Conference: History after Hobsbawm

 

Starts:Apr 29, 2014 05:00 PM Finishes:May 01, 2014 06:00 PM Location: Senate House, London

A conference on the current trajectories of history

A major international conference, with plenary speakers and large parallel sessions, exploring where the study of history is currently heading. The conference draws inspiration from the capacious legacy of the late Eric Hobsbawm, but is not a memorial event. We aim, rather, to bring together discussion about what we are currently doing as socially-committed historians, where we are headed, and what it means to be an historian in the twenty-first century.

To register, visit https://www2.bbk.ac.uk/history/hobsbawm.

Please note that the conference fee includes refreshments, lunches, and a drinks reception, but does NOT include accommodation which you will need to arrange separately.

Plenary Session Speakers

Mark Mazower (Columbia)
Gareth Stedman Jones (Queen Mary)
Catherine Hall (UCL)
Chris Wickham (Oxford)
Maxine Berg (Warwick)
Rana Mitter (Oxford)
Geoff Eley (Michigan)

Panels

Capitalism(s)

Emma Rothschild (Harvard)
Prasannan Parthasarathi (Boston)
Donald Sassoon (Queen Mary)
Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck)

Hobsbawm and the Annales

Peter Burke (Cambridge)
Joanna Innes (Oxford)
Renaud Morieux (Cambridge)
Filippo de Vivo (Birkbeck)

The Crisis of the 17th Century
Sanjay Subrahmanyam (UCLA)
Geoffrey Parker (Ohio State)
John Elliott (Oxford)
Mike Braddick (Sheffield)

History of political conflict

Lucy Riall (EUI/Birkbeck)
François Jarrige (Bourgogne)
Steve Smith (Exeter)
Illaria Favretto (Kingston)

Britain, Empire, Europe
Antoinette Burton (Illinois)
Maya Jasanoff (Harvard)
Jan Rüger (Birkbeck)

What happened to class?

John Tosh (Roehampton)
Sonya Rose (Michigan/Birkbeck)
Marjorie Levine-Clark (Colorado)
Sean Brady (Birkbeck)

Global environmental history
Harriet Ritvo (MIT)
Paul Warde (UEA)
Christof Mauch (Munich)
Sunil Amrith (Birkbeck)

Latin America

Alan Knight (Oxford)
Paulo Drinot (UCL)
Joan Martinez Alier (ICTA, Barcelona)

Marxist and post-Marxist social history

Andy Wood (Durham)
Jane Whittle (Exeter)
Lucy Robinson (Sussex)

Nationalisms

Stefan Berger (Bochum)
Bill Schwarz (Queen Mary)
John Breuilly (LSE)

(Reprinted from Birkbeck University)http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/about-us/events/history-after-hobsbawm

IWCE event in London 21 September

INDEPENDENT WORKING CLASS EDUCATION                         

Saturday 21st September 2013                   

10.30 – 3.30                                                                                 

Brunswick Centre (Foundling Court) , London                     

Across t’road from Russell Square tube                         

Community Room 10,                                           

Press Bell on the door                                        

We are looking forward to seeing you this Saturday. We’ll shape up an IWCE Manifesto in the morning and learn about William Cuffay, black Chartist leader from Martin Hoyles and from Joyce Caanan “The war on learning, teaching and thinking: critical pedagogy for radically different future” in the afternoon. Lots of lively discussion and participation.

Lunch at 12.30. Cost £6.00. Pay on the day.

Email iwceducation@yahoo.co.uk to confirm your place.

This event is supported by Labour Heritage.

IWCE Network tries to * develop a diverse range of education materials and approaches for trade union and other working class and progressive movement groups * respect the role of working class in making history, and in making future .

Upcoming

IWCE in Swansea, 12^th October.

Presentations will include Richard Lewis on The Plebs League and the WEA in South Wales, Hywel Francis on South Wales Miners’ Library and the IWCE tradition,  Rob Turnbull on Noah Ablett: an agitator to the end and Dave Chapple on Mark Starr and a Panel discussion with South Wales Miners' Library and Llafur: Welsh People's History Society

A veteran Trotskyist remembers: interviews with Harry Wicks

Harry Wicks was born in Battersea on 16 August 1905 and started work there on the railways in 1919. In 1926, after suffering victimisation for his active participation in the General Strike, he was elected to the executive of the Young Communist League (YCL). In the following year he was selected, through the YCL, to study in Moscow at the International Lenin School for party activists. This course included visits to other parts of the Soviet Union as well.

After his return to Britain in 1930, he became involved with the British Section of the Left Opposition (supporters of Leon Trotsky against the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union) and was consequently expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1932. In November and December of that year, he was sent as the delegate of the British Section to meet Trotsky in Copenhagen.

He continued to be involved with the Trotskyist movement for the rest of his life, becoming, at various points, a member of the Communist League, the Marxist League, the Labour Party (between 1934-9), the Socialist Anti-War Front, the Independent Labour Party, and the International Socialists. He died on 26 March 1989.

The Modern Records Centre at Warwick University has now put online short extracts from a substantial series of recorded interviews given by Harry Wicks between 1976 and 1980 to Professor Logie Barrow, the editor of Wicks’s autobiography, published in 1992 by Socialist Platform Ltd as Keeping my head – the memoirs of a British Bolshevik .The full recordings, which were originally made on twenty-eight tape cassettes, are with Wicks's papers held at the Centre.

LSHG Autumn Term seminars

London Socialist Historians Group Seminars Autumn 2013

__________________________________________________________________________________

Venue: Bloomsbury Room G35, Ground floor, Senate House unless otherwise stated

Time: Monday, 5.30pm, unless otherwise mentioned in the programme, below.

 

7 October

Shane C. Nagle (Royal Holloway)

Socialist intellectuals and National(ist) Historiography: The Cases of James Connolly and Franz Mehring

Venue: Room STB5, Stewart House, Basement

 

21 October

Book launch with Gareth Edwards (Portsmouth), Keith Flett, Hazel Potter, David Renton

Capitalism and Sport- some histories

Venue: Bloomsbury Room G35, Ground floor, Senate House

 

4 November

John Issit (York)

Agents of Reason, Jeremiah Joyce & Tom Paine in the 1790s

Venue: Room STB2, Basement, Stewart House

 

18 November

Ian Birchall

UKIP's Forbears? Poujade and the French left

Venue: Bloomsbury Room G35, Ground floor, Senate House

 

30 November

Roundtable discussion with Logie Barrow (Bremen), Pete Dwyer (Ruskin), respondent, Keith Flett

Remake, Remodel : the Making of the English Working Class at 50

Please note: this session takes place from 12:00-17:00 on a Saturday, in Room 246, 2nd floor, Senate House

 

16 December

Vaughan Melzer

Commitment, Stories from the Left. A Photographic project

Venue: Room G21A, ground floor, Senate House

 

For more details contact Keith Flett -  keith1917@btinternet.com

Restoring Peter Blackman

Restoring Peter Blackman
Book Launch of Footprints by Peter Blackman on 17 October in London. The editor of this volume, Chris Searle, and Colin Prescod will speak about the poetry and politics of Peter Blackman (1909-1993) at the official launch at the Institute of Race Relations (London)
For more information: events@irr.org.uk
http://www.irr.org.uk/news/restoring-peter-blackman/

CfP: Remake / Remodel: The Making of the English Working Class at 50

Remake/Remodel: The Making of the English Working Class at 50 Call for papers. Roundtable discussion from midday on Saturday November 30th Institute of Historical Research WC1 It is 50 years since the publication of EP Thompson’s landmark volume The Making of the English Working Class. There have been a number of events already during 2013 to mark the anniversary and speakers have raised important questions such as what it means to be a Thompsonian today and how the book itself might be rescued from the enormous condescension of posterity. This roundtable, which is being held as close as possible to the book’s publication in late autumn 1963, seeks to take a research focused look at Thompson’s work. It will hope to look at some of the gaps and absences in the book, as well as reviewing topics that Thompson raised such at the moral economy and his remark at the end of the preface to the book that causes lost in nineteenth century England might yet be won elsewhere where research agendas are still very much active. Contributions to the discussion are welcome. A summary of a proposed contribution should be sent to Dr Keith Flett keith.flett@btinternet.com by the end of September 2013

Eric Hobsbawm: Historian, Teacher and Critic

Eric Hobsbawm: Historian, Teacher and Critic Socialist History Society Public Meeting; all welcome This special seminar from the Socialist History Society will seek to assess the late Eric Hobsbawm’s enduring contribution to the study of history. Panel Discussion Willie Thompson, formerly Professor of Contemporary History at Glasgow Caledonian University; Malcolm Chase, Professor of Social History, University of Leeds; David Parker, Emeritus Professor, University of Leeds. Tuesday 1st October 2013, 7.00 pm. At Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 4QH. Near Liverpool Street station/underground. Space is limited -please book early to ensure your place To book, contact the Bishopsgate Institute on 020 7392 9200 or online at For further information: http://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/Events