Category: Reviews
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The Role of Colonial Legacies in the 2017 Zimbabwe Crisis
By Carissa Chew This article, which is informed by two public lectures about the Zimbabwean political crisis that were held at the University of Edinburgh in the week beginning 20 November, discusses the role of colonial legacies in recent Zimbabwean political affairs. Firstly, this article provides a summary of the Zimbabwean crisis for the reader…
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Virinder Kalra’s ‘Pondering on the Revolutionary Subject: From Ghadar to Kirti’
By Carissa Chew Professor Virinder S. Kalra’s latest research paper, entitled ‘Poetic Politics from Ghadar to the Indian Workers Association’, discusses the enduring legacies of the Ghadar Party, a short-lived Indian nationalist movement which was centred in California during the First World War. Following economic hardship, which was heightened in 1906 by the Land Alienation…
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Gombrich’s A Little History of the World
By Daniel Sharp Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001) was best known as an influential art historian, but in 1936 his first book published was an overview of world history for children and adolescents from prehistoric times to the First World War. Gombrich was Viennese by origin but lived in Britain for most of his life having fled…
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Dictatorship and Democracy in the Brazilian Countryside: Rural Perspectives and New Periodisations
By Lewis Twiby On 14 November, as part of a series of lectures for the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History (CSMCH) the University of Edinburgh’s own Dr. Jacob Blanc gave a lecture on his recent research. Dr. Blanc’s research focused on the construction of the Itaipu Hydroelectric dam along the Brazilian-Paraguayan…
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Viking Zombies – A Research Seminar by Dr Clare Downham
Written by Grace Young Vikings and zombies generally are not things one would naturally think of in the same sentence. They are certainly not things most people would associate with Scotland, either. However, this is exactly what Dr. Clare Downham of the University of Liverpool gave a seminar on. For clarification, while Downham really was…
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Notes from the Late Antique and Medieval Postgraduate Society on Experiencing Medieval Spaces
Written by Daniel Sharp On Monday 23 October, I attended a meeting presented by the Late Antique and Medieval Postgraduate Society. The society is conducting a series of research seminars this year, in which papers and research is presented and discussed. The meeting I attended was not, unfortunately, a seminar – it was a general…
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Meg Foster’s ‘Black Douglas’: The Bushranger and the Man (Diaspora Research Seminar Review)
Written by Lewis Twiby On Tuesday 31 October, Meg Foster, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New South Wales, gave a research seminar on the infamous bushranger Black Douglas. This was in an effort to highlight her research in this overlooked aspect of Australian national history. During Australia’s gold rush of the 1850s, a…
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Public Lecture Review: Dr. Shashi Tharoor’s ‘Looking Back at the British Raj in India’
Written by Carissa Chew On Monday 2 October 2017, as part of the University of Edinburgh’s World India Day celebrations, acclaimed author, Member of the Indian Parliament and former UN Under-Secretary-General, Dr. Shashi Tharoor, delivered a forceful and poignant speech at McEwan Hall in which he made plain the exploitative, oppressive and violent nature of…
Retrospect Journal 