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Projects funded by the External Engagement Fund.
Lecture on Gondwanaland: The Transnational History of Southern Earth – Jagjeet Lally
26 June 2024
This year’s Centre for Transnational and Global History Annual Lecture was delivered by Alison Bashford on the ancient megacontinent Gondwanaland.The modern history of Gondwanaland, including its deep geological histories into imperial, settler-colonial and Indigenous histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was explored. She discussed how we might consider the history of Gondwanaland as an idiosyncratic transnational history, a history and geography that has been nationalised, colonised, and mythologised since c.1800. The event was well attended with around 40 people from across and beyond UCL.
IAS Workshop – Jagjeet Lally
21 June 2024
This in-person workshop (‘South Asia’ + ‘Middle East’ + ‘Early Modern’ = ?) seeked to showcase new work in the field of early modern South Asian and Middle Eastern studies, while broadly examining what it means to use a period label derived from Europe’s historical experience and historiography, together with geographic categories originating in the Cold War West. Among the highlights were two show and tell sessions, one with the artist Yasmin Hayat on her training in early modern miniature techniques to make contemporary miniatures, another on special coins called ‘larins’ from the early modern Indian Ocean in the University of Greenwich collection.
SALon - Jagjeet Lally
October 2023 - March 2024
Thanks to funding from the EE Committee and support from the IAS, UCL’s Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World has been able to continue collaborating with our colleagues at the QMUL South Asia Forum and thereby continue to act as an important hub for arts, humanities, and social science scholars of South Asia across London (SALon). We held four work-in-progress seminars where historians, anthropologists, and geographers shared their work and received feedback from our community, who range from first-year PhD students to professors. We also held four writing group sessions with roughly ten participants per session, where we sat down each time to work on a particular knotty aspect of our writing, breaking to receive encouragement and advice from one another. We hope to continue both SALon initiatives in Term 3 and in AY2024-25.
Republicanism in the Age of Imperialism (c.1838-1931) - Jon Chandler
15-16 February 2024
This was the second in a series of three workshops bringing together an international community of historians, political theorists and philosophers to examine how the concept and language of republican liberty has informed anti-colonial movements in the British Empire. The second workshop was hosted by SOAS in Bloomsbury exploring how republicanism shaped political discourse in Britain and its empire during the ‘Age of Imperialism’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with around 40 attendees. The workshop provided an opportunity for postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, independent scholars, and academics to share our research and debate ideas.
Big Dig Energy – Yağmur Heffron
January 2024 - This year’s British Association of Near Eastern Archaeology (BANEA) conference, held in Glasgow in January 2024, featured a workshop dedicated to gendered practices in archaeological fieldwork in West Asia. The workshop topic directly responded to the BANEA conference theme of “equitable futures” in archaeology and heritage. Speakers took up a wide range of issues from the disproportionate impact of parenting responsibilities on women in the field; queer perspectives; invisible labour; qualitative and quantitative data for assessing challenges; unconscious biases. The workshop also offered a platform to representatives from research collectives in sister disciplines: Steppe Sisters Network for Central Asia; and South Asia: Women in the Field (SAWIF). This generated a great deal of exchange of ideas and inspiration, as well as building new connections as participants swapped stories and shared jokes. The session was very well-attended by a reasonably balanced distribution of gender, age, and academic status. It was through the EE Committee’s funds that the participation of SAWIF members could be guaranteed. The funds were also used for student and ECR participation, ensuring the event incorporated diverse voices.
Book Launch: 'The Letters of the Duchesse d’Elbeuf: Hostile Witness to the French Revolution' - Simon Macdonald
28 November 2023 - The UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and the History Department co-sponsored the book launch on 28 November for The Letters of the Duchesse d’Elbeuf: Hostile Witness to the French Revolution (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2023). The recently-discovered letters of the wealthy counter-revolutionary aristocrat, Innocente-Catherine de Rougé, dowager Duchesse d’Elbeuf (1707–94), offer a vivid and exciting new eye-witness perspective on the French Revolution and the Terror. Hostile witness to everything about the Revolution, the duchess’s letters, dating from 1788 to early 1794, to an unknown friend offer an unparalleled real-time narrative by an aristocratic woman struggling to understand radical change. Though tempted by emigration to the Low Countries, the duchess was unusual among her contemporary fellow-aristocrats in remaining in France down to her death in 1794, based in her homes in Picardy and at the heart of Paris. The letters constitute a remarkable example of female life-writing in the Age of Revolutions from a unique perspective. The volume includes a lengthy introduction and extensive scholarly apparatus. The book launch involved the book's co-editors, Colin Jones (QMUL), Simon Macdonald (UCL History) and Alex Fairfax-Chomleley (Exeter), with further contributions from Sanja Perovic (King's College London) and Catriona Seth (Oxford).
‘Narrating China and the Health Humanities’ - Vivienne Lo
10th November, 2023
Narrating China and the Health Humanities was a huge success and an event that celebrated ten years of the China Health and Humanities project, both Centre and MA programme. We had around 80 attendees who came in person, and fifty online. The Provost opened the event with a presentation on the importance of UCL’s connections with China. All-in-all the day was a great celebration and, intellectually, great testimony to the creative interdisciplinary initiatives of the last decade, with great promise for the on- going impact of our graduates.