received from Dr. Michelle Pfeffer (Magdalen College, University of Oxford)

Dates: 11-12 July 2025

Location: Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG

Programme

Registration

Overview – Conference Theme and Goals

Historians have studied extensively how sciences begin—but how do they end? This is a crucial question for understanding how the labour of knowledge-making evolves. Previous attention to the founding, disciplining, and professionalisation of individual sciences has provided robust frameworks for thinking through the birth and growth of knowledge-making communities. Far less attention has been directed toward how those same communities decay, dissipate, or evolve beyond the contemporary boundaries of science. This conference seeks to cultivate case studies of the ends of sciences, and thereby to motivate a new approach to thinking about the developmental trajectories of scientific disciplines, communities, institutions, and the ordering of expert knowledge. A further aim is to strengthen the community of scholars with a shared interest in studying the ends of sciences.

A small lunch will be provided on both days of the conference. If you have any dietary requirements, please email Michelle at michelle.pfeffer@history.ox.ac.uk.

We hope to arrange a conference dinner for Friday 11 July following the keynote lecture. Once arrangements are finalised we will be in contact with all registered participants to ask if you’d like to attend.

Past & Present is pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.

by Dr. Robert Yee (Wadham College, University of Oxford)

The University of Oxford convened a two-day conference on the history of political economy, capitalism, and global governance between 7 and 8 April 2025. Co-organised by Patricia Clavin, Aled Davies, and Robert Yee, the conference brought together 15 speakers for a discussion on the future of the field.

Radcliffe Camera, Oxford, photograph by Robert Yee (2025), all rights reserved

In recent years, scholars have assessed the history of global economic governance from multiple perspectives. They have focused on the rise of development initiatives, the impact of wars on the global order, and the tensions between national interests and international cooperation. Together, these works have broadened our understanding of the evolving role of individuals, ideas, and institutions in shaping the world economy.

Our conference reflected on these topics and suggested new directions for the field. We were particularly interested in examining the ways in which the idea of the world economy has been contested, debated, governed and restructured during moments of crisis and change. We also explored the time and temporality of crises, considering the various speeds at which different types of crises, from financial to environmental, proliferated.

The conference consisted of five panels, each with three presentations. Our first panel focused on the role of international organisations in promoting economic development. The presenters showed how ideas of equality, stability, and cooperation motivated different visions of global development from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The second session involved a discussion on economic interdependence during the Cold War. We explored how governments in various parts of the world, from Iceland and Chile to Hungary and Iraq, conceived of their changing role in the global economy.

We began the afternoon sessions with a panel on technocracy. The presentations showed how experts developed statistical methods and legal tools to shape debates over economic policy from the interwar years to the 1970s. How their interventions reshaped different policies, including labor regulation, economic cooperation, and welfare regimes, was a key point of discussion.

The last session of the day critically examined the idea of the so-called American century. We debated how the United States aimed to address challenges to its authority during the twentieth century. The ensuing discussion explored how state officials and private actors often worked within existing institutions to shape imperial, financial, and agriculture governance.

St John’s College Oxford quadrangle, photograph by Robert Yee (2025), all rights reserved

The following day, we examined the evolution of trade and industry from a global perspective. Our discussion assessed competing ideas of free trade and economic liberalism since the Second World War. We observed long-term global deindustrialisation trends from the 1960s to the present.

The conference concluded with a roundtable led by Patricia Clavin and Martin Daunton. We initially probed the interactions between different scales of economic governance, including the global, imperial, regional, and national framework. Future studies of economic governance should also consider less commonly studied scales, such as the Eastern bloc, the Southern cone, and OPEC.

Another common theme was the structure of economic institutions themselves. We noted the many instances in which prominent international organisations have struggled to maintain influence due to intra-national and intra-regional disputes. Whether such institutions should aim to be large and inclusive or small and effective, and how they seek to govern by either votes or consensus, remained a key topic of interest.

Our conversation then shifted to discussion of continuities and ruptures in the prewar and postwar years. We considered the novelty of post-1945 developments, and whether such changes actively drew on precedents from the nineteenth century or interwar period. How governments and institutions adapted to changing economic conditions, such as the oil crisis, also motivated this discussion.

Finally, we discussed the future of the field and, in particular, our audience outside academia. The session was concerned with the extent to which historians should engage with themes that resonate with current events, what it means to be presentist, and how we should write histories tailored to an increasingly global community of scholars and policymakers.

This conference was sponsored by Past & Present, the History & Political Economy Project, the Economic History Society, the Conference for European Studies at Temple University, the Rothermere American Institute, the Oxford Martin School Changing Global Orders project, St John’s College, and Wadham College.

Past & Present was pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.

received from Mariana Bodnaruk (Masaryk University, Brno), Stephan Bruhn (German Historical Institute, London) and Michael Eber (University of Oxford)

Dates: 22 – 23 May 2025

Venue: German Historical Institute, London/online via the Zoom platform

Overview

Trans saints – monachoparthenoi, saints who are initially described as female by their hagiographers, but transition to a male (often monastic) identity – are present in every late antique and medieval Christian tradition. The textual and artistic renderings of these figures offer a comparative key to conceptualizing trans bodies and trans souls across geographical and chronological boundaries. Binary cis-heteronormativity has long been portrayed as unchanging and unchangeable, as outside of the scope of history. This is a central plank in the playbook followed by transphobes worldwide, in the ever-escalating “culture war” against trans and queer people. Highlighting both the ubiquity and multivalence of premodern trans monks, and connecting across disciplinary divides to do so, is urgent work, not least because it provides a necessary counterpoint to such historically inaccurate rhetoric.

Following the insights of the “performative turn” in queer and trans studies that underscores the enactment and negotiation of gender identity through lived experiences, social practices, and narratives, we welcome explorations of gender and sexuality in the textual traditions in both East and West and in their translation. We also take into consideration aspects related to the ”performative turn” in visual studies in the last decade, as relevant for both medieval Eastern and Western hagiographic iconographies of trans saints, focusing on visual representations actively shaping identities and power dynamics and incorporating the embodied experience of the ritual practices.

While texts regarding fifteen trans saints are attested in the Eastern Mediterranean, this conference will focus on those whose vitae were available in Greek as well as in Latin: Eugenia*us, Euphrosyne*Smaragdus, Marina*us, Pelagia*us and Theodora*us. However, we particularly invite papers covering linguistic and artistic traditions beyond Greek and Latin, from Coptic to Old Norse. Taking seriously the connectivity of the Latin West, the Orthodox East, and the Islamic World in the Middle Ages, we adopt a trans-cultural comparative approach. Thus, contributions with a multilingual perspective are particularly welcome, as are those covering both textual and iconographic representations. Conference proceedings may be published as an edited volume.

Registration and programme

This conference will take place at the German Historical Institute, London (speakers only). It is open to external visitors online via Zoom. In order to attend this event online, please register (free) via Eventbrite to take part on Day 1 and/or Day 2.

Conference Programme

Past & Present is pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.

Past & Present logo, 2017 all rights reserved

by the Past & Present editorial team

Subscribe to Past and Present’s new e-newsletter –  the Past and Present Society has set-up a free e-newsletter using the Substack platform as a hosting medium.

From May 2025 this will be published quarterly in line with the journal’s publishing schedule. The newsletter will include a round-up of recent publications including articles, supplements and virtual issues. As well as news from the Society especially regarding initiatives we fund like scholarships, postdoctoral fellowships and conferences.

You may subscribe to the Past and Present e-newsletter here.

We would be grateful if you could share news of the newsletter’s launch with potentially interested colleagues, students, and anybody else who may be interested in receiving the quarterly communication, especially those who do not maintain a social media presence.

The Society will continue to share articles from the journals, news, opportunities and other updates via its feed on the Bluesky social media platform.

received from Dr. Robin Eagles (The History of Parliament) and Dr. Chris Monaghan (University of Worcester)

Dates: 3 – 4 July 2025

Location: University of Worcester School of Law, Jenny Lind Building, Farrier St, Worcester, WR1 3BZ

Event Overview

A conference jointly hosted by: The Constitutions, Rights and Justice Research Group, University of Worcester and The History of Parliament Trust, Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th July 2025.

The trial of Warren Hastings was one of the seminal moments in late 18th-century politics. The former governor general of Bengal, Hastings, was accused of a variety of crimes relating to abuse of the local population and peculation. Attitudes to him varied widely, with him attracting high profile supporters, while the case against him was driven forward by stars of the Whig party, such as Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox. In raw political terms it helped precipitate the collapse of any sense of unity within the former governing Whigs and helped William Pitt the Younger cement his hold on power. Quite as importantly, the trial is vital in understanding how British society viewed the government of colonial India and how Indian society responded to the process of colonization.

The trial is crucial in understanding late Georgian society and attitudes to law and governance, to Empire and colonization. The impeachment was a key event in the changing governance of British India as well as casting a spotlight on the role of Parliament and its ability to hold to account senior officials accused of misdemeanours. The subject cuts across several disciplines: law, political history, history of print satire, literary history and imperial history. The conference will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines and at all levels of experience, with colleagues from across the world, with scholars based in Canada, the EU, India, New Zealand, the UK and US participating. A book involving many of those presenting at the conference has been commissioned to be published with Bloomsbury, adding to the impact of the event.

Conference Schedule

All sessions take place in the School of Law on the first floor in Jenny Lind Building in JL1005. Speakers will have a maximum of 20 minutes to present their paper. Questions to the presenters will be at the end of each session if time permits.

Registration

The conference is free to attend. You may attend both days or either day one or day two.

You must arrange your own travel and accommodation.

You can register your place for the conference.

Full event details can be found here

In addition to the Past and Present Sociey this event is sponsored by Parliamentary History.

Past & Present is pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.