A letter that mistakenly made its way into the Freud Archives reveals hidden tensions in the history of psychoanalysis - and, as Agnes Meadows explores, in the nature of archives themselves.
For many decades, archival documents taken from the Global South by British colonial officers have been quietly available to researchers at the National Archives. Tim Livsey explores the history and questionable ethics of this "open…
How do century-old debates about the "servant problem" reverberate through today's political struggles around migration, labour, exploitation, and race? Maia Silber explores.
From the 1970s onwards, basketball became an important source of expression, identity, and resilience in many Black British communities. Michael Romyn explores.
How does age shape the experience of refugeedom and migration? How have power structures used age, a supposedly objective measurement of worthiness and vulnerability, to grant some lives more legitimacy than others? Antoine Burgard…
What does it mean to engage students with difficult, traumatic, messy and complex histories of the British empire and the two world wars? How can we engage with the ‘un-commemorated’, whose names have not appeared on the memorial…
Have you ever wondered what happens to collective trauma as eyewitness memory fades? For descendants of eyewitnesses, do results of violence dissipate, vanish, or evaporate? Gwyn McClelland explores the evidence from Nagasaki.
The modern asylum process imposes upon refugees a requirement to recount their experiences to officials to determine their eligibility. Peter Gatrell considers what is at stake in analysing the surviving archival record.
Joe Moran reflects on his trip to scatter his father's ashes on Scattery, a tiny island off west Clare, Ireland, and in the process explores its resonances for histories of family, migration, and the power of small places.
In the early morning on Sunday 18 January 1981, a fire broke out at 439 New Cross Road in the London Borough of Lewisham. The fire was almost certainly the result of a deliberate racist attack. Thirteen young Black Britons lost their lives…
What might be the links - real and metaphorical - between Anne Frank's story of exile and persecution and the work of C.S Lewis? Margaret Reynolds explores.
In Dundee in the nineteenth century, Irish women employed in the city's jute mills pioneered a new activist organisation, the Irish Ladies Land League, fusing feminism, nationalism, and radical land reform. Niall Whelehan explores.
How should we understand the connections between the transatlantic slave trade, the expansion of the British Empire, and the history of Australia? Emma Christopher explores.
Just how much immigrant newcomers should have a voice in the political life of their new communities is a question that has occupied people for centuries. Bart Lambert explores the twists and turns of that issue in later medieval England in…
How did haircutting and haircare shape narratives of slavery, oppression, and belonging in the early modern Mediterranean? Stefan Hanß explores the intimate politics of hair.