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By Josh Allen - April 14, 2025 (0 comments)
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.
Programme and Registration for "The Impeachment of Warren Hastings: The First Governor General of India"
By Josh Allen - April 2, 2025 (0 comments)
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.
| Day 1 | Thursday 3rd July |
|---|---|
| 08:45 | Registration and Refreshments (Jenny Lind Reception & JLG008) |
| 09:15 | Welcome Address (JL1005) |
| 09:30 | Session One (JL1005) |
| 11:00 | Break – Refreshments (Jenny Lind Reception & JLG008) |
| 11:30 | Session Two (JL1005) |
| 13:00 | Lunch (Jenny Lind Reception & JLG008) |
| 14:00 | Session Three (JL1005) |
| 15:30 | Break – Refreshments (Jenny Lind Reception & JLG008) |
| 16:00 | Keynote Address (JL1005) |
| 17:15 | Conference Reception (Jenny Lind Reception & JLG008) |
| Day 2 | Friday 4th July |
|---|---|
| 08:30 | Reception and Refreshments Sponsored by Bloombsury (Jenny Lind Reception & JLG008) |
| 09:00 | Session Four (JL1005) |
| 10:30 | Break – Refreshments (Jenny Lind Reception &JLG008) |
| 10:45 | Session Five (JL1005) |
| 12:15 | Lunch (Jenny Lind Reception & JLG008) |
| 13:00 | Session Six (JL1005) |
| 14:00 | Session Seven (JL1005) |
| 15:30 | Session Seven Roundtable (JL1005) |
| 16:30 | Farewell from the Organisers (JL1005) |
Keynote Speaker
Professor Dame Linda Colley, Princeton University
Linda Colley was born in Chester, England. She studied history at Bristol University, before completing a PhD at Cambridge, where she became the first female Fellow of Christ’s College. Her career has since taken her to Yale, the London School of Economics, and – since 2003 – to Princeton, where she is the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History..
Her books include In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760 (1982); Namier (1988); Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992), which won the Wolfson Prize; Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (2002); The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (2007), named by the New York Times as one of the year’s ten best books; Acts of Union and Disunion (2014) based on a 15-part BBC Radio 4 series. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her most recent work, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (2021) which was profiled in the New Yorker.
Colley writes on history, politics and art for the Financial Times, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. She has served on the Board of the British Library, the Council of Tate Britain, the Advisory Board of the Yale Center of British Art, and the Research Committee of the British Museum, and has been a Trustee of Princeton University Press.
Over the years, Colley’s expertise has earned her eight honorary degrees. She has delivered the Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University, the Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University Belfast, the Robb Lectures at the University of Auckland, and the Prime Minister’s Millennium Lecture at 10 Downing Street. A Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , she was made a DBE for services to history in the late Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Honors List.
Conference speakers
Confirmed conference speakers are listed below.
| Speaker | Affiliation | Paper title |
|---|---|---|
| Nicholas Abbott | Old Dominion University | ‘The cause of the great trial’: Writing (and avoiding) the Hastings impeachment in nineteenth-century Indo-Persian historiography’ |
| Ross Carroll | Dublin City University | ‘Political Trials and Passive Injustice: Reading Burke’s Impeachment Speeches with Judith Shklar’ |
| Ioannes P. Chountis de Fabbri | University of Aberdeen | ‘Reconciliatio in India: Burke’s “classical” persecution of Hastings’ |
| Lorna Clarke | Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada | ‘Frances Burney’s account of the Trial of Warren Hastings’ |
| Robin Eagles | History of Parliament Trust | ‘“mere rant and declamation”: John Wilkes’s defence of Warren Hastings, May 1787’ |
| Dr Elizabeth Hallam Smith | UK Parliament | That ‘vast improvised theatre’? Staging the Hastings trial in Westminster Hall, 1787-1795′ |
| Jocelyn Harris | University of Otago, Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | ‘“Such a Man”: Jane Austen and Warren Hastings’ |
| Satvinder Juss and Chris Monaghan | King’s College London, University of Worcester | ‘The rule of law under stress: the East India Company, the metropole, and the impeachment of Warren Hastings’ |
| Mark Knights | University of Warwick | ‘Hastings and Corruption’ |
| Dr Chris Monaghan | University of Worcester | “[T]is I Who late Amused you all by Crying Hastings”: The role of British domestic politics in the initiation of the Hastings impeachment’ |
| Dr Andrew Otis | ‘The Role of the Indian Press in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings’ | |
| Jessica Patterson | University of Cambridge | ‘The Use and Abuse of History in the Trial of Warren Hastings’ |
| Martyn Powell | University of Bristol | Print Culture in the Speeches of Richard Brinsley Sheridan: Warren Hastings and the “Fourth Estate”’ |
| David Prior | Parliamentary Archives, UK | ‘A precedent for Hastings? Robert Clive and parliamentary scrutiny 1772-73? |
| Chiara Rolli | University of Parma, Italy | ‘Edmund Burke’s Gallery of Pictures of Warren Hastings: Wild Beasts, Inhuman Monsters, Cruel Tyrants’ |
| Jayanta Sengupta | Director, Alipore Museum, Kolkata | ‘The Ambivalences of Empire and Nationalism: The Afterlives of Maharaja Nandakumar and Warren Hastings in Colonial Bengal’ |
| Callum D. Smith | University of Bristol | High Crimes and Misdemeanours’ of the ‘Stone Eater’: The Warren Hastings Affair, The Foxites, & Visual Culture |
| Philip Stern | Duke University | ‘“A Commonwealth Without a People”: Corporate Sovereignty on Trial in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings’ |
| Robert Travers | Cornell University | ‘At Home with Persian: the Impeachment Diary of Warren Hastings’ |
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.
Programme and Registration for "‘Demobbed’: The Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Legacies of Military Service"
By Josh Allen - March 25, 2025 (0 comments)
Received from Dr. Michelle Moffat (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Dates: 30 – 31 May 2025
Location: Manchester Metropolitan University (All Saints Campus)
Event Overview
As we approach the 80th Anniversary of the end of the Second World War, we turn to consider the lives of those who fought on the frontlines of this, and similar, conflicts. For military veterans, while the battles in which they fought may have finished, their legacies linger long after demobilisation.
The Returning Soldier Network invites you to attend our upcoming conference examining military veterans’ experiences in the post-service landscape. This two day, in-person event will be held at MMU’s campus on Oxford Road, Manchester, and aims to explore the aftermaths of conflict, and its effects on veteran lives, wellbeing, and identities.
Keynote speakers: Professor Simon Wessely (King’s Centre for Military Health Research) will share his research in occupational psychiatry and its links to the health and wellbeing of ex-serving personnel. Second keynote, Professor Angela Wanhalla (University of Otago, New Zealand), will speak of her studies into the post-war activism of veterans of New Zealand’s celebrated 28(Māori) Battalion.
Conference dinner: A three-course meal will be held at the Hyatt Regency Manchester from 6:15pm on Friday 30 May. Tickets are £65 and can only be purchased with a relevant conference ticket. Please specify any dietary requirements you may have, though vegetarian and vegan options will be available.
Ticket options:
– £180 2-day full attendance (/ £245 including dinner)
– £100 1-day attendance (/ £165 including dinner)
Subsidised rates:
– £120 postgraduate attendees or MMU staff (/ £185 including dinner)
– Special rate for ECR/PG speakers – please contact organisers for further information before purchasing your tickets
Registration and ticket purchase
For further information and conference agenda see here. Alternately, contact us via m.moffat@mmu.ac.uk
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
Programme and Registration for "Governing the Global Economy in the Long Twentieth Century"
By Josh Allen - March 24, 2025 (0 comments)
Received from Dr. Robert Yee (Wadham College, University of Oxford)
Event Overview
Conference taking place 7-8 April 2025, St. John’s College, University of Oxford. Since the financial crisis of 2007/08, international rivalries, nationalist movements, a global pandemic, and the existential threat of climate change have destabilised the global economic order. From an historical perspective, such strains have many precedents in the tumultuous twentieth century. We seek to bring together scholars for a two-day conference at the University of Oxford to explore the history of global economic governance. We are particularly keen to discuss how national governments, international organisations, businesses, financial institutions and workers all responded to shocks and instability, and how these responses shaped the global economic order.
Many recent historical works have explored the history of political economy, capitalism and global governance from multiple perspectives. There has been important historical research into the effects of wars and conflicts on the global economic order; the birth of global economic development initiatives; the ideological foundations of neoliberalism; and the hegemony of economic growth. Together, these works raise an array of important questions: What economic, political and social factors underpinned the evolution of national and global economic governance in the twentieth century? How have conflicts and crises generated competing ideas and agendas for governing the global economy? And to what extent can these works inform our perspective on present-day challenges of climate change, global poverty, public health, deindustrialisation and global economic stability?
The focus of this conference will be on examining the ways in which the world economy has been contested, debated, governed and restructured during moments of crisis and change, as well as how challenging conditions determined relations between states, businesses, individuals and civil society. Our conference will aim to bridge past and present by offering fresh insights into the forces that have shaped our current global economy, and by considering possible future trajectories of the international economy.
Our conference welcomes a broad range of topics that are historical in perspective, including but not limited to those concerned with: global trade and monetary order; the economics of empire and decolonisation; international economic organisations and international economic relations; the governing of global food and commodities; global labour practices and markets; global banking and finance; multinational business enterprises; and international tax and regulation. Following the conference, we may solicit articles for the publication of a special issue.
This conference is sponsored by 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, Past & Present, St John’s College and Wadham College.
Programme
Registration
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
Registration for "Margins to Centre"
By Josh Allen - March 21, 2025 (0 comments)
Received from Maisie Brenchley (University of York)
Event Overview
Join us on April 24th at the University of York’s Berrick Saul Building in Heslington North Yorkshire for Margins to Centre 2025! This in-person conference explores Belonging, celebrating the literature, art, and histories of marginalised communities. Engage in vital discussions on identity, inclusion, and the diverse narratives shaping our world.
Our conference features a diverse lineup of esteemed speakers exploring key themes, including colonialism and the construction of the ‘other,’ gender and identity through historical perspectives, marginalisation and power dynamics, exclusion and resistance, and the reassessment of marginalised and underutilised sources.
This event is open to all—join us for engaging discussions with our panels. Tea and coffee will be provided. We look forward to seeing you!
For inquiries or more information, please email us at marginstocentre2025@gmail.com or message us on Instagram @marginstocentre. We’re happy to help!
You can also visit the event’s website
Registration (free)
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