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.
Past events
11 May 2022, Wednesday 6pm-7.30pm, Online
Speaker: Professor Kris Manjapra (pictured, Tufts University)
Chair: Professor Piers Ludlow (LSE International History)
In this presentation, Professor Manjapra will explore a constellation of four later-nineteenth century black scholar-activists — Martin Delany, E.W. Blyden, Anna Cooper, and Marcus Garvey — located across three continents. Their Pan-Africanism, when understood as a manifestation of reparations struggle, provides us insights into the way black vitality was imagined and enacted amidst continuities of colonial oppression.
5 May 2022, Thursday 6pm-7.30pm, Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE
Speaker: Professor Dominic Lieven (LSE International History)
Chair: Professor Piers Ludlow (LSE International History)
For millennia much of the world was ruled by emperors: a handful of individuals claimed no limit to the lands they could rule over and no limit to their authority. They operated beyond normal human constraint and indeed often claimed a superhuman or divine authority. In practice they ran the gamut from being some of the most remarkable men who ever lived, to being some of the worst and least remarkable. Professor Dominic Lieven's new book, In the Shadow of the Gods, is the first to grapple seriously with this extraordinary phenomenon.
4 May 2022, Thursday 6pm-7.30pm, Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE
Speaker: Mr Roger Hardy (Green Tempelton College, Oxford)
Chair: Professor Nigel Ashton (LSE International History)
The talk introduced Mr Roger Hardy's new book The Bride, where he uses both photography and oral history to illuminate the story of Palestine from 1850 to 1948.
3 May 2022, Thursday 6pm-7.30pm, Thai Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE
Speaker: Professor Laura Robson (pictured, Penn State University)
Chair: Dr Tanya Harmer (LSE International History)
This talk explored how colonial and neocolonial spaces from the Middle East to Latin America came to serve as laboratories for remaking refugees as mobile labour pools – a process supported by the simultaneous development of a body of international law redefining displaced populations as voluntary participants in Western-backed industrial development schemes across the Global South.
Sponsored by the department's Modern World History research cluster.
10 March 2022, Thursday 11am-12.30pm, CLM 3.02, LSE
Departmental Lecture: Empire, Russia, Autocracy: A Historian's View on the Ukranian Crisis
Speaker: Professor Dominic Lieven (pictured, LSE International History
Chair: Professor Vladislav Zubok (LSE International History)
In this lecture, Professor Lieven discussed the past and present geopolitical importance of Ukraine to Russia and Europe, stressing that Ukraine’s importance today – though still great – was much less today than in 1900. It also placed the present crisis within the comparative context of the end of empire.
Listen to a recording of the lecture here.
9 March 2022, Wednesday, 6pm-7.30pm, Zoom
Speaker: Dr Robert Steele (pictured, LSE International History)
Chair: Professor Piers Ludlow (LSE International History)
In this lecture, Dr Robert Steele discussed his current book project on Iran’s political and cultural connections with Africa in the 1960s and 70s, with a particular focus on the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Sponsored by the department's Contemporary International History and the Global Cold War research cluster.
3 March 2022, Thursday, 6pm-7.30pm, Thai Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE
Speaker: Professor Nigel Ashton (LSE International History)
The talk introduced Professor Ashton's new book False Prophets, which explores the reasons why British leaders have been unable to resist returning to the mire of the Middle East, while highlighting the misconceptions about the region that have helped shape their interventions, and the legacy of history that has fuelled their pride and arrogance.
Watch a recording of the lecture here.
8 February 2022, Thursday, 6pm-7.30pm, Zoom
Co-organised with LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre
Speaker: Professor Ricardo López-Pedreros (UCL)
Chair: Dr Anna Cant (LSE International History)
The first in a series of three talks on the subject of capitalism and class in the history of the Americas. The last decade has seen the publication of important scholarship from different disciplines on the making of the middle classes across the world. Professor López-Pedreros brought together some of the arguments put forward by scholars to open up a critical interdisciplinary conversation on how to rethink the historical formation of the middle classes—as a social category, a political project, a subjectivity, and a material reality—in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century.
Sponsored by the department's The Americas in World History research cluster.