Labour History Cluster
The Labour History Cluster was inaugurated in 2019 to generate collaboration and debate on themes of labour, broadly defined. There are many ways to enter this, through histories of capitalism, war, servitude, indenture, slavery, care giving, disabilities, environmental change, emotions, gender. Our core members are within the History Faculty, but the work of the group aims to engage researchers in other Centres, Faculties and Departments in Cambridge, and those beyond our local context. We are keen to build conversations across early career and senior members of our academy, and would like to foreground the work of those relatively early in their scholarly careers.
To contact the cluster convenors, please email labour@hist.cam.ac.uk
Programme for 2024-2025
Michaelmas:
19 November 2024, Room 3, Faculty of History, 1-2pm
Maria Ågren (Uppsala), ‘Doing the history of work from an early modernist’s perspective’
Lent
21 January 2024, Room 6, Faculty of History, 1-2pm
Sheila Rowbotham, 'Reasons to Rebel: Revisiting the 1980s'
4 February 2025, Room 6, Faculty of History, 1-2pm
Laura Schwartz (Warwick), ‘Gender and the Politics of the "White Working Class": a Feminist History of Brexit Britain'
18 March 2025, Room 6, Faculty of History, 1-2pm
Hillary Taylor (Padua), ‘Corrective Violence and Labor Discipline in Early Modern England'
Easter
29 April 2025
Alex Langstaff (NYU), ‘Survey Wage Labour: What Does It Mean That Unhappy People Interview People
About Their Happiness?"
6 May 2025
Members' Books Talks (Charmian Mansell; Pedro Ramos and Massimo Asta)
3 June 2025
Kyle Zarif (Yale), ‘The Culture of Defense: Trade Unionism, the Arms Trade, and the Subject of Labor History in Neoliberal Britain’
Past Events
4 May 2024, Workshop: 'Coerced Labour in Global Historical Perspective'
Keynote: Benedetta Rossi (UCL)
Labour History blogs
Historian of South Asia Dr Partha Shil reflects on the state of the field.
Working on South Sudan, Dr Nicki Kindersley describes the co-production strategies she uses to investigate contemporary African capitalism.
Doctoral researcher Grace Whorrall-Campbell reflects on writing the history of emotions into an account of recruitment and workplace management in mid-twentieth century Britain.
Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche of CRASSH and Fitzwilliam College.
Doctoral researcher Kirstie Stage reflects on labour as a crucial analytic category for historians of disability.
The Labour History Cluster and CamPo funded a workshop for scholars interested in disability issues.