News and Events in British Studies
Keep up to date with news, upcoming events, ongoing seminars and series, and recent faculty publications.
Upcoming Events
"Miss Swan's Bad Language: The Uses of Literacy in 1920s England," Christopher Hilliard, Professor of History, University of Sydney, with commentary by Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College, London & Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at Columbia. Wine reception to follow.
Wednesday, April 6, 6:15pm-7:45pm, Heyman Center.
British History University Seminar
The British History Seminar brings together faculty and graduate students with an interest in British history at Columbia and other
institutions in the greater New York area. The seminar meets monthly to discuss work in progress by a member of the group, a paper by a visiting speaker,
or a recent book of interest to the group as a whole. In 2015-6, the seminar is chaired by Christopher Brown and Carl Wennerlind. Feb 4: Nicole Longpre (Columbia University) March 3: Peter Walker (Columbia University) March 31: Brian Cowan (McGill University) April 7: Chris Hilliard (Sydney University):
If you would like to receive
announcements of forthcoming meetings, please contact the seminar's rapporteur,
Alma Igra
All events take place in Fayerweather 411, Columbia University at 5:30 pm unless noted otherwise.
Spring 2016 Seminar Schedule:
"The Rules of the Game: The Control and Decline of Respectable Anti-Immigrationism."
"'His Majesty's Suffering Church': The American Emigre Clergy in Britain"
'What was celebrity in 18th-century Britain?'
"Words That Disturb the State: Hate Speech and the Lessons of Fascism in Postwar Britain."
Recent Faculty Publications
The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire Oxford University Press, 2015
At the end of the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference saw a battle over the future of empire. The victorious allied powers wanted to annex the Ottoman territories and German colonies they had occupied; Woodrow Wilson and a groundswell of anti-imperialist activism stood in their way. France, Belgium, Japan and the British dominions reluctantly agreed to an Anglo-American proposal to hold and administer those allied conquests under "mandate" from the new League of Nations. In the end, fourteen mandated territories were set up across the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific. Against all odds, these disparate and far-flung territories became the site and the vehicle of global transformation.
In this masterful history of the mandates system, Susan Pedersen illuminates the role the League of Nations played in creating the modern world. Tracing the system from its creation in 1920 until its demise in 1939, Pedersen examines its workings from the realm of international diplomacy; the viewpoints of the League's experts and officials; and the arena of local struggles within the territories themselves. Featuring a cast of larger-than-life figures, including Lord Lugard, King Faisal, Chaim Weizmann and Ralph Bunche, the narrative sweeps across the globe-from windswept scrublands along the Orange River to famine-blighted hilltops in Rwanda to Damascus under French bombardment-but always returns to Switzerland and the sometimes vicious battles over ideas of civilization, independence, economic relations, and sovereignty in the Geneva headquarters. As Pedersen shows, although the architects and officials of the mandates system always sought to uphold imperial authority, colonial nationalists, German revisionists, African-American intellectuals and others were able to use the platform Geneva offered to challenge their claims. Amid this cacophony, imperial statesmen began exploring new means - client states, economic concessions - of securing Western hegemony. In the end, the mandate system helped to create the world in which we now live.
A riveting work of global history, The Guardians enables us to look back at the League with new eyes, and in doing so, appreciate how complex, multivalent, and consequential this first great experiment in internationalism really was.
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Reading Style: A Life in Sentences Columbia University Press, 2014 A professor, critic, and insatiable reader, Jenny Davidson investigates the passions that drive us to fall in love with certain sentences over others and the larger implications of our relationship with writing style. At once playful and serious, immersive and analytic, her book shows how style elicits particular kinds of moral judgments and subjective preferences that turn reading into a highly personal and political act. Melding her experiences as reader and critic, Davidson opens new vistas onto works by Jane Austen, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Pynchon; adds richer dimension to critiques of W. G. Sebald, Alan Hollinghurst, Thomas Bernhard, and Karl OveKnausgaard; and allows for a sophisticated appreciation of popular fictions by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Lionel Shriver, George Pelecanos, and Helen DeWitt. She privileges diction, syntax, point of view, and structure over plot and character, identifying the intimate mechanics that draw us in to literature's sensual frameworks and move us to feel, identify, and relate. Davidson concludes with a reading list of her favorite titles so others can share in her literary adventures and get to know better the imprint of her own reading style. |
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At The Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland Oxford University Press, 2012
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Milk: A Local and Global History Yale University Press, 2011
How did an animal product that spoils easily, carries disease, and causes digestive trouble for many of its consumers become a near-universal symbol of modern nutrition? In the first cultural history of milk, historian Deborah Valenze traces the rituals and beliefs that have governed milk production and consumption since its use in the earliest societies.
Covering the long span of human history, Milk reveals how developments in technology, public health, and nutritional science made this once-rare elixir a modern-day staple. The book looks at the religious meanings of milk, along with its association with pastoral life, which made it an object of mystery and suspicion during medieval times and the Renaissance. As early modern societies refined agricultural techniques, cow's milk became crucial to improving diets and economies, launching milk production and consumption into a more modern phase. Yet as business and science transformed the product in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, commercial milk became not only a common and widely available commodity but also a source of uncertainty when used in place of human breast milk for infant feeding. Valenze also examines the dairy culture of the developing world, looking at the example of India, currently the world's largest milk producer.
Ultimately, milk's surprising history teaches us how to think about our relationship to food in the present, as well as in the past. It reveals that although milk is a product of nature, it has always been an artifact of culture.
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Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720 Harvard University Press, 2011
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The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History Harvard University Press, 2010
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Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing Oxford University Press, 2010
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A History of Victorian Literature Wiley-Blackwell, 2009
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Milton and the Victorians Cornell University Press, 2009
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Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century Columbia University Press, 2009
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