Britain at Home and Abroad IHR Seminar
Autumn Programme
Hi everyone,
We are excited for our autumn programme at the IHR! Please find details below.
To book for any of these sessions, (all of which are hybrid except for the PhD session on 10 October which is in-person only), please go to the IHR website.
10 October 2024: PhD Student Session
IHR Seminar Room N304, Third Floor, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Calling all PhD students! For the first session of term we will be hosting a meet and greet at the IHR for all PhD students in modern British and imperial history. We would like to invite PhD students in and around London (at any stage of the thesis) working on relevant topics to present their ‘elevator pitch’: a 3-minute presentation of thesis topic, emerging arguments, and why we should all be interested.
We hope this session will be a chance for PhD students to find out about other candidates’ work and make connections which will prove intellectually (and socially) fruitful in the year to come.
7 November 2024: Shamima Akhtar (Birmingham) Exhibiting Irishness, Empire, Race and Nation, c.1850-1970
Hybrid | Online-via Zoom & IHR Wolfson Room NB02, Basement, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Exhibiting Irishness analyses how exhibitions enabled Irish individuals and groups to work out (privately and publicly) their politicised existences across two centuries. As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures. Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building. My research demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. The central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland's political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland.
21 November 2024: Sam Wetherell (York): Race, Obsolescence and the Management of "Surplus" Populations in Post-War Liverpool
Hybrid | Online-via Zoom & IHR Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
How do histories of welfare, housing, top-down urban redevelopment and economic management look when viewed from Liverpool? In this talk, I compare the postwar fate of various groups deemed to be “surplus” in the city in the 1930s and 1940s: white unemployed workers, West African seamen and Black and Chinese technicians and sailors recruited into the city during the war. Liverpool’s unemployed white population were the beneficiaries of a massive state-backed expansion of housing, and jobs. At the same time, this dramatic reorganisation of Liverpool’s economy and built environment hardened lines of racial difference in the city, with people of colour becoming unhoused, policed, confined to insecure work and, in some instances, deported. In telling both halves of this story, I seek to situate broader arguments about decolonisation, racialization and welfare in a single city, while offering a different explanatory framework for understanding a period of urban redevelopment, mass house-building and industrial policy.
5 December 2024: Helen McCarthy (Cambridge): Planning for Retirement in Postwar Britain
Hybrid | Online-via Zoom & IHR Wolfson Room NB02, Basement, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Improved pensions, home ownership and widening educational opportunity fuelled new expectations of security and leisure in later life in the postwar period. Retirement became a collective social experience which could be actively envisaged and planned for, whilst presenting new challenges of psychic and interpersonal adjustment. This paper explores how Britons embraced a planning mindset through a focus on the movement for ‘pre-retirement education’, which emerged in the late 1950s to help the older worker prepare for the end of working life. As well as tracing the fortunes of this movement, the paper uses Mass Observation life-writing and archived interviews with retired steelworkers from the early 1980s to show how retirement planning was practised critically and idiosyncratically, often with an awareness of its psychic risks as well as rewards. The paper ends by reflecting on pre-retirement education’s eclipse in the 1990s by a more narrowly defined focus on the management of financial risk, drawing out the implications of this story for broader metanarratives of change across the postwar period.