UCL History Alumni Newsletter 2024

Welcome to the Alumni Newsletter 2024.

A Summer Message from the Head of Department

Antonio Sennis
Associate Professor of Medieval History
Head of UCL History (2023–2026)

Dear Alumni,

I am delighted to present you with a new issue of our annual newsletter. This past year has been exciting for the Department, filled with our usual dynamic mix of teaching, research, and community activities. This content-packed issue reflects the Department’s hard work and achievements throughout the past academic year.

As a community, we have continued our efforts to diversify and expand our student cohort, reduce the awarding gap among students from various ethnic and social backgrounds, and enhance the experience of students living at home. We have also ensured that Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) matters remain a priority for students and staff.

In terms of research and teaching, we have sustained our commitment to cultivating our established strengths while passionately developing new areas of expertise. I am pleased to use this newsletter to introduce our new academic colleagues: Fabian Krautwald (African History), Nora Yitong Qiu (East Asian History), Alka Raman (Social and Economic History), and Robert Suits (Environmental History), who will join us in September, alongside Simon Macdonald (Modern European History). Their work will be pivotal as we continue our upward trajectory, and I am confident that many of you will have the opportunity to meet them soon.

I hope you enjoy reading our newsletter, and I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at our alumni events next year. Our Department’s culture is deeply rooted in our collective engagement with our own history, and each of you plays an essential role in that legacy. I wish you all a wonderful rest of the summer.

With warmest wishes,
Antonio

Spotlight on Teaching: A First Year of Teaching in History

Samuel Garrett Zeitlin
Lecturer in Modern Intellectual History

Upon entering a history seminar room at UCL, the students’ questions let the teacher know that UCL is a real university. The students’ questions are sharp. The students are keen to draw out tensions or perceived contradictions in what the lecturer may have said and eager to draw out tensions and contradictions in the material assigned for class. The students are keen to, often successfully, delimit the bounds of the lecturer’s knowledge. The students are keen to show how much they know about history and the material assigned. The students’ questions display the University as a place of open intellectual inquiry.

In my first year of teaching at UCL History, I piloted two new seminar modules, one for undergraduates and one for graduate students. For undergraduates, I led HIST0897, an Advanced Seminar of fifteen students on the Intellectual History of the Weimar Republic and the Rise of Nazism, which focused on primary sources (political pamphlets, films, treatises, party manifestos, novels, diaries, letters, newspaper articles) from the Weimar Republic. This course moved from Landauer to “The Landauers”—from the treatises of Gustav Landauer (1870-1919), murdered at the overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet, to the final sections of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, a novel of the tragic endgame of the Weimar Republic (published with the Hogarth Press in Bloomsbury in the 1930s).

For MA students in UCL History (as well as for the pan-London MA in Intellectual History), I taught a new seminar focusing on the work of the Nazi jurist and political thinker Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) from his early academic qualifying writings before the First World War through to Schmitt’s accounts of dictatorship, romanticism, political theology, and his tract The Concept of the Political (1927/1928/1932/1933). The students in this module came from all over the world, and the best essays for the course were truly impressive.

Not least, with Dr Adela Halo, I co-convened a lecture and seminar survey course for first- and second-year undergraduate historians at UCL, “The History of Political Thought in the West.” This course, previously taught by Frederick Rosen, Angus Gowland, Avi Lifshitz and William Selinger, spans classic works in the history of political thought from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli and Hobbes up through to the twentieth century. The seminars for this course led to reflections on UCL as an institution.

Above all, I am blessed and very fortunate to be teaching at a great university and in one of the best history departments in the world (perhaps the best history department in which English is the language of instruction). The students are here for the intellectual world, and teaching them is a great privilege.

Spotlight on Research: Emily Corran’s Year in French Academia

Emily Corran
Associate Professor of Medieval History

a painting of a group of people at church

Image: The Fitzwilliam Museum (2023) “Miniature from a copy of Gratian, Decretum”, Creative Commons.

Most people could think of a time when someone consulted them on a difficult moral choice: should a friend tell their partner about a mistake they made in the past? Should they take responsibility for an accident that they caused unwittingly? Certain professions involve a constant reckoning with moral dilemmas: a social worker or a police officer, for example, must frequently make difficult decisions about when to intervene and which rules to enforce more or less strictly. A judge or a doctor must adapt their responses according to the circumstances and details of the cases they encounter.

My research concerns a medieval iteration of this phenomenon, known as casuistry. Casuistry is the discipline which determines how to resolve complex moral cases of the sort that arose in the medieval church. In 1215, the Catholic church made it compulsory for all Christians to confess their sins at least once a year. The priest who heard the confession was expected to measure the gravity of the sins and assign an appropriate spiritual punishment to the sinner. To help priests in this task, the church started providing manuals that advised weighing up the range of circumstances that could affect the gravity of sins. These manuals, therefore, list a long and impressive range of ordinary sins that could arise in a medieval parish. Some casuistical works discussed thought experiments that elaborated a difficult theological or legal principle – should a child who was baptised as a baby but then brought up in the Islamic faith be blamed for failing to live a Christian life? Is the sacrament still valid if a priest consecrates the eucharist not intending to serve God but to get his job done before lunch? Others confined themselves to practical problems that closely relate to local practice – should a servant girl break an oath to serve her mistress if the mistress’s son is importuning her to have an affair? Should a punch thrown in anger during a ball game be treated with leniency? Many adapted more abstracted problems that had been discussed in the schools (can a somnambulant murderer be held guilty?) into useful teaching for parish priests (if a patient dies while her carer dozes, is the carer guilty of negligence?) By studying medieval responses to this kind of problem, my project uses these manuals as a source for practical medieval ethical thought. I show how the church interacted with lay people’s lives and thought through unexpected and challenging situations, often with surprising pragmatism.

During my sabbatical in 2022-3, I spent ten months at the Institut d’études avancées in Paris working on my project. It was a wonderful stay: the institute welcomes visiting scholars from across the social sciences and encourages them to collaborate and discuss their work in an interdisciplinary environment. While at the institute, I heard, for example, about how scholars in ancient cuneiform are assisting brain scientists in studying the neurology of writing. The insights I got from this interdisciplinary engagement were unexpected: whilst I am used to making comparisons between medieval Catholicism and other world religions, my colleagues at the institute forced me to think more actively about comparisons with today’s secular culture. They wanted to know to what extent medieval casuistry is the forerunner or equivalent of modern guides to office management and whether a medieval confessor was more like a judge, a therapist, or a social-care case worker. (I think the answer to this last question could annoyingly be all three or neither, depending on the priest hearing the confession).

During my stay in Paris, I also contributed to several regular seminars. I gave a paper about medieval thought about corruption and negligence at a seminar studying medieval theories of intention run by historians of philosophy and law. The seminar that forced me to be the most creative was a research group interested in medieval oaths. I used the opportunity to investigate a category of oaths discussed at length in medieval confessors’ manuals: trade agreements between artisans. For example, a group of butchers might make an oath to each other, promising none would sell more than a day-old piece of meat. Another group of tailors might declare that none would work at night or beyond an agreed number of hours daily. This kind of oath may look like an early version of workers’ protection to prevent artisans from exploitation or overwork. Still, they were imposed by city guilds to maintain their control of taxation. Their key worry was that artisans might secretly sell extra wares that had been produced secretly or which did not conform to the guilds’ standards.

Interestingly, the medieval church saw the morality of this kind of oath somewhat differently. Priests’ manuals said it was fine for butchers to swear not to sell old meat. However, they say it is sinful to promise not to work at night. This is because the priests were worried that this might be a strategy to limit production and drive up prices – and, therefore, that swearing this oath would harm consumers. Thus, this paper forced me to engage with how church teachings sometimes ran counter to the concerns of ordinary people. It seems the medieval church thought that low prices always served the common good.

Since returning from Paris, I have continued to pursue the collaborations I started there. Next year, I will host a research group that was started in Paris, which is investigating the concept of ‘conscience’ in fifteenth-century Europe.

Emily Corran has recently won a 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize for this research.

The Nahrein Network

The Nahrein Network is an interdisciplinary research project dedicated to the sustainable development of Iraqi history and heritage. Their work centers on fostering research, supporting capacity-building in Iraq, and engaging in impactful collaborations with local and international partners. Their mission is to contribute to the preservation and revitalization of Iraq’s rich cultural heritage.

The Nahrein Network highlights UCL’s commitment to international collaboration and interdisciplinary research. It also showcases the impactful work being done to address global challenges related to cultural heritage and development. Their work exemplifies how historical research can contribute to real-world outcomes and the promotion of sustainable development in regions affected by conflict and instability.

Find out more about their recent projects and upcoming opportunities.

Spotlight on Public History: ‘Social making: nature, ritual and community’

Sophie Page
Lecturer in Medieval History

UCL Trellis is a multistage art commissioning programme that aims to bring together artists, UCL researchers and local east London communities to co-create work together. In 2023-24 I worked with Ukrainian artist Olha Pryymak on a series of workshops that brought together local volunteers from Cordwainers Grow community gardens and Ukrainians who had recently arrived in east London. At these seasonal gatherings we used plant and animal materials - some of them, like flax, grown by Cordwainers in the garden - to make Ukrainian folk ritual objects including motanka (guardian dolls), didukhs (wheat sheafs representing ancestor spirits) and hromovytsia candles to protect against storms.

Embracing the collaborative mode of working, exchanges were developed over the project with local performers and makers Olivia Armstrong, Maria Magdalena, Ganna and Vitalii Pryimak, Victoria Isai, and Sofiya Marynyak. The side-by-side making and story exchanges about medieval magic and environments prompted by Sophie built connections between the communities, layering historical, ecological and cultural knowledge from medieval times to today.

Over this period, and for the exhibition Olha produced oil paintings that were informed by staging and witnessing the community making. The four paintings represent ritual objects made during the seasonal events. They were intended to bring the heightened and embodied experience of working with natural materials into the exhibition space.

Photographs credit: Sofiya Marynyak, 2023, 2024

Spotlight on Careers: What’s the Value of a History Degree?

Rebecca Jennings
Professor of Modern Gender History

There are many myths surrounding studying for a history degree, such as the worry that students will be stuck in libraries writing essay after essay or that history has no relevance to the modern world. Many students and their families also believe a history degree will limit them to a teaching career upon graduation.

Rebecca Jennings debunks these myths and demonstrates that a history degree equips students with valuable skills that are highly sought after by all employers, leading to good earning potential.

Read Rebecca’s Times Higher Education article here.

Spotlight on Students: Lapis Student Zine

pink background with description of new Lapis issue

The Lapis is the History Department’s new Undergraduate Zine and the voice of the Awarding Gap project. It aims to foster a sense of belonging amongst all History undergrads, and celebrate the diversity of talent and approaches to history within our community.

We have chosen the theme of “Crossroads” for this issue, as all of us are currently making some major decisions in our life, be it simply the modules we wish to study or the career paths we wish to undergo. Crossroads feature heavily in history as a discipline, making it the perfect topic to explore!

Selected Publication: The Dread Plague and the Cow Killers

Thom Rath
Associate Professor in Modern Latin America

book cover with black and white image of a cow and a man

Congratulations to Thom Rath for winning the Best Book Prize from the UK Latin American History Network (UKLAH) for his book The Dread Plague and the Cow Killers!

Between 1947 and 1954, the Mexican and US governments waged a massive campaign against a devastating livestock plague, aftosa or foot-and-mouth disease. Absorbing over half of US economic aid to Latin America and involving thousands of veterinarians and ranchers from both countries, battalions of Mexican troops, and scientists from Europe and the Americas, the campaign against aftosa was unprecedented in size. Despite daunting obstacles and entrenched opposition, it successfully eradicated the virus in Mexico, and reshaped policies, institutions, and knowledge around the world. Using untapped sources from local, national, and international archives, Thomas Rath provides a comprehensive history of this campaign, the forces that shaped it – from presidents to peasants, scientists to journalists, pistoleros to priests, mountains to mules – and the complicated legacy it left. More broadly, it uses the campaign to explore the formation of the Mexican state, changing ideas of development and security, and the history of human–animal relations.

Academic Staff Publications 2024

For regular updates on the outputs of our academic, please bookmark our Publications and Achievements page.

New Academic Staff Profiles

Fabian Krautwald

Lecturer in African History

Fabian Krautwald is a comparative historian of eastern and southern Africa who works with sources in two African languages, Swahili and Otjiherero, to explore how memories of colonialism have influenced African societies’ conceptions of sovereignty and restorative justice since the late nineteenth century. Before joining UCL he was a postdoctoral fellow at Binghamton University and Princeton University, where he also completed his PhD (2022). In addition to an MA in History from Princeton (2018) he holds an MA in Global History from Humboldt University and Free University Berlin (2016) and a BA in History and Anthropology from the University of Freiburg (2012). A native of Germany, he has conducted extensive archival and oral history research in Namibia, Tanzania, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and his home country. Fabian’s current work focuses on the ways in which eastern and southern Africans have recalled German colonialism in Namibia and Tanzania since its end in the First World War, and how the resulting negotiations in families, the public sphere, and cultural practices illuminate the origins of decolonisation as well as calls for reparations in Africa more generally.

A young woman in glasses smiles at the camera

Nora Yitong Qiu

Lecturer in Modern East Asian History

As a historian specializing in East Asia from 1600 to 2000, Nora is dedicated to advancing our understanding of global economic inequality through exploring the process of modernization from three lenses: identity, finance, and institutions. Equipped with quantitative training and language skills, she investigates the causes of the Great Divergence that occurred in the world since the 1600s from both central and peripheral perspectives. Her research seeks to unravel the intricate interplay among diverse peoples and regions, revealing how identity, power, and the environment shape the soft and hard institutions of society and vice versa, which causes economic and cultural flourishing and suppression. Her research over the next decade will focus on four projects: Qing China’s household economy, material culture, and rulership, China’s legal pluralism, East Asia’s financial modernization, and regional inequality in Jiangnan.

A woman with long brown hair and glasses looks at the camera

Alka Raman

Lecturer in Social and Economic History (since 1500)

Dr Alka Raman’s work focusses on technological change in global economic history through an investigation of import substitution and changing technologies in cotton manufacturing. Dr Raman has used innovative scientific methods to extract data from textile objects to inform our understanding of the influence of pre-industrial Indian cotton textiles on the growth of the British cotton industry in the 18th and 19th centuries during the First Industrial Revolution. She comes from the University of Manchester where she held the Hallsworth Fellowship in History. Prior to that, she held the ESRC Fellowship at LSE and the Economic History Society’s Postan Postdoctoral Fellowship, in affiliation with the Institute of Historical Research, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She was guest lecturer at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London as well as at the Department of Economic History, LSE and Department of History, University of Manchester.

a man in glasses smiles to the camera with trees and mountains in the background

Robert Suits

Lecturer in Environmental History

Robert Suits is an incoming lecturer in Environmental History. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Calgary and at the University of Edinburgh. His work focuses on energy, climate, and labor, particularly in the context of industrial capitalism. His first book, The Hobo: An Environmental History, explores how migrant work in the industrial United States developed in response to energy transitions and climate disasters; he is also the lead researcher on a wide-ranging digital history project exploring and quantifying energy transitions across U.S. history.

Alumni Profiles

Spotlight on Anna Braddick

BA History, 2020-2023

a young woman with long brown hair smiles while wearing her graduation gown and cap

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the history department at UCL, in spite of much of it taking place during the COVID years. While I was a student, I also worked part-time as a piano and music theory teacher, and volunteered in several museums.

My love for the academic discipline of history only grew exponentially during my undergraduate degree. I feel particularly indebted to the formative - and incredibly engaging - classes I took under Patrick Lantschner, Sophie Page and Elaine Leong, who very generously fostered my initial interest in Medieval and Early Modern cultural history. I wrote my dissertation on the Boethian philosophy of musica humana, a belief that a musical life-force circulated within each individual, and how that could be informed by gendered and medical concepts of the body.

Feeling that my interest in these ideas had not reached a natural conclusion, but was instead only just emerging, I submitted my application to graduate programmes. I was accepted into the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme at Oxford University, which will be fund me to undertake an MSt in Musicology this coming year. The Ertegun Scholarship is a competitive award, with over 1,500 people competing for 15 places each year, and one I could never have anticipated receiving. It offers an extensive extra-curricular program to scholars, conducted from Ertegun House in central Oxford, with the aim of fostering scholarship in the humanities and intellectual exchange. I remain an aspiring historian at heart, and I look forward to bringing the invaluable experiences I gained while at UCL - both academic and beyond - into my upcoming research.

Spotlight on Margaret Anderson

MA History, 2021-2022

A woman with short brown hair, wearing a blue cardigan, holds her head with her hand

In 2021, I retired from managing mental health services in a large NHS Foundation Trust, a high-risk area where an interdisciplinary and multi-agency approach is essential. I studied English at KCL followed by an MSc in Social Policy and Social Work at LSE. My career has given me insight into large institutions and the discrepancy between policy and practice. I was keen to start something new, and so undertaking a part time MA in History at UCL provided a stimulating and challenging segue into a new chapter of my life.

I’m interested in state power, memory, identity, social attitudes, migration and the treatment of refugees. My dissertation was on the 1946 Moran Committee investigating German Medical War Crimes researching relatively neglected records at the Royal College of Physicians.

I love delving into archives. Unguarded comments hide between the leaves of the driest documents revealing much about attitudes and prejudices. This autumn I am delighted to start a PhD in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL researching British attitudes towards so-called enemy aliens and internment in the Second World War. It will be fascinating to return to UCL and connect with a different and interdisciplinary department.

2023-2024 Events

Inaugural Lecture: Professor John Sabapathy

29 November 2023
‘Goodbye Cockaigne! Working, eating, & laughing in the Anthropocene, 1250-2023’

Inaugural Lecture: Professor Benedetta Rossi

13 March 2024
‘Africa in the Global History of Slavery and Abolition, 1800-2023’

Finding Your Path: Departmental Alumni Panel on Careers

Simon Macdonald
Associate Lecturer in Modern European History

On Wednesday, 29 May 2024, the History department proudly welcomed back four recent graduates from our BA and MA programmes for an alumni panel event on careers. This event, the highlight of our new Careers Week programme, was a resounding success, thanks to the valuable contributions of our alumni and the partnership between the department and the UCL Careers Service. Our aim in this series of events was to give current students a sense of the wide range of jobs their History degree can open up and to help them plan their individual next steps. The chance to speak to alumni, in particular, makes the shift from studies to employment a tangible and relatable one for our students. A side benefit for the wider department, meanwhile, is that we get to hear about some of the many interesting and impressive things that our alumni go on to do in their working lives!

Our alumni panellists on this occasion represented a broad variety of career paths:
Ahmed Jama, Policy Advisor at HM Treasury
Charlotte Smith, Senior Consultant, Milltown Partners (Global Strategic Communications Consultancy)
Isobel Pratsis, Events Producer, Natural History Museum
Nicolas Leah, Barrister in broad civil and commercial law practice, 3 Hare Court Chambers

The panel was incredibly generous with their time, expertise, and advice. The event was student-led, with a question-and-answer discussion about different experiences and a chance for further discussion over refreshments. Feedback from student attendees was that the evening was ‘insightful’, enjoyable, and a source of new ideas and connections. We are grateful to all the alumni involved for returning to campus and making all this possible. Many thanks to Ahmed, Charlotte, Issie, and Nick!

We are always eager to hear from alumni who might be willing to share career experiences and sector insights with our students. Your participation is invaluable to us. If you are interested in participating in future alumni events related to careers, please get in touch by giving us some brief information via this Form or by emailing Simon at simon.macdonald@ucl.ac.uk.

Upcoming Events

Inaugural Lecture: Coşkun Tunçer – Tuesday 29 October 2024 (18:30-21:00)
Inaugural Lecture: Valentina Arena – Wednesday 13 November 2024 (18:30-21:00)
Neale Lecture - TBC

Keep in Touch with the History Department on LinkedIn

We’ve started a LinkedIn group to sustain our community beyond their time at UCL.

Join us to hear about department news, stay informed about networking opportunities and other History events, support our graduates’ career development, and find potential recruits for graduate schemes or other vacancies at your employer.

We hope you’ll join us!

Join UCL History Alumni LinkedIn

Get Involved

Stay up to date with UCL History News and Events. If you have any ideas for alumni engagement and events, contact our Communications Manager, Izzie Harvey. We are excited to bring you new alumni opportunities in 2023-24 - watch this space!

Thank you to all of the authors who contributed to this edition, which was collated and edited by Izzie Harvey, Sophie Page and Queenie Lee.

UCL History Alumni Newsletter 2024

Contents

Welcome

Department News

Alumni Profiles

2023-24 Events Overview

Alumni Profiles

2023-2024 Events