GHCC Annual Conference: Histories of Violence
By Eloisa Ocando-Thomas. Published on May 5, 2025.
GHCC Annual conferences
Every year, the Global History and Culture Centre hosts a conference tackling a topic at the forefront of global history. It's the core of our annual program and brings together scholars from all over the UK and the world to discuss novel ideas in the field.
Histories of violence have become a commonplace theme in the study of Global History over the past decade, perhaps especially so in relation to imperialism and colonialisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Violence is about oppression and domination, but it often means far more than warfare, and in this conference we aim to explore the wide variety of registers through which global violence histories can be recognised and examined.
An Exciting Programme
This year, we will have 10 sessions with themes ranging from Punishment and Massacre, to Incarceration and Decolonization. Two keynote speakers will contribute to the discussion. On the 29th, Clare Anderson from the University of Leicester will be presenting on ‘Violence, Punishment and Resistance in Prisons and Penal Colonies in the Nineteenth-Century British Imperial World’. On the 30th, Martin Thomas from Exeter University will discuss ‘Violence and the Global History of Decolonization'.
Our panels in this conference will take up these issues in focussing upon themes in the history of violence from around the globe – massacres, punishment, states of exception, organised crime, incarceration, sexual violence, terrorists, insurgencies and decolonization – each one illustrated by papers that will empirically explore the character and meaning of that violence in its context, while also opening up a comparative discussion about the impact and legacy of violent histories. As always, GHCC members at Warwick will both chair panels and present their own research. The full program is available here.
The conference is supported by Warwick’s The History of Violence NetworkLink opens in a new window, and individual sessions have been sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Research Spotlight-funded “A Global History of Organised Crime" project and by the Imperial War MuseumLink opens in a new window.
Join us to discuss on 29-30 May 2025! Registration is open here.
