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Events

Programme

2024

The Department of International History hosts numerous lectures, roundtables, debates and workshops by our academics, visiting academics and others. Members of the Department are also involved in a series of events around LSE. Below is a list of these events by chronological order. Our events are usually free and open to all with exceptions duly noted. We make video and audio recordings available whenever possible.

From time to time there are changes to event details so we strongly recommend that if you plan to attend this event you check back on this listing on the day of the event.

Socialist Conference portrait

14 June 2024, Friday 9am - 6pm (Conference)

"Socialist Ideas of Europe in the World - 1871 to 1968"

Venue: SAL.LG.04, Sir Arthur Lewis Building (SAL), LSE

Chair: Dr Dina Gusejnova and Mr Edoardo Vaccari

Can Socialism survive without an international(ist) vision? Can such a shared vision even exist? What role should an increasingly global left attribute to Europe?

The Conference will bring together graduate students, scholars, journalists, and political figures to reflect on the histories and competing traditions in international leftist politics and disentangle the complex relationship between history and current affairs.


Coffey

23 May 2024, Tuesday 6pm - 7.30pm 

Dr Rosalind Coffey Book Release: "The British Press, Public Opinion, and the End of Empire in Africa: The ‘Wind of Change’, 1957-60"

Venue: Alumni Theatre, Cheng Kin Ku Building (CKK), LSE

Dr Rosalind Coffey’s first book explores the cultural and political significance of British newspaper coverage of Africa during decolonisation. It argues that the press coverage not only influenced British policy and public attitudes, but also political and civic cultures in Africa. The book is the first in-depth study of the role of the British press in African decolonisation. It is also the first book to explore how British newspapers were received in Africa.

With the media covering global justice movements extensively today, the book is a timely exploration of transnational processes that effect (and inhibit) political and cultural transformations concerning colonialism.


Ingleson

7 May 2024, Tuesday 5pm - 6.30pm 

Dr Elizabeth Ingleson Book Release, "Made in China: When US-China interests converged to transform global trade"

Venue: Wolfson Theatre, Cheng Kin Ku Building (CKK), LSE

Chair: Prof Trevor Trubowitz

How did China—the world’s largest communist nation—converge with global capitalism? And when did this occur? In this event, LSE historian Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson argues that this convergence began in the early 1970s, when the United States and China re-opened trade and the interests of US capitalists and the Chinese state gradually aligned: at the expense of US labor and aided by US diplomats. 

The Phelan United States Centre is hosting this exciting event, featuring one of our own academics. 


300 x 500 Women and Diplomacy Conference IH Website Events Image

8 March 2024, Friday 10am - 6.30pm (Conference)

"Women and Diplomacy: From the Interwar to the Cold War"

Chair: Dr Artemis Photiadou and Dr Victoria Phillips

Download the Conference Programme 

Location: 

  • Conference Day (9.30am - 4.30pm): SAL.1.05, Sir Arthur Lewis Building (SAL), LSE
  • (CANCELLED) Evening Keynote Lecture (5pm - 6.30pm): MAR.2.04, Marshall Building (MAR), LSE

To mark International Women's Day and the tenth anniversary of the official opening of the Women's Library Reading Room at the LSE, the Department of International History’s project in History, Culture and Diplomacy is pleased to announce a day of papers, panels, and a keynote speech on women, diplomacy and politics, on Friday 8 March 2024. 

The event will be held in partnership with the LSE Library and its Women's Library, which will celebrate with its first Library Late evening event on Thursday 7 March 2024. On Friday, 8 March, the Department of International History conference will open with a paper by Denise M. Lynn, author of Where is Juliet Stuart Poyntz: Gender, Spycraft and anti-Stalinism in the Early Cold War, in which she will discuss Poyntz’s work at LSE during the interwar.

After a selection of panels and papers by faculty and emerging scholars, the day will conclude at 5:00pm with a keynote speech by the renowned award-winning biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at Seventy-five.”


Irelands Role in British Colonial Capitalism

28 February 2024, Wednesday 5:30pm - 7pm, Seminar

Ireland’s Role in British Colonial Capitalism : Irish “Men of Capital” and William Pitt’s Irish Proposals, 1784-1785

Venue: LSE, Marshall building, room 2.05 LSE 

Chair: Dr Dina Gusejnova

In addressing the British parliament in April 1785, the prime minister, William Pitt, proposed to give Ireland “complete liberty and equality” with Britain “in matters of trade”. Historians explain the subsequent failure of Pitt’s proposals in terms of divergent ideologies about trade. 

This Seminar will explore, this paper's focus on the concrete economic issues at stake in Pitt’s “Irish” proposals. The paper shows that Pitt’s proposals emerged from years of debates in which contemporaries conceived of the British Atlantic economy in terms of a systemic integration of trade, shipping, and credit that evokes the term “colonial capitalism”. Ireland’s dependent relationship with that system, and the perceived failure of “free trade” to overcome its poverty, led Irish “improvers” to devise rival plans to attract “men of capital” to Ireland. Pitt played an important role in this Irish debate by favouring one of these plans, but for fiscal rather than other economic reasons. That calculus made him vulnerable to attack from economic interests in Britain.

 


Hakim Adi photo RESIZE portrait

25 January 2024, Thursday 6pm - 7.30pm, Annual Lecture

"Affirming the History of African and Caribbean People in Britain" with Professor Hakim Adi

Venue: CLM.2.02, Clement House (CLM), LSE 
(99 Aldwych, London WC2A 2AE)

Chair: Professor Marc David Baer

It is now over 60 years since a professor of history at the University of Oxford infamously declared: ‘Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, only the history of Europeans in Africa’.

It might be hoped that such Eurocentrism had long been dead, but too often it appears to be alive, if not well, and still a major problem in the study and teaching of history in this country.

In this lecture Hakim Adi reflects on how affirming the history of African and Caribbean people enhances the study of the history of Britain and why a struggle against Eurocentrism in all its forms is still so important in higher education and beyond.


Gohel-DoctorTeacherTerrorist-Cover

18 January 2024, Thursday 6pm - 7.30pm, Book Launch

"Doctor, Teacher, Terrorist: The Life and Legacy of Al-Qaeda Leader Ayman al-Zawahiri" with Dr. Sajjan Gohel

Venue: MAR.1.08, Marshall Building (MAR), LSE 

Chair: Dr Kirsten Schulze

Dr. Sajjan Gohel’s book casts fresh light on al-Zawahiri's character and experiences in terrorism which has either never been discussed before or only briefly in passing reference. Al-Zawahiri's life in terrorism, spanned over half a century and intersected with some of the most important global geopolitical issues and conflicts across continents.

The book also helps us to understand more fully the evolution of al-Qaeda's motivations, methods, recruitment, and ideology, as well as how transnational terrorism developed.