Conversations on Identity, Ethnicity and Nationhood

About

This network was funded from August 2015 to August 2017.

The underlying aim of this network is to gather scholars across disciplines to foster conversations around identity, ethnicity, and nationalism, considering in particular the constantly shifting definitions and uses of racial discourses, their intersection with religious identities, and the gendered dynamics of national and imperial discourses across cultural contexts. Our research network brings together scholars across disciplines whose expertise covers a wide range of topics both chronologically geographically.

Conversations on Identity, Ethnicity and Nationhood Research Network is convened by Angela Flynn and Elisabeth Bolorinos Allard.

Contact: Dr Elisabeth Bolorinos Allard elisabeth.bolorinosallard@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Dr Angela Flynn Angela.flynn@history.ox.ac.uk
identity@torch.ox.ac.uk

People

Events

Past Events

Language and Community from the Armenian to Iranian Plateaux: Armenian, Kurdish and Iranian Identities before Modernity (November 2015)

A one-day workshop was held focused on speakers of the Middle East’s major Indo-European languages, that took an explicitly comparative approach to the strategies and modes by which actors and communities constructed resultant identities.

Speakers:

Christine Allison (Professor of Kurdish Studies, University of Exeter)
Ahmad Ashraf (Managing Editor & Co-Principal Investigator of Encyclopaedia Iranica, Columbia University)
Arezou Azad (Lecturer in Medieval History, University of Birmingham)
Djene Rhys Bajalan (Lecturer, American University of Iraq Sulaimani)
S. Peter Cowe (Professor of Armenian Studies, UCLA)
Bert G. Fragner (Professor of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Tim Greenwood (Lecturer in Medieval History, University of St. Andrews)
Boris James (Researcher at Ifpo (Institut Français du Proche-Orient), Erbil)
James R. Russell (Professor of Armenian Studies, Harvard University)

'What is the city but the people?' (March 2016)

A two-day workshop on '‘What is the city but the people?’ Urban Identities between the Civic and the Ethnic' was held. The workshop focused on the interplay between civic and ethnic identities and took a comparative approach to their construction in urban contexts from Archaic Greece to the Ottoman Empire.

8 Sessions, 16 speakers.

And you shall be unto me a Kingdom of Priests, a Holy Nation (June 2016)

A two day conference included:

Day 1 - Keynote Lectures:

Charlie Winter (Georgia State University, Alabama)

Islamic State: The Cynic’s Utopia

Julia Bray (University of Oxford)

Vexed Questions

Day 2 – Various talks

Keynote Lecture:

Fred Donner (University of Chicago) The Concept of umma in early Islam

Climate and History Redux (October 2016)

Lecture Held:

'Climate and History Redux: Research Notes on the Coupling of Scientific Data and Historical Method'

Nicola Di Cosmo (Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies, Institute for Advanced Study). I

Nicola discussed the problem of developing a historical method able to accommodate scientific data on climate and the environment that is changing our perception of the past.

Seminar Series: ‘The Long History of Ethnicity & Nationhood Reconsidered’ (12 Seminars held)

Race and Nation in America from Obama to Trump (January 2017)

Gary Gerstle’s paper on the major struggles over race and nation in an era defined by the war on terror, the presidency of Barack Obama and the election of Donald Trump.

The paper was accompanied by the presentation of the second edition of Gary Gerstle’s book ‘American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century’, to be released by Princeton University Press in February 2017.

"A Faithful Echo of Medieval Spain" (February 2017)

The seminar was on “A Faithful Echo of Medieval Spain”: Philosephardism and Medievalist Nostalgia in the Writing of Traditionalists and Proto-Fascists in Early Twentieth-Century Spain' with Elisabeth Bolorinos Allard (University of Oxford).

Identity and Confessional Mobilization in Medieval Baghdad (February 2017)

This seminar was on 'Identity and Confessional Mobilization in medieval Baghdad: a Micro History of the Neighbourhoods of Bab al-Basra and al-Karkh (945-1258)' with Nassima Neggaz (University of Oxford).

Revisiting Indigeneity: Ethnicity and Nationalism in Palestine (March 2017)

This seminar was on 'Revisiting Indigeneity: Ethnicity and Nationalism in Palestine' with Ilan Pappe (University of Exeter).

Byzantinism, Hellenism, and Roman Republicanism: Byzantine Identities as Constructs of European Fantasy and Western Hegemony? (May 2017)

Speaker: Yannis Stouraitis (University of Vienna)

Émigrés in Saint Petersburg: Aristocratic Cosmopolitanism and Xenophobia at the Time of the French Revolution (May 2017)

Speaker: Alexei Evstratov (Freie Universität Berlin)

Redefining Ethnicity: Western Theories and Indigenous Recreations of Jati (May 2017)

Speaker: Swarupa Gupta (Presidency University, Kolkata)

In the name of Women's Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (June 2017)

Speaker: Sara Farris (Goldsmiths, London)

Nationalism, Ethnicity, and the Phoenicians (April 2018)

The talk explored the long history of Phoenician ethnicity and nationhood.

Speaker: Josephine Quinn (University of Oxford)

Global Removal, Forced Labor, and Subjectivity in the Late Spanish Empire: The Transportation of Identity (November 2018)

The paper focused on narratives published by Cubans deported to the West African island of Fernando Poo from 1869 until the end of the century, exploring their appropriation of a number of existing discursive frameworks (the Black Legend; the Middle Passage; convivencia) to characterize their experiences and renegotiate their identities.

Speaker: Professor Susan Martin-Márquez, Rutgers University

Britain, Persia, and the Perils of Whig History (November 2018)

Speaker: Professor Ali Ansari (Professor of History at the University of St Andrews)

Shifting Loyalties? Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalist combatants in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) (November 2018)

The presentation examined the reactions of Catalan, Basque, and Galician nationalists to the outbreak and development of the Spanish Civil War from a comparative perspective, as well as the motivations of combatants who took up arms to defend the Republic, yet identified their own national identity as Catalan, Galician, or Basque.

Speaker: Professor Xosé Manuel Núnez Seixas (University of Santiago de Compostela)

Understanding Barbarian Migrations through Genomic Research (April 2017)

Lecture held: Patrick Geary (IAS, Princeton) presented the preliminary results of his collaborative, interdisciplinary genomic investigation into sixth-century population structures and movements between Pannonia and Italy.

Kingship, Nationhood and Constructions of Political Community: Locating Colonial India in Global Intellectual History (May 2017)

Speaker: Milinda Banarjee (LMU Munich/Presidency University, Kolkata)

The End of Silence: Accounts of the 1965 Genocide in Indonesia (Jube 2017)

Book launch: Speaker: Soe Tjen Marching (SOAS, London)

In the late 1960s, between one and two million people were killed by Indonesian president Suharto’s army in the name of suppressing communis. The End of Silence presents the stories of these individuals, revealing how many survivors from the period have been so strongly affected by the strategy used by Suharto and his Western allies.

Bigotry and Racism, From the Global to the Local (October 2017)

A RoundTable that brought together academics, writers, journalists and activists to discuss how racial prejudice is impacting our communities and how the growing hostility to immigrants and widespread Islamophobia are disrupting community relations and personal lives.

Shaista Aziz, freelance journalist, broadcaster, opinion writer and political commentator.

Neha Shah, a freelance journalist and campaigner.

Sunny Singh, an academic, journalist and creative non-fiction writer.

Chair: Dr Marius Turda (Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities and Reader in History, Oxford Brookes University)

Historicising Nationalism in Africa (October 2017)

Speaker: Miles Larmer

As part of The Long History of Identity, Ethnicity and Nationhood network, Miles Larmer (University of Oxford) presented on "Historicising Nationalism in Africa".

Racism in the Body of the Academy: Statues and Classrooms (October 2017)

Black History Month lecture 2017

Dr Nirmal Puwar, Reader in the Sociology Department of Goldsmith’s College, University of London.

Tudor Empire (October 2017)

Jessica S. Hower (Southwestern University) presented on "Tudor Empire: The Making of Britain and the British Atlantic World."

Medieval Political Prophecy and the Limits of National Identity (November 2017)

Victoria Flood (University of Birmingham) presented on "Medieval Political Prophecy and the Limits of National Identity"

Interracial Intimacies: Renegotiating the East African Asian Diaspora (November 2017)

Saima Nasar (University of Bristol) presented on "Interracial Intimacies: Renegotiating the East African Asian Diaspora"

Ethnicised Religion (January 2018)

Humanities & Identities seminar:

A round table was held: 'Ethnicised Religion and Sacralised Ethnicity in the Past & the Present' The discussion focused on the nexus of religious, ethnic and national identifications in colonial, anticolonial and postcolonial settings from Ireland to South Asia.

Expert Panel:

Elisabeth Bolorinos Allard, (Magdalen College, University of Oxford)

Faisal Devji, (Reader in Modern South Asian History, University of Oxford)

Peter Leary, (Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL)

The Surveillance of Sikh Bodies in the War on Terror (February 2018)

As racialization continued to accelerate in the war on terror, Islamophobia increasingly came to condition the lives of diasporic Sikh populations. Based upon a series of interviews with Sikh respondents, this talk examined their historical and contemporary positioning in Western nation states to demonstrate the complex ways in which Sikhs have been regulated through a wider racial politics of inclusion and exclusion.

Speaker: Katy Sian (University of York)

Power and Resistance in Immigration Detention: Lived Experiences of Women in Italy and Portugal (March 2018)

Drawing on fieldwork in immigration detention centers in Italy and Portugal, the talk explored how gender and sexuality shape women’s everyday experiences in detention in relation to the constructions of race, class, and nationality.

Speaker: Francesca Esposito

Renegotiating Ethiopian Nationalism: The Solomonic Myth in the Long Twentieth Century (March 2018)

The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by profound changes in the configuration of Ethiopia as a polity, and this paper will trace how Ethiopian intellectual and political elites proposed to reconfigure state nationalism in accordance with these changes.

Speaker: Sara Marzagora (SOAS)

Race and Nation in Detention (May 2018)

Drawing on fieldwork in two British immigration removal centres (IRCs), Mary discussed staff accounts of race and racism in detention. By focusing on staff accounts rather than detainees’ the paper sought to widen our understanding of the ways in which these institutions of confinement rest, reinforce and maybe sometimes, disrupt, ideas of race and belonging in British society.

Speaker: Mary Bosworth (University of Oxford)

Embracing Pluralism (June2018)

The paper explored the origins and evolution of contemporary Moroccan national identity, focusing on the legacy of the pre-colonial and colonial periods and the changes that have taken place as a result of social movements before and after the Arab Spring.

Speaker: Rocio Velasco de Castro, a lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Extremadura.

Identities in Transit (June 2018)

Identities in Transit: Spanish Civil War refugees and the Martinique route

Hannah Arendt, Aimé Césaire, and Michael Rothberg have studied the relationship between the violence of colonialism and the violence of the Nazi genocide. The paper focused on a particular place (Martinique)and two particular moments (in 1939 and in 1941) when refugees were detained on the Caribbean island.

Speaker: Tabea Alexa Linhard, Washington University in St. Louis

The Ballad, the Nation and the Uselessness of Myth: the Poetic Politics of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman (October 2018)

A talk by Adrian Daub, professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University.

Literary journals and anti-colonial struggle: the insurgent geographies of connection of the Casa Dos Estudantes do Império (January 2019)

A paper focused on Mensagem, a literary and political journal published by African writers and students in Lisbon between 1946 and 1964.

Speaker: Dr. Alexandra Reza, DPhil on anti-colonialism and literary journals in French and Portuguese

Empires of the Mind: explaining Charlie Hebdo, the Windrush scandal and Brexit (February 2019)

A talk that explored how both although both Britain and France are haunted by the glories of their imperial past and the anguish of colonial inequalities. The talk argued that until both countries lay to rest the ghosts of their imperial and colonial pasts, they will struggle to find peace and harmony.

Speaker: Robert Gildea, Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.

The origins and characteristics of macro-nationalism (February 2019)

A reflection on the emergence of pan-Latinism at the turn of the nineteenth century

Pan-nationalist movements, which appeared across Europe in the late nineteenth century, were part of the “first globalisation” process. Focusing more specifically on the case of pan-Latinism, the talk highlighted the major role played by intellectual and political elites in the development of this ideology, while showing that its relevance to other social classes was anything but obvious.

Speaker: Amotz Giladi, PhD in Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris)

'He didn't really talk about it': The (re)construction and transmission of a Free French past (October 2019)

The paper examined the wartime experience of Hilaire Marteau, a teenage member of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French who settled in Liverpool after the war. The paper aimed to reconstruct his story through writings and through interviews with his surviving family members. It revealed how Marteau represented his own past but also how he passed his story on to his relatives; suggesting ways in which historians might explore ‘second-generation’ memory of French resistance.

Speaker: Dr Chris Millington, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Manchester Metropolitan University

When 'I' becomes 'she': Writing the biography of Nathalie Sarraute (November 2019)

Most biographers find themselves confronting the question of how to incorporate “I-documents” into their third-person narratives. The paper explored the case of the French writer Nathalie Sarraute (1900-99) who was deeply opposed to biography and whose fiction repudiates all third-person narrative.

Speaker: Ann Jefferson, Emeritus Fellow in French at New College, University of Oxford

A conversation with Paul Preston : A People Betrayed (October 2020)

The foremost historian of modern Spain, related the story of how, from 1874 to the present day the Spanish people were betrayed by their political class, military and Church. A comprehensive history that chronicled the fomenting of violent social division by institutionalised corruption and startling political incompetence.

Speakers:

Sir Paul Preston CBE, FBA, Príncipe de Asturias Professor of Contemporary Spanish History at the LSE.

Professor Helen Graham, Professor of Modern European History at Royal Holloway University of London

Transnational Francoism; The British and The Canadian Friends of National Spain (November 2020)

A short lecture that explored the transnational nature of the British movement Friends of National Spain and contributes to the study of organized pro-Franco support in Great Britain and Canada during the late interwar and the early postwar periods.

Speaker: Bàrbara Molas, Ph.D. candidate in History at York University (Toronto) and Head of Doctoral Fellows at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR).

Syrian Voices: Individual perspectives on the Syrian diaspora (January 2021)

March 2021 marked the 10-year anniversary of the conflict in Syria. Since 2011, more than 12 million people left the country and around 30,000 individuals have resettled in the UK. A new oral history project entitled Syrian Voices shone a light on the struggles and triumphs of ordinary Syrians now resettled in the U.K. through a series of film and zoom recorded interviews. Mehreen Saigol and Angela Flynn discussed the project and introduced a short film on Muradi Bakir, followed by a round-table discussion with Muradi Bakir, Elisabeth Bolorinos and Meryem Kalayci.

Syria and Silence (March 2021)

The Silence Hub and the Oxford Network for Armenian Genocide Research invited ten individuals to talk about what the ongoing war means to them. Two questions were asked: 1. Where were you/what were you doing when you realised that Syria had turned from demonstrations to war/conflict? 2. What do you want to happen now/how do you want people to engage with the situation?

New protagonists of recent History (May 2021)

Talk Held: “New protagonists of recent History: Reassessing the Role of Women in the Francoist Fifth Column”.

Speaker: Assistant Professor Sofía Rodríguez (University of Cádiz, Spain)

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