In the autumn of 2023, we entered a shared online classroom created by the Global History Lab (GHL), a programme designed to support collaborative, research-driven historical learning across borders. The GHL began at Princeton University in 2012 and has since developed into a network of universities and NGOs committed to broadening access to the study of world history. The programme rests on a simple yet demanding proposition. Learners situated in markedly different contexts, including refugee settlements, cities under strain, and established universities, encounter one another as peers and produce new historical narratives together. Since its relocation to the University of Cambridge in 2023, the GHL has continued to extend this model. It draws on digital platforms to connect teachers and learners who would otherwise remain separated by geography and circumstance.
Aayushi, a PhD student in History at Cambridge, joined the programme as a Teaching Fellow and was partnered with the Modern University of Business and Science (MUBS) in Lebanon. It was through this partnership that she met Hadil and Ghiwa, two undergraduate students studying Public Health at MUBS. What followed was a year of collaboration, mediation, and ongoing negotiation over what it meant to study Global History across contexts affected by conflict, uncertainty, and unequal digital infrastructures. Here, we trace that experience and the forms of teaching and learning that emerged from it.
Living in the ‘Taught’ History
Doing Global History between Beirut and Cambridge during 2023–24 meant engaging with historical themes while witnessing comparable events unfold in real time. After the 7 October attack by Hamas, Israel initiated a major military campaign in Gaza, producing mass civilian casualties and a humanitarian crisis documented by international organisations. In September 2024, the conflict expanded into Lebanon. Strikes affected towns and villages across the south and reverberated into Beirut. Our sessions were interrupted by the distant sounds of drones or explosions, and unstable connectivity often caused students to drop out of calls. At times discussion continued despite this uncertainty; at others, it paused until conditions appeared to stabilise.
While these events unfolded in Gaza and Lebanon, protest movements emerged across the UK. In Cambridge, students and staff established an encampment on the grounds of King’s College, with tents, banners, reading groups, and teach-outs creating a temporary civic space. Protestors discussed international law, colonial histories, and the responsibilities of universities. As students in Lebanon postponed examinations because of airstrikes, students in Cambridge revised for theirs from within this improvised public forum.
Under these circumstances, teaching and learning Global History raised unavoidable ethical questions. We examined histories of imperial expansion, ethnic cleansing, and forced migration while comparable dynamics unfolded around us. Human rights were discussed even as they were violated nearby. We analysed political voice at a moment when it appeared increasingly constrained, and we debated the circulation of information while journalists and broadcasters faced mounting obstruction. By the end of most sessions, we reflected on the weight of occupying a dual position: as teachers and learners, and as participants in the histories under consideration. As we continued to meet in an online classroom, reports circulated of universities in Gaza being destroyed, of teaching and research coming to a halt, and of students and academics whose studies and livelihoods had been abruptly severed. These realities entered our discussions both through international news coverage and through protests in Cambridge. Discomfort became inescapable. Yet it enabled a sharper recognition that the study of Global History depends not only on primary and secondary sources, but also on the conditions in which teaching and learning take place.
Connectivity Beyond Borders
Our course operated through an extensive digital infrastructure that facilitated teaching and learning between Beirut and Cambridge. In the first part, ‘History of the World’, we engaged with pre-recorded lectures and readings before meeting twice weekly on Zoom to analyse broad historical patterns and examine specific case studies. The second part, ‘Qualitative Research Methods’, retained this configuration but shifted towards methodological training. We explored oral history and archival approaches and developed individual projects. We presented our work at the GHL Annual Conference, and wrote blogs for the Global History Dialogues website (for example, see Hadil and Ghiwa’s contributions).
Ordinarily, the GHL combines digital engagement with in-person collaboration, but due to the conflict it was impossible for Aayushi to travel to Lebanon during 2023–24. The opportunities for the cohort to meet in person in Lebanon were also limited by the violence. As a result, our online classroom became our sole shared space. It was pedagogically rich but posed its own challenges. Early sessions, with cameras off, long pauses, and uncertainty about when to speak, underscored how difficult it was to establish relationships between teacher and students, as well as between peers. Once the cohort collectively agreed to keep cameras on, discussions began to resemble a conventional classroom, and over subsequent weeks conversations flowed more naturally.
A discussion of Lebanon’s economic crisis, exacerbated by Covid-19, the Beirut port explosion, and renewed conflict in the south, marked a turning point in our classes. We traced how economic collapse translated into everyday constraints: rising healthcare costs, the erosion of public services, the casualisation of labour, and the difficulty of sustaining education amid currency devaluation and repeated disruption. While examining nineteenth and twentieth-century case studies of imperial extraction and debt, students repeatedly returned to their present. Discussions of colonial taxation regimes, for instance, prompted comparisons with contemporary austerity measures and the shifting burden placed on households. Similarly, conversations about labour precarity in colonial port cities resonated with students’ own experiences of short-term contracts, unpaid work, and interrupted study. These reflections grounded abstract discussions of global inequality in lived experience, and altered the dynamics of the classroom. Rather than historical case studies being mediated primarily through readings and lectures, analysis emerged through comparison and shared reflection between the present and the past. Teaching became more dialogic, and knowledge began to move in multiple directions.
Yet, even as our relationships strengthened, the structural inequalities embedded in the digital environment remained stark. Unstable internet connections, power cuts, and sudden background noise regularly interrupted our sessions and formed a constant backdrop to teaching and learning. Periodic open-house events (cross-cohort online sessions that brought together students from across the GHL) made these disparities more visible. In these gatherings, some students, particularly in Ukraine or the Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement in Uganda, struggled to maintain a stable connection and participate fully in discussion. Such disruptions challenged the notion of ‘connectivity beyond borders’ and foregrounded how the promise of digital learning across borders depends on infrastructures that remain unevenly distributed.
Language(s) of Global History
While the course’s digital infrastructure reduced the geographical distance between Beirut and Cambridge, language introduced a different kind of barrier. Across most of GHL’s partner institutions, teaching takes place primarily in English. Jeremy Adelman, GHL’s Programme Director, has observed that historians working across borders tend to rely on English to sustain a shared academic conversation, but this reliance imposes its own limits. When English becomes sufficient for participation, incentives to learn additional languages weaken, even though these languages often contain the conceptual and cultural resources necessary for interpreting different historical worlds.
Our classroom brought these tensions into focus. Most students were native Arabic speakers, and several had enrolled partly to strengthen their English, reflecting the broader pull of the language as an entry point into scholarly communities. Yet many found the linguistic demands challenging. Difficulties arose not only from vocabulary, but also from different English accents, speaking pace, and the effort required to process complex material in a second language. In response to these pressures, Aayushi invited Hadil to join as a Teaching Assistant. Students were encouraged to contribute in Arabic, and participation increased immediately. Hadil translated comments into English when this served the discussion. At other points, the conversation continued in Arabic because the pace of exchange made word-for-word translation impracticable. Translation itself was not our priority. Instead, our aim was to enable substantive engagement with historical material in whichever language best supported students’ confidence and analytical clarity.
For Hadil, articulating concepts in Arabic also proved intellectually generative. She often found herself expressing ideas she did not routinely formulate in that language. Other students likewise reported that moving between Arabic and English altered how they approached key ideas. Certain terms carried different implications in each language, and the process of translation prompted closer reflection on the historical concepts under discussion. One recurrent point of debate concerned the term ‘Global History’ itself. In Arabic, it is commonly rendered as al-tārīkh al-ʿālamī, a phrase that also connotes ‘universal history’. This translation opened up critical discussion about the assumptions embedded in the term. Hadil used this moment to unpack how Global History seeks to resist universalising narratives by foregrounding plurality, connection, and unevenness, rather than a single, totalising account of the past. Translation became a site of historical inquiry in its own right. The ‘global’ in Global History emerged for us not only from the material we studied, but from moments such as these, in which moving between languages exposed the limits of historical categories and required them to be collectively rethought.
Teaching and learning Global History between Beirut and Cambridge required continual adjustment rather than the application of fixed pedagogical models. Translation demanded deliberate pauses and a slowing down of discussion. Although much of the course operated in English, moments devoted to translating core concepts proved especially generative. The challenges of synchronicity further shaped the course. Power outages, insecurity, and disruption made rigid schedules untenable. However, the flexibility built into the GHL allowed teaching to prioritise historical skills over syllabus completion and to accommodate asynchronous engagement when needed. Studying history while living through crisis also altered the relationship between learning and knowledge production. Students moved beyond consuming historical narratives to actively producing interpretations shaped by present conditions. In this context, historical understanding emerged not at a distance from events, but instead alongside them.