Dr Jack Bowman's 'The Early Political Thought and Publishing Career of V. K. Krishna Menon, 1928-1938' has recently been selected as one of two articles to be 'Highly Commended' in the Historical Journal's inaugural Early Careers Researcher Article Prize. Their article follows Indian Independence activist V. K. Krishna Menon, later India's defence minister and United Nations delegate, through his formative years in Britain as an editor. A book history of anti-colonial print, the article ties together histories of political thought, interwar internationalism, and global anti-colonial networks, to argue that twentieth-century anti-colonialism can be fruitfully engaged via the lens of book history. Their article is available open access and can be read hereLink opens in a new window 

We are pleased to announce that we are now opening our call for papers for our next issue, 10.2, to be published in Fall 2025. The deadline for submissions is January 31st, 2025.

We encourage the submission of research articles, methodological and public history essays giving examples of concrete research informed by global historical perspectives or reflecting relevant methodological considerations. We also welcome the submission of recent book, conference or museum reviews. Please note that the reviewed books have to be published in 2023 or later.

More...

This workshopLink opens in a new window focuses on significant theoretical and methodological developments in the interdisciplinary field of travel studies and reflects on the directions that it might take next. We will consider the legacies of the New Historicist and postcolonial approaches which shaped the study of travel in the 1980s and 1990s before turning to the insights and provocations offered by more recent scholarship rooted in feminist, queer, Black, migration, and decolonial studies. With these various theories and methods in mind, we will examine items drawn from the Newberry Library’s extensive collection of materials on travel, including maps. In doing so, we will discuss the questions these materials raise about issues at the heart of travel studies, such as the relationship of knowledge and power, different forms of positionality and perspective, the challenges of translation and comparison, and the definition of “travel” itself.

Led by Natalya Din-Kariuki (University of Warwick). May 16, 2025, 9:30am–4:30pm, at the Newberry. The application deadline is November 15, 2024.

A fully-funded PhD studentship, to begin in September 2025, is available at the University of Warwick’s Department of History, in collaboration with the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), through the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.

The Hakluyt Society has published hundreds of travel accounts mostly of European colonial ‘discovery’. Yet despite its celebration of Elizabethan empire-builders, support for Victorian explorers and connections with the Royal Geographical Society and India Office, it has never been studied in relation to British imperial culture and its public legacies, until now.

Many congratulations to Sara Akhavan-Malayeri, the Maxine Berg Prize winner of 2024! Her dissertation entitles "The Fight over the Five ‘Soviet-born Wives of British Subjects’: the Impact of Anglo-Soviet Marriages in Early Cold War Britain”.