In early May GHCC director Anne Gerritsen wrote to the extended GHCC community to start mapping their experiences of the global pandemic. She has written about the idea behind the survey here and discussed concepts of the 'local' during the pandemic here. In this third instalment of the GHCC pandemic mini-series, Dr Christian Hess (Sophia University, Tokyo) reflects on his life in lockdown from the vantage point of a North American academic in suburban Western Tokyo.

With 'lockdown' having been a near-global experience for the past several months, and with restrictions now increasingly being relaxed in many places around the world, perhaps the time has come for some reflections on what ‘staying at home’ has meant for members of the extended community of the Global History and Culture Centre. We pride ourselves on our boundary-crossing research, our international partnerships and, when we are feeling hubristic, our global reach. So, what did we do, when we suddenly all had to stay home? In this blog, GHCC director Anne Gerritsen reflects on the detailed responses she received on a question she posed to the GHCC community: ‘What has been specific to your local situation?’ It is the second post in a brief blog series on GHCC and the pandemic (see the first post here).

Early in May, already several weeks after the start of what seemed a near-global ‘lock-down’ policy, the director of the Global History and Culture Centre, Anne Gerritsen, wrote to past and present members of the Centre to inquire about their experiences of the pandemic. Of the 130 members of the extended GHCC community she contacted, a total of 45 responded with descriptions of life in lockdown from Berlin to Tokyo to Caracas. In this first of a small series of blog posts, Professor Gerritsen introduces the short survey she sent out and amalgamates the answers she received to the first question: where is the wider GHCC community spending the weeks and months of this first global pandemic of our lifetimes?

On 21 February 2020, the Global History and Culture Centre hosted a workshop to celebrate the career of Professor Maxine Berg. Focused on the question "Why Does Economic History Matter?", the event concluded with the presentation of a volume of essays written and edited by Maxine's friends and colleagues, titled Reinventing the Economic History of Industrialisation (McGill-Queen's University Press: 2020). In this guest blog, Professor Tirthankar Roy (LSE) responds to the book and the central place of Berg's scholarship in shaping the field of global economic history.

Saul Guerrero turns the received view on silver refining in the Hispanic New World on its head in his remarkable 2017 book, Silver by Fire, Silver by Mercury: A Chemical History of Silver Refining in New Spain and Mexico, 16th to 19th Centuries. The book, which has its origins in the MA programme in Global History at the University of Warwick which Guerrero completed in 2009, is discussed by Michael Bycroft.