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Exhibition Review: Collectible Minerals at Mineralogy Museum of Mines Paris – PSL

Anaïs Walsdorf reviews the new ‘Collectible Minerals’ temporary exhibition at the Mineralogy Museum of Mines Paris – PSL. The exhibition explores the history of the collection’s acquisitions within the context of 18th – 20th century global networks of geology. This review highlights the importance of human histories in natural history and science collections. The exhibition runs from 6 September 2023 to 9 March 2024.

Wed 24 Jan 2024, 16:20

Researching Chinese Big Business in the British Straits Settlements

In this blog post, Jeremy Goh recounts his first experience in researching Chinese businesses based in colonial Singapore, the capital of the British Straits Settlements. This research later developed into an article published in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies in 2023. He reflects upon the opportunities and challenges that he faced as he undertook archival research and fieldwork in Singapore, Hong Kong, and China, and draws useful lessons for early-career researchers.

Wed 24 Jan 2024, 14:31

Archaeology, Antiquity, and the Making of the Modern Middle East: Global Histories 1800–1939

Guillemette Crouzet and Eva Miller report on the conference 'Archaeology, Antiquity, and the Making of the Modern Middle East: Global Histories 1800–1939'. The ‘Middle East’ is both a geographical descriptor and a much grander conceptual designation, associated with emerging empires, antiquity, antiquities, and the forging of modern political, religious, ethnic, and national destinies. What competing imperial, national, and transnational narratives about the present and future of this geopolitically crucial region were fed by archaeology, philology, and history? How were these emergent disciplines themselves forged through Middle Eastern contexts they purported to study? How were temporalities of modernity and progress constructed in relation to the ruptures, continuities and heuristic challenges suggested by the excavation and exegesis of traces of ancient civilisations? How did the return of the remains of the past assist Western and Eastern empires, and new Middle Eastern countries in understanding their own futures?

Thu 03 Aug 2023, 12:16

New Frontiers in Imperial Networks Workshop

Liz Egan, Jim Hulbert, and Catriona Sharples report on the workshop ‘New Frontiers in Imperial Networks’, which took place in the Wolfson Exchange, University of Warwick. Kindly funded by Midlands4Cities, this event was designed to bring together doctoral and early career researchers with more established academics, to discuss the latest research and new directions in the field of imperial history. The workshop focused particularly on the place of “networks” in our study of imperialism and colonialism


African Futures: European Conference on African Studies

Rose Miyonga reports on the the ninth European Conference on African Studies (ECAS). The event, which brought together over 2,000 scholars from eighty countries, under the theme of ‘African Futures'. What emerged from this was a plurality of ways to conceptualise the future – of Africa and more generally – that led to an extremely rich conference programme, which stretched across time frames and spatial dimensions. Several Global History and Culture Centre students, staff and affiliates contributed to ECAS 2023.


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