Research groups

The research group Cultural History of War is a large and active research and teaching group formed around the Centre for the Cultural History of War.

It is dedicated to understanding the cultural attributes and representation of war in the modern world.

Our distinctive focus is to consider four interlocking themes:

• The body and corpses in mass violence and Genocide
• Population displacement
• Humanitarianism
• Collective memory and the writing of war experience

Centre for the Cultural History of War

The Centre for the Cultural History of War has held a range of public events in collaboration with local cultural and heritage institutions, including the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester Art Gallery, Whitworth Art Gallery and the Science Museum.  

• Centre for the Cultural History of War
• Imperial War Museum North

At the core of the Centre is a team of established academic staff who co-ordinate and disseminate research both nationally and internationally. Historians in this cluster lead two book series with Manchester University Press: 'Cultural History of Modern War' and 'Humanitarianism, Key Debates and New Approaches'.

• Cultural History of Modern War
• Humanitarianism, Key Debates and New Approaches

A new open-access MUP academic journal has been launched, with the same title 'Human Remains and Violence'. Several members of this group are directly involved in leading the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute.  

• Human Remains and Violence
• Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute

The European Research Council funded project ‘Laughing in an emergency: Humour in contemporary art’ will examine the operation of humour in contemporary art from diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives in a conference publication.  

• Laughing in an emergency: Humour in contemporary art 
  

This area of our research has had direct impact on our collaboration with NGOs and educationalists. Members of this group research in English and in numerous foreign languages. They have received major AHRC, ESRC, Leverhulme and EU funding over the last ten years. We support a new generation of research students and postdoctoral fellows in this field. 

Teaching

The Cultural History of War research cluster also forms an important part of the department’s teaching, and we are keen to involve our students in these activities. At Undergraduate level history of war is taught at level 2 and 3.  The courses offered by Professors Gatrell, Summerfield and Taithe, Drs Carden-Coyne, Dreyfus, Fuller, Geiger, Moore and Jones all touch on the central themes of this research group.

At MA level the cluster offers specialised courses on the history of war (War, Conflict and Culture), humanitarianism (The History of Humanitarian Aid) and public history (Public History: Historians and the Public Sphere) among others. The MA courses Film and History and Filming History has produced many prize winning short films which have been shown at the Imperial War Museum and in short film festivals.

• Film and History and Filming History

Research group members are:

• Dr Ana Carden-Coyne
• Dr Jean-Marc Dreyfus
• Dr Pierre Fuller
• Prof Peter Gatrell
• Dr Till Geiger
• Dr Max Jones
• Dr Aaron Moore
• Prof Penny Summerfield
• Prof Bertrand Taithe (cluster leader)

Group member profiles

They work with a diverse range of other projects and institutions, and appear regularly in the media:

Dr Ana Carden-Coyne

Dr Ana Carden-Coyne's monograph Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War was published by Oxford University Press, in 2009.  Her next monograph is entitled The Politics of Wounds: Military Patients and Medical Power in the First World War, and is forthcoming with OUP. She is currently curating an art exhibition with Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth Art Gallery for the centenary of WW1, The Sensory War, 1914-2014, and organising a comprehensive programme of public events across the city. She is co-founder of the Disability History Group UK/Europe and is working with Kent University on a history of disabled veterans. She has a wider interest in disability in the global south, post conflict and genocide justice, and working with local and international NGOs in Cambodia. She has recently edited Gender and Conflict Since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Palgrave, 2012).

Dr Jean-Marc Dreyfus

Dr Jean-Marc Dreyfus works on the Holocaust and is specialist of its economic aspects. He leads a major ERC funded research programmes "Corpses of mass violence and genocide" which casts new interdisciplinary light on the treatment of corpses in mass violence and genocides. This world leading project has led to a range of publications such as Cadavres impensables, cadavres impensés. Approaches méthodologiques du traitement des corps dans les violences de masse et les génocides (Paris : Petra, 2012) ; Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide: Destruction (forthcoming MUP, 2014); Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide: Search and Identification (forthcoming, MUP, 2014). He organises and participates to outreach programmes on the Holocaust and Holocaust education. Particularly, he organises the annual workshop at the Imperial War Museum North.

Dr Pierre Fuller

Dr Pierre Fuller's research centres on the social and political networks behind disaster relief during the escalating civil wars of 1920s China. Based on county gazetteers, news tabloids, and other local sources, it aims to capture street-level responses to drought-famine, earthquake and war in urban and rural communities across North China and Manchuria. Building on his latest publication, 'North China Revisited: Unsung Native Relief in the Warlord Era, 1920-21' (Modern Asian Studies, May 2013), his work aims to provide a counterweight to the international and institutional relief dimensions traditionally emphasised in scholarly and popular treatments of disaster in 20th century East Asia. He is currently at the beginning stages of creating an online resource on disasters in Chinese history.

Prof Peter Gatrell

Prof Peter Gatrell's interest in the history of population displacement include collaborative research projects on population displacement, state-building and social identity in the aftermath of the First World War and the Second World War. He is also interested in the UN and global campaigns on behalf of refugees, and published Free World? The campaign to save the world's refugees, 1956-1963 (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His most recent monograph is entitled The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford University Press, 2013. He is involved in education and outreach activities in the field of refugee history and the history of humanitarianism. Together with Dr. Jenny Carson (Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute) he has produced a series of public exhibitions and teachers’ packs on ‘Refugees in the post-1945 world’, including relief work undertaken by the Society of Friends (Quakers). Peter Gatrell is on the editorial board of 1914-1918 online http://www.1914-1918-online.net/

Dr Till Geiger

Dr Till Geiger's research focuses on the political economy of the cold war. Building on his book Britain and the Economic Problem of the Cold War (Ashgate, 2004), he is currently researching the transformation of the British Warfare State in response to the cold war, the nuclear arms race, and decolonisation during the 1950s and early 1960s. This project has resulted in an important article on 'The British Warfare State and the Challenge of Americanisation of Western Defence' in European Review of History (2008). He is also interested in the development of American foreign assistance from primarily humanitarian aid in the immediate postwar period to the support for Western defence efforts and on a more limited basis to pro-western third world countries in the 1950s and co-edited a volume on Ireland, Europe and the Marshall Plan (Four Court Press, 2004). As part of the department's outreach activities, he has presented paper to numerous local and school history societies. 

Dr Max Jones

Dr Max Jones has particular interests in heroes, heroism, gender & masculinity; monarchy, empire & national identity; the cultural history of modern war; Antarctica, exploration & technology. Although primarily a British historian, he is interested in locating the British experience in context, through comparisons with Europe, America and the Empire. His early work focused on the British polar explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott, RN, who died while returning from the South Pole in 1912.  His monograph The Last Great Quest was published in 2003 by Oxford University Press. In a number of publications, he has analysed the origins of Scott's Antarctic expeditions, and the response to his death, in order to offer insights into a range of research questions regarding exploration, empire and masculinity.  He is currently working on a new research project, which looks more broadly at the changing form and functions of national heroes over the last three centuries.  He is currently co-editing a forthcoming special issue ‘Post-Colonial Heroes’, with B. Sebe, B. Taithe, P. Yeandel, J. Strachan, devoted to the post-colonial fate of colonial heroes for the Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History.

Dr Aaron Moore

Dr Aaron Moore's first monograph, Writing War, which analyses in a comparative framework the writings of Japanese, Chinese, and American soldiers during WWII has recently been published by Harvard University Press in 2013.  His second monograph project on childhood and adolescence in China, Japan, Britain, and Russia has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. He has received support from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation for his work on youth narratives of war in Russia, China, Britain, and Japan. He is currently working on three articles, one monograph, and one co-authored volume on wartime childhood and youth.

Professor Penny Summerfield

Professor Penny Summerfield's 2007 monograph, Contesting Home Defence: men, women and the Home Guard in Britain in the Second World War, led to her current project on The Second World War in Popular Memory 1945-1979. This interrogates the strength of the British desire to keep alive the memory of 1939-45, seeking to understand when that desire began, what fuelled it and what the memory of the war has signified. The project explores the evocation of the war in political discourse, popular culture and personal memory from 1945 to 1979, and identifies and seeks to explain the continuities and contradictions within and between these different types of cultural representation. Summerfield has so far published three articles and a book chapter on various aspects of this theme.

Professor Bertrand Taithe

Prof Bertrand Taithe's (cluster leader) most recent monograph was devoted to French colonial violence, The Killer Trail, and was published with Oxford University Press in 2011; he has since edited a collection in 2012 with Tom Crook and Rebecca Gill Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, c. 1830-2000.  He is currently working on a new edited volume with Pedro Ramos Pinto, The Impact of History, Routledge, 2014 and ‘Post-Colonial Heroes’, with B. Sebe, M. Jones, P. Yeandel, and J. Strachan for the Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History. He has edited a recent special issue of French Historical Studies on Humanitarianism in French History.  His next monograph with Julie-Marie Strange and Sarah Roddy, ‘The Freedom of Charity: The Making of Modern Civil Society’ deals with the establishment of modern charities and humanitarian organisations in the Victorian and Edwardian era.  He is also collaborating on a range of contemporary debates on humanitarian aid with NGOs such as MSF.  He is a member of the scientific Committee of the Centre de Recherche sur l'action et les savoirs humanitaires (CRASH fondation MSF Paris) and is the director of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute.

In partnership with the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI)

This research group explores histories of humanitarianism across different time periods and in a range of geographies. Our work highlights the global scope of histories of humanitarianism and their capacity to shed light on a multitude of issues and experiences, from the abstract to the most intimate.

It reflects Manchester’s distinctive expertise in histories of humanitarianism that cross disciplinary boundaries and which seek to engage with contemporary debates about the practices, policies, and representations of humanitarian action. We welcome interest from staff working on related themes elsewhere at the University of Manchester and from prospective research students.

People

• Eleanor Davey
• Jessica Field
• Pierre Fuller
• Peter Gatrell
• Jessica Hawkins
• Laure Humbert
• Kristy Ironside
• Luke Kelly
• Tanja Müller
• Sarah Roddy
• Julie-Marie Strange
• Bertrand Taithe

Themes

The group’s interests take in themes such as:

• Relief practices, such as responses to conflict, famine, and natural disasters, how local and transnational networks respond in times of crisis, and how such practices have evolved over time;
• Displacement, both across borders and within them, mapping responses at multiple levels as well as in global and comparative perspectives, and seeking to understand the meanings and narratives of displacement for those who experience it;
• Non-governmental organisations and international organisations, including the techniques these organisations use to raise funds, to communicate with different audiences, and to foster organisational cultures;
• Ideas and cultures of care, exploring what motivates action on behalf of others, how different beliefs and ideologies have conceived and influenced such action, and what frameworks have enabled or obstructed it.

Work on these and other themes within humanitarian history has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and the Leverhulme Trust, as well as by the University of Manchester’s Faculty of Humanities Strategic Investment Fund and its ESRC Impact Acceleration Account.

Wider work

The group’s members actively engage in debates and collaborations outside of academia, working to open up histories of humanitarianism to wider audiences and to connect historical perspectives to current events.

A key platform for the dissemination of research on responses to natural disasters is DisasterHistory.org, convened by Pierre Fuller, and HumanitarianHistory.org is a pilot site under development by HCRI staff in consultation with Honorary Lecturer John Borton.

• DisasterHistory.org
• HumanitarianHistory.org

Conferences and seminars

Histories of humanitarianism feature prominently in workshops, conferences and seminars convened by HCRI, History, and the group’s members, including:

• The Quest for Humanitarian Effectiveness? (HCRI conference in collaboration with Save the Children UK, 2015)
• History of Chinese Disasters: State of the Field and Pathways to Public Engagement (History workshop in collaboration with the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2014)
• Humanitarianism: Past, Present and Future (HCRI conference, 2012)
• History department Research Seminar, which has recently featured papers by Emily Mark-Fitzgerald (Dublin) and Alan Lester (Sussex)

Recent publication highlights

For more publications please refer to individual members’ research profiles.

• Davey, Eleanor. Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954-1988. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Field, Jessica. “Consumption in lieu of Membership: Reconfiguring Popular Charitable Action in Post-World War II Britain,” VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 27:2 (2016): 979-97.
• Fuller, Pierre. “Writing Disaster: A Chinese Earthquake and the Pitfalls of Historical Investigation,” History Workshop Journal 80 (2015): 201-17.
• Gatrell, Peter. The Making of the Modern Refugee, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Gatrell, Peter. “Refugees – What’s Wrong with History?” Journal of Refugee Studies, Advance Access (2016).
• Hawkins, Jessica. “Historicizing the State in Development Theory: Michael Mann’s Model of Social Power,” Progress in Development Studies 14:3 (2014): 299-308.
• Humbert, Laure. “French Politics of Relief and International Aid: France, UNRRA and the Rescue of Eastern European Displaced Persons in post-war Germany, 1945-1947,” Journal of Contemporary History, OnlineFirst (2015).
• Ironside, Kristy. “Rubles for Victory: The Social Dynamics of State Fundraising on the Soviet Home Front,” Kritika 15:4 (2014): 799-828.
• Kelly, Luke. “Humanitarian Sentiment and Forced Repatriation: The Administration of DPs in a Post-war Displaced Persons Camp,” Journal of Refugee Studies, Advance Access (2016).
• Müller, Tanja. “Acts of Citizenship as a Politics of Resistance? Reflections on Realizing Concrete Rights within the Israeli Asylum Regime,” Citizenship Studies 20:1 (2015): 50-66.
• Roddy, Sarah, Strange, Julie-Marie, and Taithe, Bertrand. “The Charity-mongers of Modern Babylon: Bureaucracy, Scandal and the Transformation of the Philanthropic Marketplace, c.1870-1912,” Journal of British Studies 54:1 (2015): 118-37.
• Taithe, Bertrand. “The Cradle of the New Humanitarian System? International Work and European Volunteers at the Cambodian Border Camps, 1979–1993,” Contemporary European History 25:S2 (2016): 335-58.

Research agenda and themes

Our research group focuses on the modern histories of politics, policy and its institutions broadly conceived, including political discourses, official and popular politics in their national, transnational and global formations.

We continue to build on innovative research done at Manchester over a long period, augmenting the fruitful encounter between political and cultural history. Our research has regional breadth: we have specialists working on Britain, continental Europe (France, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union), the USA, and West Africa.

The group’s members belong to a wide range of national and international networks. For instance, in Britain, we have strong links with the Rethinking Modern Europe seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Abroad, we work closely together with the European University Institute in Florence (with which we have a PhD exchange scheme) and other leading institutions including Kyoto University, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin.

The group’s collective research agenda currently focuses on the following problématiques:

1. Cultures of Politics, especially Cultural Histories of Diplomacy. Colleagues regularly organise workshops related to ‘Cultures of Diplomacy’ as well as a reading group which is open, by application to Christian Goeschel, to colleagues (including post-docs and PhD researchers) from other universities.

2. The History of Political Thought and Intellectual History.

3. Universities and the Politics of Knowledge (in conjunction with the Research Group on University History and the History of Humanities Network).

4. Emotions and Political/Social History.

5. The History of Empires.

Funding received

Projects emerging from our group have received funding from national and international funding bodies, including the AHRC, ESRC, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science.

Research impact

We are also connected with policy-makers and charities in order to relate our work to a broader public.

Our group’s members have a strong track record of communicating their research to non-academic audiences, both in Britain and abroad, including on BBC Radio 3, BBC 2, Rai Tre, ZDF, and PBS.

Current members

Click on the links to see their research profiles and publications

Dr Thomas Tunstall Allcock

Dr Alexandre Campsie

Dr Freddy Foks

Dr Laura C. Forster

Dr Christopher Godden

Dr Christian Goeschel (research group leader)

Dr Siobhán Hearne

Dr Emily Jones

Professor Stuart Jones

Dr Jo Laycock

Emeritus Professor Frank Mort

Dr Eloise Moss

Dr Steven Pierce

Dr Lewis Ryder

Dr Charlotte Wildman

We have a strong track record of hosting post-doctoral fellowships. Our post-docs have received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the Simon and Hallsworth Fund.

We make a special effort to integrate PhD researchers. Currently, John Ayshford and Adam Waddingham are members of our group.

The Bodies, Emotions and Material Collective – originally established as the Embodied Emotions research group in 2015—explores the interplay between bodies, emotions, objects and materials in past and present societies

Members of this research group are historians, art historians, archaeologists and curators with a shared interest in cross-disciplinary debates on the history of the body and gender studies, the history of emotions as well as material culture studies.

The group supports home-grown research in this area by drawing in postgraduates, postdoctoral scholars, academic colleagues in the humanities and sciences, as well as cultural collections staff. We have a strong focus on supporting Early Career Researchers, including PhD students, with an interest in the history of bodies, emotions and material culture.

The collective fosters a vibrant, interdisciplinary research community through longstanding seminar activities, as well as a variety of workshops, conferences and exhibitions. Associated projects and events have been supported, among others, by:

• The Arts and Humanities Research Council
• The Australian Research Council
• The British Academy
• The Economic and Social Research Council
• The Leverhulme Trust
• The Getty Foundation
• The Wellcome Trust.

The research collective has developed strong international partnerships with experts in the history of emotions at the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions 1100–1800.

The group has built strong connections with

• Manchester’s unique public collections;
• The John Rylands Research Institute and Library;
• The Whitworth Art Gallery;
• The Manchester Museum;
• The Manchester Art Gallery.

The collective is also engaged in a wide range of public engagement and impact activities, developing innovative pedagogic approaches, pushing established methodologies in material culture studies (e.g. microscopy) and fostering collaborations with laboratories as well as beyond the university.

Find out more about the Collective:

• The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective

The Medieval History research network is reuniting scholars who specialise in various fields of medieval history and cover a geographical range from Wales, via England, Northern France and Germany, to Italy, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Themes

Our expertise includes themes such as mysticism, memory, piety, crusades, intercultural exchange, Norman expansion, Anglo-Saxon England, and pre-modern world trade. 

Members:

• Dr Georg Christ
• Dr Kathryn Dutton
• Prof Paul Fouracre
• Dr Jonathan Gledhill
• Emeritus Professor Nick Higham
• Dr Charles Insley (network leader [dux reticuli] and alderman)
• Dr Stephen Mossman
• Dr Irene O'Daly (JRRI research associate)
• Dr Paul Oldfield
• Emeritus Prof Stephen Rigby
• Dr Ingrid Rembold 

All of our Medieval historians also participate in teaching the interdisciplinary MA in Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

Our joint research projects include textbook and cataloguing rare manuscripts held at the John Rylands Library. Further afield, we run two initiatives with The University of Melbourne, Australia: ‘Connecting Collections’ and ‘Foreign Bodies’. 

The John Rylands Research Institute and Library projects

Foreign Bodies  

Artem longam, vitam brevem esse dicitur. Et vere: ars historica est ars longissima. Ergo tempus non perfundere sed ad lucrum solidum dedicare sapientes studeant. Cum solum aeones et locos remotos transeundus/a oceanumque historiae completum navigandus/a historicus/a historiae naturam intelligere possit aetas mediaevalis studiare non solum pulchre sed necesse est.

Don't worry - we also have English speaking staff (and between us Anglo-Saxon, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Arabic and Ancient Greek). We are looking forward to hearing from you and speaking to you - in whatever language you prefer.

The Race, Roots, and Resistance group is a democratic collective of staff, students, and community members dedicated to the critical study of race and its impact on the lived experiences of people across temporal and spatial boundaries. It is a multidisciplinary group with broad specialisations in the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and where relevant the Natural Sciences.

Research themes include:

• the historical construction, evolution and operation of ‘race’;
• the social, economic, political, and cultural legacies of racial oppression;
• the formation of strategies and movements to resist and transform racial regimes by people of colour.  

The group’s student-led zine ‘In: Colour’ is created by, and for, BAME creatives with a focus on issues of race, identity and culture. 

The Race, Roots, and Resistance Collective meets regularly throughout the academic year to share research findings and host public events to foster wider community awareness and understanding.

The collective has hosted events for students with the University’s Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre, as well as a Symposium for university students, staff and leading scholars in the fields of African Diaspora, African American, and Black British history at the Global Black Freedom Movements Network (2019). In addition, members have worked with national and international partners, including The National Trust and the BBC.  

Current members:

• Dr Jesus Chairez-Garza
• Prof Anindita Ghosh
• Dr Frances Houghton
• Dr Eloise Moss
• Dr Kerry Pimblott
• Dr Jack Webb

Research

This group brings together colleagues working on various aspects of world history in the effort of promoting and studying histories of the Global South. A major aim of the Group is to research the methodological approaches of the Global South and understand how such approaches might re-orientate world histories away from ‘metropolitan’ knowledges and towards a global history told through local and regional perspective. Several members have an intrinsic interest in the intellectual history of the Global South, scrutinising intellectual traditions that present only one understanding of concepts such as political economy, sovereignty and race.

We are interested in:

·      South-South connections

·      The recovery of voices otherwise marginalised or silenced in the colonial archive

·      Subaltern histories

·      Histories of radicality and resistance

Events

Forthcoming 2022:

THYSSEN LECTURE, Organized by the German Historical Institute London in collaboration with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and hosted by us at Manchester.

16th May, 2023

Prof Sebastian Conrad (Frei Universität, Berlin)

‘Colonial Times, Global Times: History and Imperial World-Making’

TEACHING WORLD HISTORY IN THE UK: CHALLENGES

Networking event with colleagues teaching World History in the UK, to share experiences and brainstorm ideas around both pedagogy and research

Projects

We have a strong focus on interdisciplinarity and have won major awards from the British Academy, AHRC and Leverhulme, fostering our links with anthropology, ethnography, diaspora and urban studies, medical humanities, political economy and musicology. The group maintains strong international links spanning the globe, from Africa and the Caribbean to India, China and Mexico, working closely with researchers and research institutes in these locations. We foster and support a growing body of PhD students, Research Associates, ECRs and collaborators within the University, and across the School and Faculty.

Some of our current interests include:

• Intellectual origins of disciplines in the Global South
• Religion, migration, borders and diasporic identity
• History of corruption in Africa
• Race, Marginality, community and locality
• Understanding technocracy and resource management
• Black Power and Activism
• Print and performance cultures of the Global South

Outreach

Our members are engaged in a wide range of public engagement activities that remain invested in the University agenda of Social Responsibility, while also making major contributions to research impact. Our partner institutions include the Race Relations Archive at the Central Library, the John Rylands, MOSI and the Manchester Museum, and we also share an unparalleled partnership with local community based organisations in Manchester. We regularly contribute to media outlets, both national and international, including the BBC and global television and radio.

Our People

Dr Lauren Banko

I am a social historian of the Middle East, and work namely on Palestine prior to 1948, and on topics of mobility, displacement, and borders. The project draws on narratives by migrants from across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond, which reveal understandings and negotiations of their own physical, emotional, and psychological infirmities vis-a-vis border controls.

Dr Jesús Cháirez-Garza

I research the political thought of Dr B.R. Ambedkar and how the concept of untouchability became a political category. Currently, I am working on an AHRC project that investigates the intellectual origins of Indian anthropology.

Prof Anindita Ghosh (group convenor)

I specialise on popular cultures from South Asia, more specifically Bengal, and have explored the social history of print, urban history of colonial Calcutta, and gender in South Asia, in my published work so far. My newest research focuses on printed and oral representations of anti-colonial revolutionary. I am also involved in developing an impact case study that examines the role of music in sustaining Bangladeshi migrants in the North-West, 1960s-1980s.

Dr Ethan Menchinger

Dr Steven Pierce

I am currently writing a book tentatively titled A History of Corruption in Africa, which is under contract to Ohio University Press and is a sequel to Moral Economies of Corruption (Duke, 2016).  I'm also the Senior Editor for Africa for Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Dr Kerry Pimblott

I have broad interests in the fields of urban history, labor and working-class history, and African diaspora studies. In both teaching and scholarship, I focus on social movements for economic and racial justice, drawing upon community-based research methods to examine the relationships between race and class, the state, political economy, and radical activism. My current research studies the role of activist travel in shaping radical thought and networks across the globe; and the distinctive character of Black Power struggles in locales beyond the U.S.

Aditya Ramesh

I am currently engaged in two different and interrelated projects, spanning environmental history, the history of disease and historical geography. The first, asks how rivers and deltas, which largely only attracted irrigation engineers in the 19th century, became the focus and site of multiple techno-social expertise. In doing so, it revisits the history of large dams beyond the global spread of American expertise, and roots the logic of expertise on water to everyday engagements with land, science and politics. Second, I am engaged in developing a project on cities and infectious diseases in South Asia and other colonial contexts..

Gerardo Serra

I am a historian of colonial and postcolonial West Africa, interested in the history of political economy (broadly conceived), history and sociology of quantification, and African socialism. My research aims to reconstruct the political lives of economic and statistical knowledge in colonial and postcolonial Ghana and Nigeria. My next research project is an intellectual history of economic inequality in West Africa from the 19th century to the present.   

Dr Rian Thum

My work focuses on the history and ethnography of Muslims in China and their connections to Central and South Asia, with particular interests in pilgrimage, technologies of the word, and money, from the 18^th century to the present.

I am currently completing a book on the history of Muslims in China that re-evaluates accepted views on Chinese Islams in light of the large but under-utilized body of Chinese Muslim sources written in Persian and Arabic. Since the rise of anti-Muslim atrocities in China from 2017 onward I have written for public facing venues and worked with governments and NGOs to document the ongoing Uyghur genocide.

Dr Jack Webb

I am interested in the histories of the Caribbean and its diasporas in the colonial and postcolonial eras. My monograph and related articles focussed on ideas about Haiti in Britain and the ‘British’ Caribbean in the Victorian period. My more recent research involves recovering the perspectives and experiences of Caribbean migrants to Britain in the twentieth century. Here I am most interested in understanding this history as told by those migrants and their descendants so that we are able to appreciate the wealth of Caribbean and Black intellectualism that has unfolded and intervened in British history over the course of the twentieth century.

Prof Yangwen Zheng

My research has focused on Ming-Qing maritime trade, the foreign goods/things that travelled to China, the ways in which they became indigenised, and patterns/cultures of consumption.  This interest in the dynamics of Sino-foreign interaction and in the complex process of sinicization has led me to railways and performing art genres like ballet. My research has also explored the Chinese body, Asian naming practices, China's relations with Southeast Asia, and the Cold War in Asia.  I was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the Historical Association in July 2019. 

Modern British Studies at Manchester draws together diverse expertise from within the department of History at Manchester in social, cultural, political and economic history.

Despite the wide-ranging interests of members, the cluster has a series of intellectual and methodological meeting points for engagement, debate and collaboration. Interests include:

• micro history;
• life stories;
• memory;
• migration;
• the relationship between high and popular culture;
• personal life;
• consumption;
• cosmopolitan cultures. 

Research network members include:

• Dr Emily Jones
• Dr Christopher Godden
• Dr Max Jones
• Prof Stuart Jones
• Prof Frank Mort
• Prof Penny Summerfield (Emerita) 
• Dr Charlotte Wildman
• Dr Frances Houghton
• Dr Lewis Ryder 

Many members of the Modern British History network are actively involved in public history and engagement.