference dates can often mean that papers morph as ideas evolve, or as the promised research takes an unexpected direction. Less commonly – at least when dealing with historical topics – it is due to the shifting political sands of the present. However, …

Reading group: Spiralling around the Comintern

Serge Wolikow (2017) “The Comintern as a World Network”. In Silvio Pons & Stephen A. Smith (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Communism, Volume 1: World Revolution and Socialism in One Country 1917–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 212-231 Oleksa Drachewych (2019) “The Communist Transnational? Transnational studies and the history of the Comintern” History Compass 17:e12521 …

“Spaces of Internationalism”: Making an Exhibition of Ourselves

Complementing and coinciding with our recent conference at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers, hereafter simply ‘RGS’), the same venue played host to our exhibition, titled ‘Spaces of Internationalism’. We launched the exhibition on the day before the conference, Monday 17th December 2018, and it ran until 22nd January 2019, with …

RGS Conference: “Conferencing the International: Spaces of Modern Internationalism”, 18th & 19th Dec 2018

On Tuesday 18th and Wednesday 19th December, we met for what was the primary public event of the ‘Conferencing the International’ project: an international conference on international conferencing. The venue was the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in South Kensington, London, a space whose own overtly imperial history and decoration, which the geographers in attendance …