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 …

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 …

Reading group: South-South transnationalisms

Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective (2018) “Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa”, Radical History Review 131:176-182; also published on Medium: https://medium.com/afro-asian-visions/a-manifesto-by-the-afro-asian-networks-research-collective-30857823579f Laura Bier (2010) “Feminism, Solidarity, and Identity in the Age of Bandung: Third World Women in the Egyptian Women’s Press”, in Christopher J. Lee (ed), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment …

Reading Group: Making Spaces of Display

The AHRC Conferencing the International reading group gathered around the now familiar table in the Hogarth Room on the 1st March to consider three essays on ‘Making Spaces of Display’, a theme that connects with several aspects of the AHRC project on the politics of event management. The reading group meeting also foreshadowed a project …

Reading Group: Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World

Internationalism, imperialism and the formation of the contemporary world: the pasts of the present Edited by Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, José Pedro Monteiro. 2018, Palgrave Macmillan In early December 2017 we met to discuss the introduction and three chapters from this new edited volume, drawn from the first (‘Internationalism(s) in an Imperial World: the Interwar Years’) …

Reading Group: World Fairs

‘Messages of Peace and Images of War: Modern Architecture and Diplomacy’ in Devos, R., Ortenberg, A. & Paperny, V., eds., (2016). Architecture of Great Expositions 1937-1959: Messages of Peace, Images of War, pp.1-22. ‘Modernity on display: the 1940 Grand International Exposition of Japan’ in Kargon, R.H., Fiss, K., Low, M. & Molella, A.P. (2017). World’s Fairs on …

Reading Group: Internationalism and Race

Goswami, M. (2012) Imaginary futures and colonial internationalism, American Historical Review, 117 (5), 1461-1485. Manela, E. (2007) The Wilsonian moment: self-determination and the international origins of anticolonial nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press Singh, N (2004) Black is a country: race and the unfinished struggle for democracy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press This reading group presented us …

Reading Group: Sensory History

Tim Edensor, ‘The Social Life of the Senses: Ordering and Disordering the Modern Sensorium’ in David Howes (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 1920-2000 (Bloomsbury, 2014) Rebecca P. Scales, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Chapter 2 ‘Disabled veterans, radio citizenship, and the …

Reading Group: The International City

Not only were conferences key spaces where the world order was redesigned in the wake of the World War I – where new borders were drawn and states created – but they were held in towns, cities, and regions that were themselves materially transformed by the increasing intensity and scale of conference events. Large imperial centres …

Reading Group: Performance and the Senses

Craggs R (2014) Postcolonial geographies, decolonization, and the performance of geopolitics at Commonwealth conferences Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35, 39-55 Geertz, C. (1980). Negara: The theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Paterson, M (2009) Haptic geographies: ethnography, haptic knowledges and sensuous dispositions Progress in Human Geography 33, 766-788   This …