New Methods for New Histories (Online) (Rethinking Internationalism: Histories and Pluralities)
New Methods for New Histories
9-10 July 2025 (Online – the Zoom link will be sent to registered attendees)
Workshop 2: Rethinking Internationalisms: Histories and Pluralities
You are invited to attend online as an audience-participant for a series of panel-based discussions on approaches to internationalism’s histories that go beyond the confines of traditional, state, and institution-centred archives in the Global North. This workshop’s main goal is to consider how we can write histories of internationalism that acknowledge the instrumental roles played by postcolonial, grassroots, marginalised, or simply unconventional actors, organisations and places. Does the meaning of internationalism itself change depending on where, when and how we look for it and which voices in the archives we listen to?
The workshop is part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Rethinking Internationalism: Histories and Pluralities’, which is jointly led by Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck), Ria Kapoor (QMUL), Daniel Laqua (Northumbria) and Margot Tudor (City St George’s). ‘Rethinking Internationalism’ seeks to build a community of scholars beyond (sub-)disciplinary silos and across different career stages who can collectively decentre histories of internationalism dominated by Anglo-American liberal internationalism.
Format: Once members of each panel offer their brief reflections, the session will be open to wider discussion.
The programme is below:
Wednesday 9 July
9:45 – 11:00 Towards a (More) Global History of International Peace Advocacy?
Chair: Caroline Stolte
A Missing African Peace? Anti-War Activism, West-Africans, and the Global Peace Movement (1928- 1964) – Henrike Vellinga
The Nevada-Semipalatinsk Anti-nuclear Movement: Locating the Soviet Union in Global Colonialism and Decolonization – Kamila Smagulova
Swaraj of Natural Peace: An Intellectual History of Evolutionism and Ecology in India’s Ashrams – Floris de Ruiter
11:00-11:30 break
11:30-12:45 Methodologies and Solidarities
Chair: Daniel Laqua
Rough-handed solidarity: finding internationalism through a sheep farmers’ struggle -Andrew WM Smith
Overcoming Subalternity: A Renewed Methodology of Subaltern Historiography with Gramsci – Marral Shamshiri, University of Exeter
Performative Knowledge and Toussaint Louverture: Drama and Theatre as Tools for a Critical (Re)Assessment of the Haitian Revolution – Klaas Tindemans, Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound
12:45-1:30 Break
1:30 – 3:00 Geographies of Internationalism in South and Southeast Asia
Chair: Jessica Reinisch
Internationalisms in the anticolonial: The Annual Sessions of the Indian National Congress, 1916-46 – Stephen Legg, University of Nottingham
Internationalisms and the Geographies of an Unreliable Archive – Sneha Krishnan, University of Oxford
Nationalism, internationalism, and the geographies of archives: the Naga Archives and Research Centre – Alex Manby, University of Oxford
How Carp became Anchovies: Nested scales in Twentieth Century International Development Implementation – Agnieszka Sobocinska, King’s College London
Co-curating an “Archive of Unrepresented Peoples”: the geographies of twentieth-century Hmong internationalisms – Jake Hodder, University of Nottingham; Fiona McConnell, University of Oxford; Alex Manby, University of Oxford
3:00-3:30 break
3:30 – 5:00 Asian and Transpacific Archives in Rethinking U.S.-Centered Internationalism
Chair: Margot Tudor
Discussant: Dr. Qingfei Yin
Planters’ Anxiety and Migrant Sentiments: Affect in Hawaiian Plantations’ Archives – Veronica Alporha (PhD Candidate in History, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa)
Uncovering Imperial Legacies: New Left Advocacy Against Okinawa’s Reincorporation Into the Japanese State (1969-1972) – Kirsten Soer (Incoming PhD Student in History, Ohio State University)
Competing Revolutions? China, the United States, and the Forging of Mexico’s Third Worldism, 1970–76 – Yixin Tian (PhD Candidate in History, University of Oxford)
The Pan-Pacific Decades: China, Hawaii, and the Interwar Pan-Pacific Internationalism, 1910s to 1930s – Bohan Zhang (PhD Candidate in History, Rice University)
U.S. Chinese Exclusions and Family Separations: Stories from Chinese Immigrants Magazines in the Early Twentieth Century – Shouyue Zhang (PhD Candidate in History, University of Melbourne)
Thursday 10 July
10:00 – 11:30 Interviews and the Co-Creation of Activist Histories
Chair: Ria Kapoor
Su Lin Lewis – Professor of Global and Asian History, University of Bristol
Emma Kluge – Lecturer in Colonial and Environmental History, University of Exeter, Cornwall Joanna Simonow – Assistant Professor in History, University of Heidelburg
Lydia Walker – Assistant Professor and Myers Chair in Global Military History, Ohio State University
11:30-11:45 break
11:45 – 12:15 Closing discussion and future plans (Jessica, Daniel, Margot and Ria)
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/new-methods-for-new-histories-online-tickets-1418793041179