CONFERENCE SPEAKERS
Adelaide Machado is an integrated researcher at CHAM (Portuguese Centre for Global History) at Nova University of Lisbon. She holds a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Ideas from Nova University of Lisbon. She has published several articles and book chapters on contemporary history and is the author of a monograph on the history of European heritage and the Congress of Vienna (1815). She works on a post-doctoral project about democracy, journals and intellectual movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Adeline Darrigol (Ph.D., University of Tours, France) is Teacher and Researcher at University of Maine (Laboratory 3L.AM, France). Her current research focus on Spanish and Portuguese colonization in Equatorial Guinea, slavery and creolization, memories and identities.
Adolfo Polo y La Borda (University of Maryland, College Park) is a PhD Student in History. His dissertation, “Cosmopolitanism, Mobility and Royal Officials in the Making of the Spanish Empire,” studies the political culture of the global Spanish empire during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Alexander Kais holds a BA and MA from National Taiwan University in Taipei and is now a PhD candidate at UIUC. In my research I am focusing on the domestic impact of the late Qing encounter with the West and how these internal factors themselves contributed to the global modern. Additionally, I have done research on Chinese nationalism and its relation to provincial identity and religion.
Ana Margarida Sousa Santos has a DPhil in Social Anthropology from Oxford. Her doctoral work focuses on history and the memory of violence in northern Mozambique, and her current research continues to develop her interest in memory and trauma, investigating the changes in understanding of PTSD among Portuguese veterans, their families and clinical staff and the way trauma has been medicalised in Portugal. She has taught at Oxford, SOAS and Durham and held a Leach-RAI fellowship at Brunel.
Branwen Gruffydd Jones is a Reader in International Relations in the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University. Her teaching and research focus on Africa in international relations. Her current project examines the political thought and practice of the liberation movements of Portugal’s African colonies in the broader continental and global context of decolonisation.
Camille Jacob is a PhD candidate at the University of Portsmouth and a former languages teacher. Her research interests include contemporary Algeria, as well as the production of discourses around history, national identity and languages, especially in the context of North Africa. Her current work examines the place of English in Algeria, funded by the AHRC in collaboration with the British Council in Algiers.
Candace Clare Sobers is an Assistant Professor in the Global and International Studies Program in the Kroeger College of Public Affairs at Carleton University, Canada. An historian of international history and modern international relations, her work focuses on twentieth century decolonization, movements of national liberation, and the global reach of +Third World revolutionary internationalism, with a specific focus on African independence movements and United States (U.S.) foreign policy. Link to full bio: http://carleton.ca/bgins/candace-clare-sobers-assistant-professor/
Catarina Laranjeiro is a PhD candidate at Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra. Her thesis focuses on modes of silencing and safeguarding the memory of the liberation / colonial war in Guinea-Bissau. She holds a degree in Social Psychology from the University of Lisbon, a post-graduation course in Digital Visual Culture by ISCTE-IUL, and a master of Visual Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin. She directed the film PABIA DI AOS (2013).
Cátia Miriam Costa is a post-doc researcher in Centre for International Studies (ISCTE-IUL), supported by FCT. Her research is focused in an international communication approach regarding colonial spaces (Angola and Macau - 1880-1930), imperial relations and the circulation of intellectuals and political ideas such as autonomy, resistance, anti-colonialism an independence.
Christine Gilmore (MA Oxon, MA York, MA Manchester) is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, UK where she is researching the long-term legacy of the Aswan High Dam on the Nubian community in Egypt.
Claire Edington received her PhD in the History and Ethics of Public Health from Columbia University in 2013 and she is now an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California-San Diego. Her research interests include the history of medicine and public health, French colonial history, histories of drug policy and addiction and Southeast Asian Studies. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the social history of psychiatry and mental illness in French colonial Vietnam. Faculty bio link: https://history.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/edington.html
Cláudia Castelo holds a PhD in Social Sciences (Universidade de Lisboa) is currently a Research Fellow at Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal. Her research interests include the history of the Portuguese colonial empire (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), the history of colonial ideas and the history of settler colonialism in Angola and Mozambique. She is currently studying the connections of field sciences and policymaking in the Portuguese colonies.
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Emilio Distretti holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Politics of Representation from the School of Art and Design, University of Portsmouth. His research interests are multidisciplinary and place a strong emphasis on new materialism, comparative colonial histories, geography and theories of space. Emilio's current research explores representations and transformations of deserts as colonial spaces. His work investigates two desert-colonisations and their cultural and historical convergences around the dream to "make the desert bloom": Fascist Italy colonisation of the northern Sahara in Libya and the Zionist colonisation of the Negev. He is the Head of the Urban Studies and Spatial Practices program at Bard College, Al Quds University in Abu Dis where he teaches since the Summer 2015 and Research Fellow at the Kenyon Institute - (Council for British Research in the Levant), East Jerusalem.
Federica Morelli is associate professor in History of Americas at the University of Turin. Her research interests centre on the political and social history of late colonial and early independent Latin America and on Atlantic History. Among her publications: Territorio o Nación. Reforma y disolución del espacio imperial in Ecuador, 1765-1830 (2005), Il Mondo Atlantico. Una storia senza confini (2013), L'indipendenza dell'America spagnola (2015).
Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal is research associate and lecturer for the History of Eastern Europe at Heidelberg University. In her current research she focuses on transnational facets as well as the anti-imperial character of Russian terrorism in the long 19th century. She received her Dr. phil. in 2009 for a dissertation on the print media and the aspect of reeducation in Soviet forced labor camps.
Hedi Viterbo is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at SOAS, University of London, specialising in state violence, childhood, and sexuality. He completed his PhD in law at the London School of Economics, his LLM at Tel Aviv University, and was also a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School and a visiting researcher at Columbia University. https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff86489.php
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Helen McKee recently completed her doctorate at Newcastle University which was titled ““Negotiating Freedom in the Circum-Caribbean World: The Jamaican Maroons and Creek Nation Compared.” McKee is now undertaking a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, Germany. Her new project will investigate the history of land ownership in post-emancipation Jamaica. http://www.suits.su.se/about-us/people/faculty/dr-isa-blumi-1.260818
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Ilaria Berti recently initiated her investigation as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, Spain. Her research project, Imperial Recipes, aims to compare the British and the Spanish Empires in the nineteenth century Caribbean focusing on the discourse on food. Her interests deal on how ideas and ideologies on food may be used as a means to enforce but also to undermine imperial power, on agency of subalterns and, more generally, on cultural history of food in the colonies.
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Inês Galvão is a PhD candidate on Anthropology at Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, with an ongoing ethnographical and historical study on kinship and gender politics in rural Guinea-Bissau.
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Isa Blumi (Stockholm University) researches societies in the throes of social, economic, and political transformation. Author of 5 monographs, his latest work covers the late Ottoman period and successor regimes, arguing that these events are part of process that interlinks the Balkans, the Middle East, and the larger Islamic world.
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Isadora de Ataíde Fonseca is an independent researcher and journalist. She holds a PhD in Sociology of Culture (Lisbon University, 2014) with a thesis on press and empire throughout Portuguese colonialism in Africa. Press, journalism and political regimes in the context of colonialism in 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus in Lusophone countries, are her main areas of interest.
Jacob Smith (Queen Mary, University of London) is a PhD student in history. His research focuses on the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny 1857, concepts of revenge in an imperial setting, and the pursuit of colonial resistance leaders.
Jake Christopher Richards is a PhD student in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is working on liberated Africans and self-emancipated Africans in the Cape Town, Freetown, and Salvador in the period 1840-1870. He is particularly interested in the connections between the public sphere, the space of the port city, and the history of migration.
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José Pedro Monteiro is currently finishing (first semester of 2016) his PhD dissertation on the relationship between the International Labour Organization and the Portuguese empire at the Institute of Social Sciences in Lisbon. His main interests are related with the history of empires and colonialism and especially with its international dimensions and connections. He has published in several books and journals, both in English and Portuguese, and he recently co-edited the book Os Passados do Presente: Internacionalismo, Imperialismo e a Construção do Mundo Contemporâneo (Almedina, 2015).
Kent Mathewson is Professor of Geography & Anthropology at Louisiana State University. His teaching and research areas are: history of geography, cultural & historical geography, and Latin America. He is author/editor of a number of books, including: Irrigation Horticulture in Highland Guatemala (1984); Concepts in Human Geography (1996); Dangerous Harvest (2004); Carl Sauer on Culture & Landscape (2009).
Kim A. Wagner is Senior Lecturer in British Imperial History at History Queen Mary, University of London & Marie Curie Global Fellow at George Washington University, Washington DC, 2015-17. His publications include The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford, 2010); ‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past& Present (2013); and ‘‘Calculated to Strike Terror’: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past & Present (forthcoming). https://qmul.academia.edu/KimAWagner
Lipika Kamra is a DPhil candidate at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Her research interests crisscross political anthropology, gender studies, development studies, and South Asian history and politics. Her doctoral research examines the relationship between statemaking, development, and counterinsurgency in rural eastern India. Through a combination of ethnographic and historical methods, she studies how counterinsurgency recurs as a primary driver of colonial and postcolonial statemaking in regions associated today with the Maoist insurgency.
Mads Bomholt Nielsen is a PhD Student at King’s College London and formerly External Lecturer at the University of Copenhagen. His research is focused especially British views on Anglo-German colonial rule in southern Africa before and after World War I.
Manjeet Baruah is Assistant Professor, North East India Studies Programme, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His areas of interest include cultural history, study of space and text, and study of frontiers and borderlands. His previous publications include Frontier Cultures: A Social History of Assamese Literature (Routledge, 2012).
Marie Rodet is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). Her principal research interests lie in the field of migration history, gender studies and the history of slavery in West Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries. She has written a number of articles on post-slavery in Mali, including “Listening to the History of Those Who Don’t Forget” published in History in Africa (2013). She is currently working on her second monograph on slave resistance in Kayes, Mali.
Marta Macedo is a postdoctoral fellow at CIUHCT, University of Lisbon. Her current work deals with the historical connections between cocoa, plantation technologies and imperial regimes.
Matthew Nielsen is a fourth-year doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA (U.S.A.). He received a M.S. in Spanish at the University of Wyoming (U.S.A) and an M.A. in History at Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation analyzes the social and environmental forces in the Lower Orinoco River Basin in the eighteenth century. He is especially interested in ethnohistory, the study of borderlands, and environmental history.
Nadine Siegert holds a PhD in Art Studies from the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies for her dissertation (Re)mapping Luanda. Utopie und Nostalgie in der ästhetischen Praxis. She is deputy director of Iwalewahaus, Associated Project Leader of the Project Revolution 3.0 – Iconographies of Utopia in Africa and its diaspora at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies and project leader of the research project African Art History and the Formation of a Modernist Aesthetics. Since 2009, she curated a number of exhibitions, focusing on lusophone Africa and East Africa. http://www.iwalewahaus.uni-bayreuth.de/de/team/Leitung/Siegert/CV-12_2015.pdf​
Naveen Kanalu is Phd. student in South Asian History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a Teaching and Research fellow (ATER) at the Université de Strasbourg. His current research project is a study of the codification of legal systems in the Mughal Empire and their influence on politics and the articulation of sovereignty during the Aurangzeb Period. His other research interests include the Early Modern Persianate and Kannada Literary Culture and the Critical Theory of the early Frankfurt School.
Orna Alyagon Darr is the Dean of Students and a senior lecturer in the law school of Carmel Academic Center in Haifa, and the author of "Marks of an Absolute Witch: Evidentiary Dilemmas in Early Modern England". Her areas of research include criminal law, criminal procedure and evidence, and law in historical, cultural and social context. Her current research is about the proof of sexual offenses in Mandate Palestine.
Paolo Israel is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of the Western Cape. Since 2002 he carries out research in northern Mozambique on themes connected with dance, music, magic and history. His book, In Step with the Times: Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique, charts the historicity of Makonde masquerades throughout the twentieth century. He has also written on traditional storytelling, orality, liberation songs, contemporary art, and witchcraft. He lives at works in Cape Town.
Parashar Kulkarni is an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (Politics) at Yale-NUS College. He works at the intersection of religion, colonialism, and political economy. He won the British Academy Brian Barry Prize in Political Science (2015) for his research on religion, property rights and violence against women in colonial India. He received his PhD from New York University.
Patricia Hayes teaches and researches in African history, gender and visuality. Her PhD is from Cambridge University. She is based at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and was recently appointed as National Research Foundation (NRF) South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) Chair in Visual History & Theory.
Ralph Wilde is a member of the Faculty of Laws at University College London, and the Executive Board of the European Society of International Law. He writes on international law and politics, adopting cross-disciplinary methodologies. His previous work focused on the concept of trusteeship over people in international law and public policy, addressing colonialism, belligerent occupation and international territorial administration. His current, ERC-funded project, ‘human rights beyond borders’, is on the extraterritorial application of human rights law. http://www.laws.ucl.ac.uk/people/ralph-wilde/
Rebecca Granato is Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean at al Quds Bard College for the Arts and Sciences. Her research looks at Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails in the 1970s and 1980s, with a particular focus on the evolution of a prisoner movement amongst members of the Fatah faction.
Sameetah Agha is Associate Professor of History at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Her teaching and research areas include: Modern World History, Geographies of Power and Resistance, Imperialism and Colonialism and Military History with an emphasis on Central and South Asia and Afghanistan. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the Pukhtun Revolt of 1897 in the North-West Frontier of British India.
Sandra Ataíde Lobo worked extensively on Goan and Portuguese cultural and political history. Focused, since the PhD, in Modern Goan cultural, political and intellectual history (19th-20th centuries), she published several related papers. She is now working in her post-doc project, “The home and the world: the Goan intellectual diaspora”, which addresses the political-cultural intervention of Goan Catholic intellectuals in different academic centres, during the first decades of the 20th Century. As a member of the Free Seminary of History of Ideas, she participates in a research project regarding 20th Century Portuguese magazines. She is also a founding member of the International Group for Studies of Colonial Periodical Press of the Portuguese Empire.
Sarah Ghabrial is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at Columbia University. Her current book project is entitled "Le Fiqh Francisé? Colonial Law and the Muslim Family in Algeria, 1870-1930."
Sarath Pillai is a third year PhD Student in History at the University of Chicago, USA.
Sharri Plonski earned her PhD from the Department of Development Studies, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where she is currently a Senior Teaching Fellow and Postdoctoral Research Associate. Her research anchors the study of critical geography, border spaces, subaltern struggle and the materiality of settler-colonialism/de-colonisation, within the social and political terrains of Israel/Palestine. Her first book, based on her PhD thesis, will be published in late 2016 as part of the new SOAS Palestine Studies Book Series with I.B. Tauris, under the title Palestinian Citizens of Israel: Power, Resistance and the Struggle for Space.
Stephanie Lämmert is a PhD candidate at the Department of History and Civilization in Florence, focusing on Eastern African late colonial history. His PhD research is concerned with litigation patterns and social change in designated native courts in the Usambara Mountains in Tanganyika under British colonial rule, 1920-61. She holds a Magister (MA) in African Studies from Humboldt University (Berlin) and in History from Free University (Berlin).
Stephanie Mawson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on slavery, trade and witchcraft in seventeenth century Maritime Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on the Spanish Philippines.
Tijl Vanneste holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. He is currently post-doctoral researcher at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, studying the legal interaction between Europeans and Ottomans at the Dutch Consular Court in eighteenth-century Smyrna. He has a long-standing research interest in the colonial history of Brazil, focusing on diaspora and diamond trade.
Todd Cleveland is an Assistant Professor of African History at the University of Arkansas (U.S.). His research interests are broadly concentrated around the interactions between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans during the colonial period and, in particular, labor and social relations between the Portuguese and the indigenous populations in the former’s assortment of African territories. The majority of his research has focused on the history of diamond mining in Africa, which features in two books: Stones of Contention: A History of Africa’s Diamonds (Ohio University, 2014), and Diamonds in the Rough: Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917-75 (Ohio University, 2015), and he also has a forthcoming book that examines the histories of African soccer players who migrated from Portugal’s colonies to the metropole beginning in the mid-1940s, tentatively entitled Following the Ball: The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire.
Uday Chandra is an Assistant Professor of Government in Georgetown University, Qatar. His research lies at the intersection between critical agrarian studies, political anthropology, postcolonial theory, and South Asian studies. He is currently working on a book, which revisits classic questions of power and resistance by tracing how the notion of "tribe" has curiously co-evolved with modern statemaking processes in South Asia and beyond.
Uma Kothari is Professor of Migration and Postcolonial Studies in the School of Environment, Education and Development and the Director of the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include development histories, theories and representations, colonial and postcolonial analyses and, forced migration and diasporas. Her research has involved a number of externally funded projects and has resulted in the publication of numerous articles. Her books include Participation: the new tyranny?, Development Theory and Practice: critical perspectives, and A Radical History of Development Studies. She was recently made a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and conferred the Royal Geographical Society’s Busk Medal for her contributions to research in support of global development.
Yavuz Tuyloglu is a PhD candidate at the University of Sussex and his doctoral research focuses on the non-Western influences on the modernisations of Iran and Turkey. He also acts a co-convenor for the historical sociology working group of the British International Studies Associatio