GHIL Podcast

Alice Rio is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London. An enduring problem in early medieval history is what to make of the legal material, which is abundant relative to the total surviving evidence (legislation, acts of practice, models, old texts, new texts), and paints extremely contradictory pictures of contemporary legal practices both within and across legal genres. The lecture will try to show that this level of contradiction results from people calling on many different legal and cultural frameworks for representing their own actions, all of which were potentially valid provided that they could be sold successfully to one’s audience: what mattered was success in getting others to play along through scene-setting and role-play. Alice Rio has written two books on early medieval legal and legal-ish practices: Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages: Frankish Formulae, c.500–1000 (2009); and Slavery After Rome, 500–1100 (2017).

Survivors of the Shoah have often described how the SS liked to define torturing practices during the genocide as ‘jokes’. The paper discusses the systematic presence of derisive laughter in Nazi Germany and analyzes its meanings as a way both to act out understandings of Germanness and to ‘justify’ violence.

The Gerda Henkel Foundation Visiting Professorship Lecture 2020, hosted by the German Historical Institute and London School of Economics and Political Science, was be held as an online event on Thursday, 26 November 2020.

The 2020 Annual Lecture 'The Crisis of the Meritocracy' was given by Professor Peter Mandler, Cambridge, on Friday, 6 November 2020.

Maud Anne Bracke is a historian of 20th-century European social, political, and gender history. A graduate of the European University Institute, Florence, she has published two monographs, three edited collections, and over 20 articles on feminism, gender and work, translation, ‘1968’, and European communism. She co-directs Glasgow’s Centre for Gender History and is a former editor of the journal Gender & History.

Her lecture presents an interpretation of the emergence, following the Second World War, of the notion of ‘reproductive rights’. Drawing on critical understandings of reproductive biopower, it focuses on the ways in which the introduction and legalisation of the contraceptive pill across Western Europe in the long 1960s produced new, gendered discourses on family planning, responsibility in reproduction, sexual morality and bodily autonomy. The lecture situates France and Western Europe in the transnational developments that enabled the emergence of reproductive rights discourse following the war. Bracke particularly considers two key moments in the genealogy of reproductive rights discourse in France, corresponding to two instances of legislative change and intense public debate. The first is family planning activism in the 1950s and 1960s, which was key in leading to the legalisation of contraception through the Loi Neuwirth of 1967. The second is the ‘new’ feminism that exploded onto the political scene in France in 1970, and crucially contributed to legal reform on abortion through the Loi Veil of 1975.  She argues that the ‘invention’ of reproductive rights relied crucially on the introduction of new discourses and political practices by feminists of a reproductive subject – that is to say, an individual endowed with knowledge, agency, and rights – and that this reproductive subject was increasingly explicitly presented as a woman. At the same time, however, not all women became reproductive subjects to the same extent, as reproductive bodies continued to be hierarchised according to social class, race, migration status and ability. 

Jane Whittle is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Exeter. She currently holds an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council on ‘Forms of Labour: Gender, Freedom, and Experience of Work in the Pre-Industrial Economy’. She has published widely on the history of work, consumption, property rights, and the household economy in England from 1300 to 1750.

Laura Schwartz is Reader in Modern British History at the University of Warwick. Her most recent book Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women's Suffrage Movement was published with Cambridge University Press in 2019. Having previously worked on the history of British feminism, she is now moving more definitively into labour history and is in the early stages of developing a collaborative project entitled '"Ordinary" Working-Class People? Brexit Britain and the "New" Labour History', which aims to critically interrogate the contemporary political mobilization of a 'white' male working class and to consider alternative and more heterogeneous histories of class in Britain.

This round table brings together two experts in the field of women’s work to discuss how ideas of work and gender have changed across the centuries. Alongside considering what women’s work is, it will explore how women’s work has been defined and valued in the past and within historical scholarship.

Chiara Bonfiglioli is a Lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies at University College Cork, where she also coordinates the one-year interdisciplinary Masters in Women’s Studies. She is the author of Women and Industry in the Balkans: The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector (I.B. Tauris, 2019).

Her lecture focuses on women’s internationalism in Italy, Yugoslavia, and Cuba, and on the gendered imaginaries of citizenship that circulated among the generation of women active within Cold-War mass organizations in the 1950s and 1960s. It will also consider how this ‘internationalist wave’ engaged with second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, a time characterized by the overlapping of different generational paradigms of women’s and feminist activism: that of 'emancipation', based on women’s socio-economic rights and institutional reform, and that of 'liberation', based on gender, sexuality, and grassroots activism. These generational paradigms were both national and transnational, and were shaped by the global development of left-wing parties and movements, and of women’s and feminist movements worldwide.

Margaret MacMillan is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto and emeritus Professor of International History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The War that Ended Peace (2014); The Uses and Abuses of History (2008); and the international bestsellers Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao (2006) and Peacemakers: The Paris Conference 1919 and its Attempt to End the War (2001), which won the 2002 Samuel Johnson Prize.

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European museums have recently come under increasing pressure to repatriate objects from colonial times. But where do we go from here? Does repatriation naturally entail ‘decolonizing the museum’, or might it even prevent museums from doing just that? This panelwill discuss what decolonization in the museum might actually mean. How do recent debates fit into the bigger picture of engaging with uncomfortable collecting histories? And how could embracing these histories enable marginal and multiple voices to have a say?

Who owns public history and on what grounds? How does the historian relate to public debates? Across spatial and temporal conflict contexts, debates about the content and role of history textbooks are sensitive, highly political, and often notable for their interminability. Developing a theoretical approach, political scientist Eleni Christodoulou, Georg Eckert Institute, Braunschweig, will embrace ‘educational anxieties’ by offering a frame-work for analysing securitization dynamics that success-fully resist and prevent textbook revisions as part of peace-building processes in Cyprus and Lebanon. Neeladri Bhattacharya, former Chief Adviser of the National Council for Education Research and Training in India, will then explore how contested claims of caste, class, region, and nation, play out on the site of history textbooks in India. Chaired by Nandini Manjrekar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

How do colonial history, the Second World War, and the Holocaust intersect? As Britain embarks on the creation of a National Holocaust Memorial, calls have been made for a memorial to and a museum of Britain’s historical involvement in slavery, its colonial past, and their legacies. Meanwhile, scholarship such as Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory has argued that Holocaust remembrance also has the potential to open up routes for commemorating other contested national pasts. This panel will enable a dialogue betweenscholars of the Holocaust, colonialism, and the British Empire to reflect on national and transnational legacies. With Avril Alba, Sydney, Yasmin Khan, Oxford, and Tom Lawson, Northumbria. Chaired by Tamar Garb, IAS London.

Images mentioned in Lecture

Thomas Hobbes: De Cive, 1642 Frontispiece by Jean Matheus

Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, 1651, Frontispiece by Abraham Bosse

(Source: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

In co-operation with the German Embassy London.