Network
On 20 June 2025, the project will host the workshop Schooling for Empire, c. 1750-c. 1945 in collaboration with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
One outcome of the workshop is the establishment of a network of researchers working at the intersection of education and empire. The purpose of this network is to connect researchers working in the field with each other and to promote their work. Please see the list of members below, including their research interests and contact details.
Abdul Sabur Kidwai (King’s College, London)
Contact: abdul_sabur.kidwai@kcl.ac.uk
Research interests: Indian Muslim travel writing to Britain in the nineteenth century, with a focus on Urdu and Persian manuscripts, combining history and literature. He is particularly interested in the dynamics of religion, travel, and empire.
Alexander Scott (International Slavery Museum, Liverpool)
Contact: Alexander.Scott@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk
Research interests: the class, gender and racial politics of museum displays, and the historic patronage of universities by enslavers and colonists.
Alison Hight (Mississippi State University)
Contact: a.hight@msstate.edu
Research interests: the dilemmas British subjects faced in their efforts to universalize “British” institutions across their multinational empire during the long nineteenth century.
Anandita Singh (Assam University)
Contact: a.singhanandita@gmail.com
Research interests: Northeast India's comprehensive history; finding a niche in the timeline and impact of colonization, freedom struggle, and post-colonial era.
Anastasia Arsenis (University of Utrecht)
Contact: a.k.arsenis@students.uu.nl
Research interests: the role that educational systems have played in sustaining and perpetuating normative ideas about the nation-state, especially in maintaining the French colonial status quo on the island of Martinique.
Andy Carter (Independent scholar)
Contact: andy_kerr_carter@hotmail.co.uk
Research interests: the intersection of classicism and athleticism in British public schools and universities between 1850 and 1914.
Asma Shakeel (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)
Contact: asma.shakeel@lmh.ox.ac.uk
Research interests: the intersection of empire, missionaries, and imperial ecology.
Bhadrajee Hewage (Trinity College, Oxford)
Contact: bhadrajee.hewage@mansfield.ox.ac.uk
Research interests: developments in subcontinental Buddhism during the late colonial and early postcolonial periods.
Caitlin Harvey (University of Hull)
Contact: C.Harvey2@hull.ac.uk
Research interests: the history of migration, race, settlement, and education in a British imperial and global context; Indigenous history and the institutional and political development of settler/Indigenous societies since 1800.
Caitlin Wareing-Oksanen (Royal Air Force Museum)
Contact: cate.wareing@icloud.com
Research interests: education, wartime, pedagogy, material culture.
Cameron Bowman (Keble College, Oxford)
Contact: cameron.bowman@keble.ox.ac.uk
Research interests: anglophone justifications of slavery in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century; debates about slavery prior to the rise of abolitionism in Britain; the intellectual and cultural heritage from which slavery drew support.
Carissa Chew (University of Edinburgh)
Contact: Carissa.Chew@ed.ac.uk
Research interests: experiences of people of mixed Black and South Asian heritage in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda in the period 1940-1980.
Caterina Scalvedi (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Contact: caterinascalvedi@gmail.com
Research interests: Italian and European colonialism in Africa, education, fascism, labour, and Christian missions.
Catherine Hall (University College, London)
Contact: c.hall@ucl.ac.uk
Research interests: rethinking the relation between Britain and Empire in the early/mid-nineteenth century; the ways in which metropolitan ideas and practices have been shaped by the colonial experience.
Chris Campbell (St John’s College, Cambridge)
Contact: cjc236@cam.ac.uk
Research interests: the British Council, with a particular focus on race and cultural imperialism in the context of the late British Empire.
Clare Sargent (Radley College)
Contact: cds@radley.org.uk
Research interests: the intersection of libraries, historical bibliography, diaries, and empire.
Eleanor Villafranca Wikstrom (Balliol College, Oxford)
Contact: eleanor.wikstrom@balliol.ox.ac.uk
Research interests: the 20th-century U.S. system of English-only education in the Philippines as a transnational project of epistemic colonialism.
Elizabeth Dillenburg (Ohio State University at Newark)
Contact: dillenburg.1@osu.edu
Research interests: the history of Britain and the British Empire with a particular focus on gender and childhood.
Ella Palin (Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge)
Contact: esp39@cam.ac.uk
Research interests: early modern West Africa, long-run economic development in Africa, and the role of empire in shaping economies.
Francesco Scatigna (University College, Dublin)
Contact: francesco.scatigna@ucdconnect.ie
Research interests: British and French soft power strategies in Bakumatsu and Meiji Japan (1853–1912), especially the adaptation of Western powers from informal empire to a more equal relationship with Japan.
Giovanna Violi (Florida International University)
Contact: gviol003@fiu.edu
Research interests: young Black Martinican women’s educational migration to France during the 1920s and 1930s, including strategies to counter French colonial practices of exclusion and contributions to wider transnational networks as well as their homeland’s community.
Hilary Brash (Independent Scholar)
Contact: Archives@whs.bucks.sch.uk
Research interests: the intersection of public schools, archives, and empire.
Holly Hiscox (Open University)
Contact: holly.hiscox@open.ac.uk
Research interests: public schools, empire and the City of London, c.1828-1900; Rugby School and the making of an imperial financial elite.
Hugh Morrison (University of Otago, New Zealand)
Contact: hugh.morrison@otago.ac.nz
Research interests: a combination of missions, religious and childhood history, both for New Zealand and the wider British Empire.
Jessica Clark (Royal College of Art)
Contact: jessicaclarkxx@icloud.com
Research interests: empire, society, and economics of the early twentieth and their impact on exhibition, advertisement and engineering.
Karine Walther (Georgetown University in Qatar)
Contact: kvw@georgetown.edu
Research interests: American Missionaries, ARAMCO and the US-Saudi Special Relationship, 1890-1955.
Kate Pozgay (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Contact: Kate.Pozgay.2017@live.rhul.ac.uk
Research interests: constructions of white womanhood in British domestic spaces ca. 1876-1914 through the lens of imperially-sourced material culture.
Lucy Evans (University of Leicester)
Contact: lae9@leicester.ac.uk
Research interests: elite education and empire, focusing on literary representations of boarding schools in contemporary fiction and memoir, including British public schools’ colonial connections and the global export of the distinctively British boarding school model.
Maria Murad (Lincoln College, Oxford)
Contact: maria.murad@lincoln.ox.ac.uk
Research interests: training of colonial officers on the one-year Colonial Administrative Services course (formerly known as the Tropical African Services course), with a specific focus on its anthropological training.
Marie Ruiz (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France)
Contact: marie.jose.ruiz@u-picardie.fr
Research interests: migration, British history, emigration societies, emigrant letters, census, demography.
Mary Clare Martin (University of Greenwich)
Contact: M.C.H.Martin@greenwich.ac.uk
Research interests: history of childhood and youth, including religion, children’s illness, play and youth movements, in global and national contexts.
Molly Groarke (Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge)
Contact: mg2107@cam.ac.uk
Research interests: family networks in the nineteenth-century British Empire, particularly focussing on British antislavery and elite philanthropic movements.
Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa (Magdalen College, Oxford)
Contact: mrinalini.wadhwa@magd.ox.ac.uk
Research interests: intellectual and cultural history of empire, family law in colonial India, and global dimensions of Enlightenment thought.
Myriam Yakoubi (Jean Jaurès University in Toulouse, France)
Contact: myriam.yakoubi@univ-tlse2.fr
Research interests: British imperialism in the Middle East from WWI to the late 1950s, especially in Iraq and Jordan, as well as on transimperial connections across the British and French colonial empires.
Oli Charbonneau (University of Glasgow)
Contact: Oli.Charbonneau@glasgow.ac.uk
Research interests: transimperial history of U.S. rule in the Muslim-majority Southern Philippines (1899-1940s); global microhistory that uses a luxury hotel in Upstate New York to understand U.S. ascendancy and the forging of an American pedagogical empire.
Pragya Sharma (University of Brighton)
Contact: P.Sharma6@uni.brighton.ac.uk
Research interests: histories of knitting from the Indian subcontinent; concepts of domesticity, gender and labour within the craft practice.
Rohan Basu (Central European University, Vienna)
Contact: Basu_Rohan@phd.ceu.edu
Research interests: the British Empire, the long nineteenth century, and the history of science and religion: Jesuit mission in late nineteenth-century Calcutta and their involvement with the intellectual world of Indian nationalism; Indology.
Siobhán Daly (Kellog College, Oxford)
Contact: siobhan.daly@conted.ox.ac.uk
Research interests: post-colonialism, Orientalism, and Oxford’s historical influence on empire and colonial legacies.
Timothy J. Schmalz (Radley College)
Contact: TJS.Schmalz@radley.org.uk
Research interests: public schools and empire; European interwar cultural diplomacy and official and unofficial relations between Austria and Britain.
Tommy Madinson (University College, London)
Contact: thomas.maddinson.22@ucl.ac.uk
Research interests: politics of bordering, migration and the Channel; colonial histories and heritage across the UK.
Yuetong Li ( Murray Edwards College, Cambridge)