Britain since 1688
Modern British History has had a long and distinguished career at the University of Illinois, sustained by the ongoing, if changing, significance of Britain and its empire to world history and contemporary political, social and cultural questions. On the eve of the new millennium, scholarship in British history is more robust than ever, drawing on methodological approaches from colonial studies, postcolonial theory and women's, feminist and cultural history.
The British History field at Illinois, "Britain and the Empire-Commonwealth from 1688," takes these new approaches into account without sacrificing attention to either empirical research or those "national" narratives which continue to have relevance even as globalization has become the watchword of the findesiecle. Thus, students who specialize in Modern Britain are encouraged to ground themselves in both the political trajectories and the cultural politics of the imperial nationstate from its seventeenth century origins through decolonization.
Particular attention is paid to the British empire in India, and to the impact of imperialism on metropolitan society in the nineteenth century. The relationship of Britain to Europe, especially through imperial concerns and questions, is an integral part of the graduate program in the field, as are comparative and interdisciplinary approaches. Gender and sexuality are considered critical analytical tools for historical thinking, and their intersection with race, class and nation are treated as equally crucial for understanding modernity and related subjects in the British/imperial context.
The department's growing interest in transnational and global perspectives articulated through courses that interrogate the nation and offer models of nonnational investigative methods means that students who come to study "Britain" will have the opportunity to be trained in a variety of methodological approaches. Courses offered in the next few years will focus on Victorian Politics and Imperial Culture, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory, and British Women's History in Comparative Colonial Perspective. Graduate students specializing in Modern Britain are expected to do archival research in the United Kingdom and are encouraged to gain teaching experience in both national and comparative history.
Faculty in British History
- Antoinette Burton - (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1990), Modern Britain; South Asian women; feminist/cultural theory; women in the British empire.
- Shefali Chandra - (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2003), South Asia; women, gender, and sexuality; feminist and PostColonial studies.
- Caroline Hibbard - (Ph.D. Yale University, 1975), TudorStuart Britain; early modern Europe; and the Catholic Reformation.
- Mark Micale - (PhD, Yale) Associate Professor, European cultural and intellectual, science and medicine.
- Dana Rabin - (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1996), Early Modern Britain; legal, cultural, and gender history.
Associated Faculty in Modern European History
Peter Fritzsche - A specialist in modern German history and a former Humboldt Fellow, Professor Fritzsche's current research focuses on comparative questions of memory and identity and vernacular uses of the past in modern Europe. He is completing a book on Nostalgia and Modernity. His publications include Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (1990); A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (1992); Reading Berlin 1900 (1996); and Germans into Nazis (1998). With Charles C. Stewart, he edited Imagining the Twentieth Century (1997).
Harry Liebersohn - A specialist in European cultural and intellectual history, Professor Liebersohn is currently working on a book on world travel, 18001850. His publications include Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians (forthcoming, "Discovering Indigenous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso, and Romantic Travel Writing"
(AHR 99/3, June 1994), and Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 18701923 (1988).
John McKay - A specialist in modern European social and economic history, with particular reference to France, and a former Guggenheim Fellow, Professor McKay's current research focuses on the French Rothschilds and modes of enterprise andbehavior of the European middle classes in the nineteenth century. He is currently completing a coauthored book, A History of World Societies, 5th ed. (July 1999). Other publications include A History of Western Society. vol. 2: 1660 to the Present, 6th ed. (1998); Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport (1976); a translation with introduction of Jules Michelet, The People (1973); and Pioneers for Profit: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization, 18851913 (1970).
Mark Micale - A specialist in modern European cultural and intellectual history, with an emphasis on findesiecle France, and in the history of science and medicine, especially psychiatry. He currently has in progress two booklength projects: a history of medicine and masculinity and a history of the concept of psychological trauma. He is also the author of "Approaching Hysteria: Disease and its Interpretations" (1995), the translator of "Beyond the Unconscious: Essays in the History of Psychiatry" (1994), and editor of "Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity" (2000); "The Mind of Modernism" (forthcoming); and "Discovering the History of Psychiatry" (1996)
David Prochaska - A specialist in modern French history and former National Humanities Center Fellow, Professor Prochaska's current research focuses on the history of colonialism and postcolonial studies, especially colonial Algeria, the history of orientalism, and colonial photography. His publications include Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bone, 18701920 (1990); "Art of Colonialism, Colonialism of Art: The Description de l'Egypte (18091828)," L'Esprit Createur, vol. 34 (1994); "Ethnography of a Postcolonial Site: Sarnath," Journal of Southeast Asian Architecture, vol. 1 (1996); and "History as Literature, Literature as History: Cagayous of Algiers," American Historical Review, vol. 101 (1996).
Other faculty with Expertise in European Studies
Matti Bunzl - Department of Anthropology: Jewish and Austrian history; queer theory
Richard Burckhardt, jr. - Department of History: history of science
Clare Crowston - Department of History: France, comparative gender
William Kelleher - Department of Anthropology: contemporary Ireland
Diane Koenker - Department of History: Soviet Union, comparative labor, comparative gender
Edward Kolodjiez - Department of Political Science
Craig Koslofsky Department of History: early modern Germany, Renaissance, Reformation
Carol Skalnik Leff - Department of Political Science: comparative politics
Jean-Philippe Mathy - Department of French: cultural studies, intellectual life
Karl-Heinz Schoeps - Emeriti; Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures: Weimar, Third Reich, and DDR literature
Mark Steinberg - Department of History: Russia, comparative labor, popular culture
Websites Related to British History
Section One: British Libraries and Archives
- The British Library
- COPAC
- Cambridge University Library
- Bodleian Library (Oxford University)
- The Fawcett Library (The Women's Library)
- Churchill Archives Center
- Libraries and Archives Research Guide OnLine (LARGO)
- London School of Economics and Political Science Library
- Liddelll Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London
- The Commonwealth: Information