Empire of Emptiness: Fortresses of the Colonial Conquest in the Sahara
Empires and everyday cultural coexistence: the Nineteenth century Ottoman Empire in comparative perspective
Picturing War: Art and Empire in the Late-Victorian Period
East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars
How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe
Writing the Indian Army and the Second World War
As Michaelmas Term begins, a welcome from DPIR's new Head of Department Professor David Doyle
New & Jew, Zionism and the Quest for National Culture
The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on a very old story; so old that it became a myth. And since the distance between the Jewish present and the Jewish past was vast, the wish to make Palestine a home for a modern Jewish nation called for creating that nation anew. It was an immense claim that required an equally immense innovation. The lecture reexamines this well-known story by looking at some of the cultural innovations of Zionists - body culture, space, art, music - and considering their fraught legacy a century later.
Saving Soviet Muslims: the politics of protection at Jerusalem's General Islamic Congress of 1931
Historians of the Middle East have extensively explored how imperial powers and international institutions during the interwar period used the idea of “minority rights and protection” to solidify their rule and influence over large parts of the region. Rather than focusing on the Eurocentric premises of this idea, the present lecture considers the role of Muslim anti-colonialists in challenging the utilization of the humanitarian discourse of protection by colonial powers.