Ian Caistor-Parker

I am a third year ESRC funded PhD student supervised by David Anderson and Clare Anderson. My thesis is on the history of the Kenyan Prison Service c.1950-1983. One of the project’s key themes is violence (broadly defined), particularly change and continuities in practices and discourses across the watershed of formal decolonisation. My work intersects with critical strands of criminology, and I am currently working on two projects in this area - violence is a prominent theme in both. Firstly, I am researching colonial penal policy towards British-ruled Africa in the mid-20th century. Secondly, with Stacey Hynd (University of Exeter) and April Jackson (University of Leicester), I am writing about how to develop critical historical approaches to the study of empire.

• "Positionality, Reflexivity and Decolonisation: Writing a History of the Kenyan Prison Service, c.1950-1982", University of Nairobi, History and Archaeology Department, 04 October, 2023

• "The Treatment of Offenders Committee (TOC): policy making, penal thinking and development colonialism, c.1937-1961", University of Oxford, Transnational & Global History Seminar, 'International Law, Humanitarianism, and Colonial Violence', 01 November, 2023

Jonathan Davies

My research focuses on violence in early modern Europe, especially verbal violence and literary representations of violence. I am the editor of:

• A Cultural History of Violence in Renaissance Europe(London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and of
• Aspects of Violence in Renaissance Europe(Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

I contribute to the EUTOPIA Undergraduate Summer School on the History of Violence.

Wanxin Du

I am a current PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick, and I am supervised by Dr Jonathan DaviesLink opens in a new window. I am interested in economic, social, political, and legal history in early modern Italy, especially in the history of the grand duchy of Tuscany in the 16th and 17th centuries. My PhD project 'Violent Crimes and Criminal Justice in the State of Siena, 1590-1650', explores the patterns and changing rates of violent crime such as homicide, assault, and sexual violence in the Stato nuovodi Siena, an essential part of the grand duchy of Tuscany, between the late sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries. It also investigates the daily administration of criminal justice, including judicial and extra judicial conflict resolution as well as punishment, in order to demonstrate the network of power relations between the Medici grand duke, the governor of Siena, the captain of justice, and the local magistrates. Set in the context of seventeenth-century crisis in the grand duchy of Tuscany, it hopes to provide a new insight into the current historical debates on the levels of violence, the socio-economic roots of crime, and the nature of state formation in early modern Italy, challenging traditional views of absolutism.

Mark Glubb

I graduated in Politics and Economics from the University of Exeter and spent much of the next 36 years working and owning businesses in recruitment and catering. Since October 2023 I have been studying for an MA in Global and Comparative History at the University of Warwick. My particular area of interest is the process of nation building in mandated Iraq and Jordan, with particular consideration of the role the military played in this. My dissertation will look at the 1920 Iraq revolt, how it influenced British rule over Iraq and the impact it had on Iraq’s journey to independence.

For my PhD, starting in October 2024, I will firstly be analysing the role of General Sir John Glubb in pacifying the border tribes of Iraq and Jordan, and securing their borders while these countries moved from the liminal space of a League of Nations mandate to independent states. Secondly, I will consider the military transformation in Jordan from a border police force to a fully-functioning military as part of the nation-building process, and the need to fight both in World War 2 and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Sophie Hartles

I am a current PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at Warwick (2020-2024), co-supervised by Dr Jonathan Davies and Prof. Ingrid De Smet. My doctoral project, ‘Laughter and Violence in the Italian Renaissance: The Physical and Emotional Abuse of the beffa’, is funded by Midlands4Cities and investigates the violent culture of the Italian Renaissance through the analysis of the beffa. This was a cruel practical joke that was enjoyed and laughed at by many contemporaries while also physically and emotionally abusive. My interest in the beffa originated from my master’s dissertation at Manchester, ‘Cruel Jokes, Friendship and Masculinity: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Italian Courts’, which examined what the beffa could reveal about elite male sociability, masculine values, and the sinister nature of the Italian courts. This current project provides the opportunity to examine the beffa more substantively, particularly its relation to violence and to incorporate other variables such as women and men of lower classes. I am interested in Bologna and Venice as case studies and in methods from cultural history, microhistory, and the history of emotions. I will be particularly looking at instances of the beffa in judicial records, works of literature, and cheap print to gain a broader understanding of how laughter and violence intertwined in this culture and what this can reveal about their values, practices, and interpersonal interactions.

Talks:

• 'Laughter and violence: The cruel humour of the beffa in sixteenth-century Venetian literature', The Venetian Seminar, St Edmund's Hall, University of Oxford (14 May 2022)
• 'Laughter and violence: The brutal mockery of prostitutes in sixteenth century Italy', Renaissance Society of America conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico (9-11 March 2023)
• 'Pranks, mockery, and violence between workers: The glassmaking furnace in sixteenth-century Murano', Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Conference:Worlds of Conflict: Violence in the Early Modern Period, Victoria College, University of Toronto (21-23 September 2023)
• 'Laughter, Mockery, and Violence in the Comic Plays and Performances of Renaissance Italy', part of the 2-panel series onEmotions, Senses, and Space: Experiencing Performances in the Renaissance City, co-organised by myself and Eva van Kemenade, Renaissance Society of America conference, Chicago (21-23 March 2024)

Euan Higgins

I am a current PGT student with an interest in the history of empire with a focus on the interactions and relationship between different empires. My previous essays and research have explored various regions, including the Middle East, North Africa, and Haiti. The current research I am undertaking for my MA Dissertation explores the German genocide of the Herero people in Namibia, formerly the colony of German South West Africa. The dissertation will explore how British colonial agents from the bordering territories of the Cape Colony and Bechuanaland Protectorate thought about the German actions. It will examine how these perceptions intersected with contemporary imperial tensions and factored into wider comparative perceptions of British and German colonialism - particularly colonial violence and, more broadly, the treatment of the colonised population.

Rose Miyonga

I’m a PhD candidate at Warwick, working on memories of the Mau Mau War in post-independence. Within this research, my primary interest lies in better understanding how survivors of the Mau Mau War have made sense of and healed from violent pasts, especially in the context of wider political forgetting. This includes exploring the ways that people have asserted their own agency as curators and narrators of their lived experiences of violent histories, and the ways that these traumas reverberated into the present. In a wider sense, I am interested in how communities create heritage around mass violence and in the role of heritage- and memory-work in collective healing.

Publications:

• ‘We Kept Them to Remember: Gender, personal archives and the emotional history of the Mau Mau war’,History Workshop Journal, September 2023

• ‘Colonial Afterlives: Land and the Emotional History of the Mau Mau War’,The Funambulist, 40, March 2022

Talk:

• ‘Mau Mau as History of Emotions’,University of Nairobi History and Archaeology Departmental Seminar, March 2023

Podcasts:

• History Workshop Journal
• A Palace for the People
• Conflict of Interest

David Lambert

My research is concerned with empire, race, warfare and slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on the Caribbean and its place in the wider world. Developing from my work on the West India Regiments (the AHRC-funded 'Africa's Sons Under Arms', 2014-19), I am now working on a new project on the representation and experience of warfare in the Revolutionary Caribbean. The British fought not only against Republicanism but a multi-ethnic alliance of indigenous, enslaved, and free people inhabiting what Tessa Murphy (2022) terms the ‘creole archipelago’. Yet, Britain’s counter-revolutionary forces were also multi-ethnic in character, including other European soldiers and mercenaries of uncertain loyalty, as well as rangers and regulars of African descent. Drawing on the history of emotions and environmental history to develop a postcolonial approach to military history, this research is concerned with how the British struggled not merely to overcome their enemies, but even to comprehend the complex, revolutionary nature of the conflict. Using first-hand accounts, maps and material culture, it thus examines how British soldiers tried to make sense of, and survive in, the creole archipelago. In addition to this research, I serve as a consultant on the Royal Armouries' 'Inclusive Narratives' project and an advisor on 'The Revolutionary Wars in the Caribbean at St Paul's Cathedral' trail, working with the community organisation, SV2G (St Vincent and the 2nd Generation). I am also interested in the representation and simulation of warfare and histories of violence through boardgames like GMT's The British Way (2023) and other COIN-focused titles.

Publications:

• Soldiers of Uncertain Rank: The West India Regiments in British Imperial Culture (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
• ‘“[A] mere cloak for their proud contempt and antipathy towards the African race": Imagining Britain’s West India Regiments in the Caribbean, 1795-1838’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 46: 4 (2018), pp 627-65
• Special issue on 'Africa's Sons Under Arms', Slavery and Abolition 39: 3 (2018), co-edited with Tim Lockley

Talks:

• Spoke to SV2G on 'The Revolutionary Wars in the Caribbean', St Paul's Cathedral, London, 14 January 2024
• 'Campaigning and Counter-Insurgency in the Creole Archipelago', Inter-Island Connections in the Lesser Antilles, 1650-1850 conference, University of Copenhagen, 25-26 April 2024
• 'Campaigning and Counter-Insurgency in the Creole Archipelago', Society for Caribbean Studies annual conference (online), 3-6 July 2024

Christoph Mick

My last book discussed the impact of war on the now Ukrainian city of Lviv (Lwòw, Lvov, Lemberg) in the first half of the twentieth century. I analysed how violence in and after wars affected the relationship between Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in the city. Another project deals with the Tombs of the “Unknown Soldier“ which were created after World War I in the victorious countries. After 1945 such Tombs of the Unknown Soldier became a global phenomenon and are attempts of societies to give meaning to death in war.

Publications:

• Lemberg - Lwów - L'viv, 1914 - 1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2015). Revised English version of the book Kriegserfahrungen in einer multiethnischen Stadt. Lemberg 1914-1947
• ‘Legality, ethnicity, and violence in Austrian Galicia, 1890-1920’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, vol. 26, 2019, issue 5: Dossier: Questioning the Wilsonian moment: the role of ethnicity and nationalism in the dissolution of European empires from the Belle Èpoque through the First World War, ed. by Maarten van Ginderachter and H.J. Storm, pp. 757-782.
• 'Everyday Life in War Time Europe', in Nicholas Doumanis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 497-51

Benjamin Smith

I am a historian of modern Latin America. I am particularly interested in Cold War state violence in Mexico as well as the relationship between the state and organized crime.

Publications:

• The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (Penguin, 2021)
• (w/ Alex Alvina), “The Mexican Dirty War: A Reassessment”, in Bulletin of Latin America (accepted)
• (w/ Tom Long) “Arbiters of impunity, agents of coercion: State, crime and violence in Mexico, 1920-2000”, in Past and Present (accepted)

Lectures:

• “Monte de Chila 1970: Mexico’s Forgotten Massacre”, Latin American Centre, University of Oxford, 2024
• “The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade”, Warwick Words History Festival, 2023

Siddhant Joshi

N/A

Imogen Knox

I am primarily interested in self-violence in the early modern period. I am currently finishing up my PhD which explores self-destructive thoughts and actions in the context of supernatural affliction in early modern Britain. More broadly, my work reflects on the connections between self-violence, emotion, and gender.

Publications:

• 'Pin-swallowing and self-destruction in early modern British and Irish supernatural narratives', Cultural & Social History 20:4 (2023)
• 'Early modern Britain was terrified of women trying to swallow pins', The Conversation (2024)

Lectures:

• 'Suicide in the History of Emotions', NACHE Colloquium, 22nd February 2024
• 'Self-destructive desires and the supernatural in early modern Britain', Early Modern Colloquium, TU Dresden, 14th December 2023
• 'Love suicide in early modern England', Disappearances: Representations of Suicide in Literature, Culture, and History, International Symposium, 10th July 2023
• 'Attempted Suicide in Early Modern Britain', Renaissance Society of America Conference, Dublin, 30th March 2022

Beat Kümin

I am Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick. I have worked on drink-related violence in early modern public houses and, more generally, on social interactions in local communities. These include conflicts about personal honour as well as the commemoration of violent events such as (civil) wars. A current research projectLink opens in a new window, supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, centres on the chronicles deposited in golden spheres on top of towers in the German lands since the late Middle Ages. He's a co-founder / -organizer of the 'History of Violence' Summer School inaugurated at TU Dresden in 2023.

Publications:

• 'The Devil's Altar? Crime and the early modern public house'Link opens in a new window, in: History Compass 2 (1/2005)
• ‘Friede, Gewalt und öffentliche Räume: Grenzziehungen im alteuropäischen Wirtshaus [Peace, Violence and Public Space: Drawing Boundaries in the Early Modern Public House’], in: Claudia Ulbrich, Claudia Jarzebowski and Michaela Hohkamp (eds),Gewalt in der Frühen Neuzeit: Beiträge zur 5. Tagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Frühe Neuzeit im VHD, Historische Forschungen Bd. 81 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005), 130-9
• 'Nachrichten für die Nachwelt. Turmkugelarchive in der Erinnerungskultur des deutschsprachigen EuropaLink opens in a new window [Messages for Posterity: Tower Capsule Archives in the Memory Culture of German-Speaking Europe], in:Historische Zeitschrift 312 (3/2021), 614-648

Talks:

• ‘Drink-Related Violence’, at theHistory of Violence Summer School (TU Dresden/Germany, 3 July 2023)
• ‘Peasant Self-Representations in the Holy Roman Empire’, atThe Image of the Peasantry conference (Lublin/Poland, 16 April 2024)

Tristan Powell

I am a postgraduate studying modern history here at the University of Warwick. My main area of interest is European colonial history which ties in neatly with the history of violence programme. My dissertation topic is comparing counterinsurgency tactics employed by the British in Malaya and Kenya during the fifties. Specifically I am aiming to analyze why the level of violence in Kenya greatly outstripped that in Malaya. More generally, my main area of knowledge concerns post-war anti-colonial struggles; I have written essays on topics such as the Mau-Mau rebellion, the Algerian war of independence, the EOKA insurgency in Cyprus and the Sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. My knowlege expands beyond that of the 20th century though and I have also worked on areas such as the Atlantic slave trade, the Indian Rebellion, and the Opium Wars. The History of Violence Network suits my research interests perfectly as I am almost exclusively interested in the violent impacts of European colonial domination. I am very much looking forward to including my modernist voice in the discussions and to hopefully learn a thing or two from my colleagues and professors.

Penny Roberts

My longstanding interest in the history of violence is primarily focused on the French religious wars (c.1560-1600) and to this period in European history more generally. The sixteenth century was dominated by the confessional conflicts that emerged from the Protestant Reformation and France saw many of its most bloody episodes, notably the Saint Bartholomew’s massacres of 1572, on which I have regularly published and been asked to present. Understanding the ritualised nature of the violence that emerged from the wars has long preoccupied historians and led to a collection I coedited, Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France (OUP; Past and Present supplements no.7, 2012). I have written about popular revolt, sexual violence and intercommunal violence as well as massacres and judicial violence, in both English and French, and continue to work on confessional conflict and associated clandestine activities which resulted in arrests, assaults and even executions.

Publications:

• A coedited special issue (to which I also contributed an essay): 'Returning to the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, 1572-2022',French History, 36-4 (2022), 393-488
• ‘Violence by Royal Command: a Judicial ‘Moment’ 1574-1575’,French History, 33 (2019), 199-217 [special issue on ‘Religion and Violence’]
• ‘French Historians and Collective Violence’,History and Theory, 56, no. 4 (Dec. 2017), 60-75 [special issue 'Theorizing Histories of Violence']

Talks:

• To a roundtable on the Saint Bartholomew’s massacres of 1572 at the University of Kent, Canterbury (22 March 2024)
• On the assassination of the Prince of Condé in 1569, to the Society for the Study of French History conference at the University of Manchester, 1-2 July 2024