Public Lectures
The History Faculty regularly hosts public lectures online, and our alumni are particularly welcome to join our speakers. Those thinking of studying history are also welcome, and we hope the lectures will give a taste of what our taught courses feature.
Our last series featured Professor Nick Guyatt, Professor Sujit Sivasundaram and Dr Arthur Asseraf. Watch out for further details on our next series in 2024. The lectures are free and open to all.
Prisoners of the Archive
In April 1815, in a war prison planted on the high plains of Dartmoor, nine Americans were shot dead by their British captors. The War of 1812 had been over for more than a month, but the American prisoners had not yet been permitted to leave and had become increasingly restless until the prison exploded in the infamous ‘Dartmoor Massacre’. These were the last men to be killed in a war between Britain and the United States, but they’ve been almost completely forgotten — along with the origins of the war which brought them to Dartmoor, and the extraordinary and often bizarre worlds they built within that massive granite prison.
In this talk, Professor Nicholas Guyatt will discuss the challenges he faced in writing his recent book The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain’s Most Terrifying Prison. He’ll explore the sources which allow us to tell stories about what happened at Dartmoor, and the particular problems of writing about Dartmoor prisoners who left little to no trace in the archive of their prison ordeal - including the thousand Black men who found themselves racially segregated in Dartmoor’s central prison block. And he’ll consider what the Dartmoor story has to tell us about race, national belonging and the power of the state in the early-nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
To book a ticket please go to
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/prisoners-of-the-archive-tickets-681473634987
Look out for the other lectures
This lecture, by Professor Sujit Sivasundaram, is an exploration of the historical context which frames present experience in global South cities, through the case study of Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. Colombo has a deeply-layered imperial past: it was initially an Indian ocean settlement which attracted Muslim settlers, before it came under a succession of European empires, Portuguese (first trading post in 1518), Dutch (1658-1796) and British (1796-1948). Yet while it was multiply-colonised, it was also multiply-engineered: a wetland with a headland, became a major port at the centre of the Indian Ocean. The transformation carries on today with China's massive Belt and Road project here. The lecture demonstrates how immersive urban and world history can speak to major challenges, such as inequality and environmental crisis, facing the world today.
To book a ticket please go to
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/colombo-the-many-histories-of-a-global-south-city-tickets-681489923707
Nearly every week, a new controversy rages in France over its colonial past. Far from there being a silence or taboo about colonialism, it regularly makes the headlines and prompts speeches from the highest levels of government. From the army’s use of torture in Algeria to the statue of Napoleon’s slave-owning wife Josephine toppled in the Caribbean, vibrant polemics over the legacy of the second-largest European colonial empire are leading to what some scholars have called a ‘memory war’.
What role can historians play in these debates? This lecture will look at a major project which brought together over 200 scholars on five continents to gather in a single book the most precise knowledge on French colonialism and its legacy. As one of the coordinators of Colonisations: Notre Histoire, Dr Arthur Asseraf will explain how colonialism has affected every dimension of France’s past. We will also see how the implications of this new research go well beyond France, opening up new pathways to think about the relationship between European and global history, and offering insights into similar debates in Britain, Belgium, Portugal, and others.
To book a ticket please go to
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-can-france-reckon-with-its-colonial-history-tickets-681498198457