Participants and Speakers
Urvashi Chakravarty
Urvashi Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and works on early modern English literature, critical race studies, queer studies, and the history of slavery. Her first book, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Penn Press, 2022), explores the ideologies of Atlantic slavery in early modern England, revealing the everyday sites where the foundations of racialized slavery were laid, and is the first book in Penn Press's new series on “RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern.” Her second book, currently in progress, is titled From Fairest Creatures: Race, Reproduction, and Slavery in the Early Modern British Atlantic World, and examines the nexus of race and reproduction, including the construction of white womanhood and white childhood in the early modern Atlantic world, and its relationship to the structures of colonial violence and enslavement. Articles on (among other subjects) early modern race and reproduction; queer and racialized futurity; labour, domestic service, and whiteness; the “spiriting” of indentured labourers; and the future of early modern race studies appear or are forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Spenser Studies, postmedieval, Literature Compass, and the edited collections Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture, Shakespeare/Sex: Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality, and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race.
Mark Hailwood
Mark Hailwood is a first-generation academic from a working-class background and a social historian of England in the period c.1500-1750. He is interested in the relationship between historical change and the everyday lives of ordinary men and women, and his work seeks to challenge misunderstandings of working-class people in the age before industrial modernity. His research to date has focused in particular on the histories of drinking and of working. His first book, Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England, was published by Boydell in 2014, and his second book (co-authored with Professor Jane Whittle) on The Experience of Work in Early Modern England, is due to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. He has published articles on occupational identity, the gender division of labour, and the relationship between time and work, in Past and Present, Huntington Library Quarterly, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Economic History Review and Cultural and Social History. Mark is one of four editors of the popular early modern history blog the many-headed monster, and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, England.
Katie Hindmarch-Watson
Katie Hindmarch-Watson is a cultural historian of Modern Britain and the British Empire. Her work is broadly engaged in two major, interrelated questions: how to do histories of gender and sexualities in ways that move beyond identities while keeping networks of power and agency into sharp focus; and how to re-engage British labor history with processes of class formation that address continuities alongside (and in some ways independent of) the rise and fall of an industrial proletariat. She is the author of Serving a Wired World: London’s Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital (University of California, 2020).
Kennetta Hammond Perry
Kennetta Hammond Perry is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University. Previously, she served as founding Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK where she maintains an affiliation as an Honorary Senior Research Fellow. Dr Perry holds a PhD in Comparative Black History and her research interests include Black British history, transnational race politics, Black women’s history, Black Europe, histories of state crafted violence and the political uses of historical narratives. She has published widely, including a book-length study on African Caribbean migration to Britain following World War II titled London Is The Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford Press, 2016). Currently she is completing a new book, Insufficient Justice: Living and Dying in David Oluwale’s Britain which uses imperiled Black life as a lens to rethink the contours of contemporary British history.
Malik Al Nasir
PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge
Malik Al Nasir is an author, poet and academic from Liverpool. His memoir ‘Letters to Gil’ is a compelling account of his childhood experiences in a brutal UK Local Authority care system, which at eighteen, left him traumatised, semi-literate, homeless, and destitute. A chance meeting with poet and activist Gil Scott-Heron was to prove life changing, setting him on a path to success. Malik is currently reading for a PhD in history at University of Cambridge on a full ESRC scholarship, and he’s just been awarded the prestigious ‘Sydney Smith Memorial Prize’ for ‘outstanding achievement’ at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.
Photo credit: Ean Flanders
Joanna Godfrey
Joanna Godfrey is a Senior Commissioning Editor at Yale University Press. She handles modern history and current affairs lists in Yale's London office. She looks for original, cutting-edge research written in an accessible narrative voice. She enjoys working both with experienced authors and early career scholars and have a track record in guiding academics through the process of publishing their first trade book. In history, she’s particularly interested in human-centred stories – whether from social history, cultural history or military history – across the long twentieth century and around the world. Her current affairs list is similarly global in scope and includes country-specific studies and broader books on the key issues affecting us internationally – from polarization and misinformation to inequality and climate change. Recent and forthcoming highlights include Danny Dorling's Slowdown, George Makari's Of Fear and Strangers, Vladislav Zubok's Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, Nelly Lahoud's The Bin Laden Papers, Graeme Garrard's The Return of the State and Chris Armstrong's A Blue New Deal.
Diarmaid Kelliher
Diarmaid Kelliher is a lecturer in human geography at the University of Glasgow. His first book Making Cultures of Solidarity: London and the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike was published by Routledge in 2021.
Jessica Ann Levy
Jessica Ann Levy is an Assistant Professor of History at Purchase College, State University of New York. Her first book, Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America, Race, and Empowerment Politics in the U.S. and Africa, under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press, traces the transnational rise of Black empowerment politics, examining how business--broadly construed--molded Black movements, and, vice versa, racial politics shaped corporate politics at local, national, and international scales during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Presently, Levy is also co-editing a volume with B. Alex Beasley, Capitalism & the American Century: Towards a Global History of Postwar America, under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Building on and revising histories of 20th century U.S. political economy, this volume approaches the study of postwar American capitalism as a distinctly global story. This is more than an accounting of exports and imports, foreign assets, and other kinds of cross-border economic activity. Rather, treating postwar U.S. capitalism as a global story transforms historical narratives of political, social, and cultural life, shedding new light on racial formations and gender politics during this tumultuous era. Levy's writing has appeared in a variety of scholarly and popular publications, including Enterprise & Society, The Journal of Urban History, The Washington Post, Black Perspectives, and Public Seminar. She is the host and producer of WhoMakesCents: A History of Capitalism Podcast.
Priya Satia
Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of History at Stanford University and the award-winning author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008); Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin, 2018); Time's Monster: How History Makes History (Belknap HUP/Penguin Allen Lane, 2020). Her academic and popular writing has appeared in American Historical Review, Past & Present, Financial Times, London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Time, Washington Post, among others.
Laura Schwartz
Laura Schwartz is Reader in Modern British history at the University of Warwick. Her last book was Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women's Suffrage Movement (Cambridge University press, 2019) and she is now working on a new project on proletarian countercultures.
Felicia Angeja Viator
Felicia Angeja Viator is Associate Professor of History at San Francisco State University and Associate Editor for Made By History at The Washington Post. Her research focuses on American popular culture in times of crisis, and most of her scholarship –– including her first book, To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America (Harvard University Press, 2020) and essays for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lapham's Quarterly –– has been shaped to engage with general audiences. As an editor for Made By History, she helps scholars develop their own practical tools for communicating complex arguments in plain language. In addition to public-facing platforms, Viator's work has appeared in the American Studies Journal, Journal of American History, and California History. Before her career as a historian, she entertained big audiences as a mobile and club DJ in the San Francisco Bay Area.