Department of History

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Sascha Auerbach

Associate Professor of History, Faculty of Arts

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Biography

I am a historian of race, the state, and imperialism in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I was born in London, but did my degrees in the U.S. at Oberlin College (B.A.) and Emory University (M.A.,Ph.D.). Before coming to Nottingham, I held full-time posts in both the U.S. and Canada, most recently at the University of Northern British Columbia. I recently completed a year-long research sabbatical, supported by the Leverhulme Foundation. In the past, my work has also been supported by the US-UK Fulbright Commission, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Isaac Manasseh Meyer Fellowship (National University of Singapore). I am currently the Director of the Nottingham Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS), and the co-editor of the Cambridge University Press book series, "Histories of Slavery and its Global Legacies."

Expertise Summary

Originally trained as an historian of modern Britiain and the British Empire, my ongoing research projects decentre the history of the modern state in the nineteenth century and critically reinterpret the dynamics of race, gender and governance in a global context. This research encompasses a broad geographic remit (Europe, the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, South Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and Southeast Asia) and is underpinned by more than two decades of research in archives across these locales. In the broadest frame, through a combination of scholarship, grant capture, international collaborations and public engagement, I am hoping to accomplish three primary goals. Through my scholarship, I am trying to reconcile the foundational approaches of political, economic and social histories of governance, colonialism, and labour with the newer veins of work that focus on culture, identity and the agency of subaltern cohorts. Through my international collaborations and grant capture, my aim is to critically assess the many connections, both conceptual and concrete, that bridged the histories of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds in the nineteenth century. In terms of public engagement, my goal is to foster a rethinking of the modern state and its deep embedding in the global history of race, migration, and colonial dynamics of rule and resistance.

I can supervise undergraduate and postgraduate students with research interests in the following areas:

  • Late-stage slavery and its legacies in the nineteenth century
  • Comparative colonialism in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries
  • Chinese and Indian labour diasporas in the nineteenth century
  • Race and migration in the Global South
  • Medicine and public health in the colonial context

I am currently supervising the following Ph.D. theses:

Elizabeth Egan (w/Prof. David Lambert, Warwick), "Constructing and Contesting Creole Whiteness in Jamaica, 1865-1938"

James Hulbert (w/ Prof. David Lambert, Warwick and Dr. Alex Korb, Leicester), "Before High Imperialism: Exploring the trans-imperial nature of British colonial violence in Australia, India and South Africa, 1857-1884"

I expect to be on research leave in the autumn of 2023.

Teaching Summary

Over the past twenty years, I have offered a wide array of modules at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. These have ranged from general histories of modern Europe to MA seminars on… read more

Research Summary

Informed by the paradigms of New Imperial History, postcolonial theory, cultural history, legal theory and Subaltern Studies, my work explores how everyday encounters between individuals and the… read more

Department of History

University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

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