GHCC » News from the Global History and Culture Centre

Travel Writing at ��TV receives major donation

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:06:26 GMT

Amazing news! The University of ��TV has received a £1 million donation and a major gift‑in‑kind of rare travel books from philanthropist Bill Newlin. This major donation strengthens the University’s position as an international leader in the study of travel writing.

Alongside the Wheeler Travel Writing Programme, the generous Newlin donation advances ��TV’s ambition to Set the Pace in Critical Arts. The donation includes the establishment of the Bill Newlin Collection, a world‑class archive of travel guidebooks spanning centuries and continents.

The University of ��TV is setting the pace in the field of travel literature research, and at the Global History and Culture Centre, we are thrilled to support these advances.

Diversity in STEM GCSE Science Resources

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 08:26:32 GMT

Diversity in STEM is a set of GCSE Biology, Chemistry, and Physics resources that are designed to fit into existing lessons.

All the resources are curriculum-aligned and provide a simple, effective, and engaging way to highlight diversity in the STEM classroom.

There is an interactive website—Diversity in STEM: The Challenge—to get started: Diversity in STEM: The Challenge Interactive Website

As well as downloadable slides and lesson plans from both the website and the TES teachers’ resource portal: Diversity in STEM Slides and Lesson Plans

All resources are free to download, use and adapt.

They were developed by Dr James Poskett at the University of ��TV with funding from the History Department and the British Academy.

Monash scholars visit for “Islands and Empire” project

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 10:01:00 GMT

On 21-22 July, three scholars from Monash University visited the University of ��TV as part of their ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration, “Islands and Empires: Island Agency in Inter-Imperial Ordering.” The project is supported by the Monash ��TV Alliance.

The project seeks to better understand diverse manifestations of empire and their effects on island populations. Recently, scholars have dedicated attention to the relationship between islands and empire in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, as well as the Caribbean Sea. Islands feature in accounts of strategic competition, and of how international law was hashed out among imperial interests. Several studies have pointed to the agency of island polities in these rivalries.

Congratulations to Professor Susan Carruthers!

Fri, 09 May 2025 09:18:00 GMT

Congratulations to GHCC member Professor Susan Carruthers, whose book 'Making do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World' has just been published! PGR student Jeremy Goh has also been recently published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

GHCC members recognized in ��TV research Celebration

Thu, 08 May 2025 09:29:43 GMT

GHCC members David Anderson and Guido van Meersbergen were recognized at ��TV's Research Celebration!

CfP - Material Literacy in the Age of the Global Turn

Thu, 08 May 2025 09:27:39 GMT

Join us for a workshop on 19-20 June 2025 at the University of ��TV. Organized by GHCC's Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, this workshop will foster a conversation between a small group of material culture history experts and curators and a larger group of PhD students and early career researchers on how to develop skills suitable for the understanding of and working with objects as sources for historical research and teaching. Deadline for abstract submission is May 18, 2025.

Congratulations to Dr Jack Bowman!

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 11:26:10 GMT

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 here

Call for Papers - Global Histories, A Student Journal

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 15:02:00 GMT

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.

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Travel Studies: Theories, Methods, Materials

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 13:55:00 GMT

This workshop 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 ��TV). May 16, 2025, 9:30am–4:30pm, at the Newberry. The application deadline is November 15, 2024.

M4C PhD Studentship available - Editing Empire: The Hakluyt Society in (Post-)imperial Britain, 1846 to the present

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 09:16:00 GMT

A fully-funded PhD studentship, to begin in September 2025, is available at the University of ��TV’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.