Politics as History and Area Studies

Sir Anthony Seldon, Vice-Chancellor of The University of Buckingham since 2015, is one of Britain’s leading contemporary historians, educationalist, commentator and political author. He was head of Brighton College and of Wellington College, two of Britain’s leading independent schools. He is author of over 40 books on contemporary history, including the inside books on the last four Prime Ministers, politics and education, was the co-founder and first director of the Institute for Contemporary British History, is co-founder of Action for Happiness, honorary historical adviser to 10 Downing Street, chair of the National Comment Awards, a member of the Government’s First World War Culture Committee, and a governor of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

David Craig is Lecturer in Modern British History at Durham University. His research primarily focuses on political culture and intellectual history in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular interest in the evolution of the languages of liberalism. He has also worked on the development of the fields of political history and the history of political thought. He is the author of Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy: Political Argument in Britain, c. 1780-c.1840 (2007) and co-editor with James Thompson of Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013).

Peter Gatrell teaches history at the University of Manchester where he is also affiliated to the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute. He chaired SP27 (Area Studies) in REF2014. In the first part of his career he devoted himself primarily to Russian economic history, and published several books including The Tsarist Economy, 1850-1917 (1986). He is the author of a trilogy of books on refugee history, including A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War 1 (1999) and The Making of the Modern Refugee (2013). His edited book on the European ‘refugee crisis’ during the First World War will appear in June 2017. He is currently writing a history of migration in/to Europe since 1945, for Penguin Books and Basic Books.

Mandy Sadan is Reader in the History of South East Asia and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at SOAS University of London. She works on the social and cultural histories of the borderland regions of Myanmar, North East India and Yunnan. Her research began when she was a MA student at SOAS with a small project on the historical memory of photographic images of Burma from the 1920s in the World Art Collections of Brighton Pavilion & Museums. She has been following the development of use and reuse of these images in the Kachin region of Myanmar since. Her paper will reflect on the longer trajectory of this research and the unfolding narratives which continue to emerge as the region has moved from war to peace to war again.