Centre for Transnational and Global History Annual Lecture 2026
As UCL marks its 2026 Bicentenary, the History Department invites colleagues, students, alumni and history fans to the Centre for Transnational and Global History Annual Lecture 2026.
Centre for Transnational and Global History Annual Lecture 2026
03 Jun 2026, 17:00 – 20:00
‘From the Planetary to the Global, and Other Lost Histories of the Twentieth Century’
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the term ‘planetary’ was prominently and pervasively used in the context of global governance and global challenges. It framed new ways of addressing two intersecting world-scale problems: the environment and the economy, conceived together as ‘planetary’ in scope and impact, as a means of preventing the world from ‘sleepwalking’ to environmental disaster. By the later 1970s, this planetary thinking had been replaced by a turn to the tamer language of global and globalizations. This talk revisits this ‘lost history’ in the context of the new turn to planetary thinking, and asks, can we use a genealogical approach to better understand the potential and limits of our own planetary moment of existential environmental and economic crisis? What can we learn from an international history of potential ambitious transformation? Can History help?
Lecture: Archaeology G6 Lecture Theatre (5-7pm)
Reception: Archaeology Common Room (7pm-8pm)
Professor of International History and Capitalism
European University Institute
Glenda Sluga is Joint Professor of International History and Capitalism at the EUI. She received a European Research Council Advanced Grant (2020) for a five-year project on twentieth-century international economic thinking and globalization. Her most recent book The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. She is also President of the Toynbee Prize Foundation and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.