InternatIonal SemInar on DecolonIzatIon

reunion conferenceJuly 5–7, 2016 | WaShIngton, Dc | #Decol2016

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Welcome

The National History Center of the American Historical Association is pleased to welcome you to the International Seminar on Decolonization Reunion Conference.

Each summer from 2006 through 2015, fifteen historians at the beginning of their careers attended the month-long International Seminar on Decolonization. Sponsored by the National History Center, hosted by the Library of Congress, and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, these seminars provided participants a unique opportunity to conduct research, write papers, and exchange ideas with one another about the phenomenon of decolonization. The Reunion Conference brings together alumni from the decade-long seminar to reflect on the seminar’s accomplishments, to honor the scholarship of its participants, to define the current parameters of the field, and to forge future directions for research.

Seminar Founder and DirectorWm. Roger Louis

Program Committee MembersMiguel Bandeira Jerónimo, University of CoimbraJennifer L. Foray, Purdue UniversityLeigh Gardner, London School of EconomicsJessica Pearson-Patel, University of Oklahoma

National History Center StaffDane Kennedy, DirectorAmanda Moniz, Associate DirectorAmanda Perry, Program Assistant

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ReWRiting the Revolution: the Decolonization SeminaR helpS FoRge a neW FielD

In the September 2105 issue of Perspectives on History, Dane Kennedy reflects on the contributions of the seminar.

It is a wonderful thing to witness the birth of a new historical field. I’ve had the privilege to be party to such an event as a founding faculty member of the International Decolonization Seminar, which came to an end this summer after a remarkable 10-year run. Starting in 2006, each year the seminar brought 15 early-career historians to Washington, DC, where they spent the hot, steamy month of July exploring the incomparable resources of the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and other area research institutions, engaging in vigorous debates with faculty leaders and one another, and writing in-depth research papers that became the basis for countless articles, book and dissertation chapters, conference presentations, and other scholarship on decolonization. Over the past decade, the 150 seminar participants have helped to forge a new and vibrant field of study.

I do not mean to suggest that until the launch of the seminar historians had not noticed what Farina Mir has recently referred to as one of “the most significant events or processes of the 20th century.” Christopher Bayly, Frederick Cooper, John Darwin, and various other distinguished historians had already written important works on the subject. Wm. Roger Louis was arguably the leading authority on the British withdrawal from empire long before he envisioned the idea of the seminar and served as its director from start to finish.

Even so, a decade ago few historians saw decolonization as a distinct field of study. In the early years, most of the seminar participants identified themselves as historians of empire or the Cold War or particular countries or regions. But once they came together, they discovered that their individual research interests often overlapped, revealing common patterns and parallel trajectories. Perspectives were widened, insights gained, friendships forged, collaborations created, and an intellectual cohort brought into being. The international composition of the seminar proved especially valuable and generative. Participants came from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, India, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Malaysia, Portugal, Turkey, Singapore, and the United States. Each of them contributed particular experiences, skills, observations, and information to what became a common enterprise. Together they broke down cultural and intellectual barriers, enriching their own research and the field of decolonization as a whole.

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What the seminar accomplished can be measured in a variety of ways. Seminar alumni have introduced new courses on the history of decolonization at their home institutions. They have organized panels at meetings of the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the North American Conference of British Studies, and other scholarly venues. They have founded the H-Net listserv H-Decol. And, of course, they have published lots of books and articles, creating an intellectual synergy around the issue of decolonization that has become all but impossible to ignore.

Above all, the seminar alumni have contributed to a wholesale reassessment of decolonization—its causes, character, and consequences. When the seminar launched, the story of decolonization was told almost exclusively in terms of the political and diplomatic struggle between imperial states and anticolonial nationalists. This was an important story, to be sure, and it remains integral to our understanding of decolonization. But over the past decade, the range of issues that have attracted the attention of seminar participants has multiplied. Whereas many historians once believed decolonization took place mainly in the colonies, it is now recognized as having had an equally profound impact on imperial homelands. Formerly regarded as a moment of great rupture, it is now understood to have involved substantial continuities as well. Interest has increasingly shifted from the actions of states to the influence of international agencies like the United Nations, multinational conglomerates like Lonrho, and nongovernmental agencies like Oxfam.

Much recent research has also moved from the state to the local level, where decolonization’s experiential impact on peoples was more readily apparent and where factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexuality contributed to community mobilization and identity formation. The crucial issue of sovereignty—its nature, its scope, and the conditions and consequences of its transfer—is increasingly understood to have been far more variable, contested, and problematic than once supposed. This has helped spur greater interest in issues such as the drawing of borders, the expulsion of peoples, and the construction of national and subnational loyalties. Spatial, social, cultural, and other considerations now jockey with political ones for prominence in interpretations of decolonization.

When I joined the team of faculty that Roger Louis assembled for the inaugural seminar in 2006, I never imagined that it would last as long as it did or have such a profound impact on the study of decolonization. Nor, I suspect, did Roger or the other veteran seminar faculty: Philippa Levine (Univ. of Texas at Austin), Jason Parker (Texas A&M Univ.), Pillarisetti Sudhir (American Historical Association), and Marilyn Young (New York Univ.). Each of us brought a different expertise and set of interests to the seminar, which also benefited over the years from various guest faculty: Julia Clancy-Smith (Univ. of Arizona), John Darwin (Oxford Univ.), Jennifer Foray (Purdue Univ.), Joseph Miller (Univ. of Virginia), and Lori Watt (Washington Univ. in St. Louis). Parker, Foray, and Watt were themselves alumni of the seminar. I’m sure I speak for all of them when I say that it has been a rare privilege to be part of this seminar, getting to know so many talented young historians from so many different countries and bearing witness to their vibrant role in reshaping our understanding of decolonization.

Finally, it should be stressed that the seminar would not have been possible without the remarkable generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded its 10-year run, and the wonderful hospitality of the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, which provided the magnificent setting and support for our proceedings. •

— Dane Kennedy, September 2015

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conFeRence ScheDule

tuesday, July 5

9:00–10:00 am Optional Private Tour of The Value of Money, led by Ellen FeingoldThe National Museum of American History 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001

1:00–1:10 pm Welcome from the Kluge Center, Jason Steinhauer

1:10–1:20 pm Welcome from The American Historical Association, Dana Schaffer

1:20–1:45 pm Opening Remarks, Wm. Roger Louis

2:00–3:15 pm Resources, Technology, and Economics in the Era of Decolonizationchair: Guiliano Garavini, University of Padua

Building an Oil Empire: U.S. Oil Companies and the Reshaping of Labor Relations in Libya, 1951–1981 | Elisabetta Bini, University of Trieste

If All Else Fails, Ask America: Facing Colonial Exclusion in Nazareth Leena Dallasheh, Humboldt State University

Making the Hydro-Nation: Sovereignty and Regionalism in India, 1950s–1960s Daniel Haines, University of Bristol

Shifting Sudan: An Economic Region Between Interwar Imperialism and the Age of Development | Alden Young, Drexel University

3:30–4:45 pm Empire at War chair: Andres Rodriguez, University of Sydney

Sentencing and Executing in the Metropolis during Decolonisation: The Case Study of “Fort Montluc” | Marc André, Associated researcher of the Larhra (Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes/Historical research laboratory of Rhone-Alpes)

Doing Justice or Guarding National Unity: Sentencing Female ‘Traitors’ in Times of Transition | Eveline Buchheim, NIOD, Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies

Bad Blood in the Post-War Netherlands: Indonesian Decolonization as Interpersonal Conflict | Jennifer L. Foray, Purdue University

At the Crossroads of Empire: Neutral Macau during the Second World WarFelicia Yap, London School of Economics, Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Center

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Wednesday, July 6

9:00–10:30 am Drawing Borders, Building Communitieschair: Aiyaz Husain, U.S. Department of State

Portuguese Empire’s Migrants of Decolonization Settled in Brazil (1974–1977)Isabel de Souza Lima Junqueira Barreto, Fluminense Federal University

Who Wants an East African Federation? Michael Collins, University College London

The Integration of African Chiefdoms into the Colonial Administration: Institutional Change or Institutional Persistence? Leigh Gardner, London School of Economics

Decolonizing Borders in South Asia Elisabeth Leake, Royal Holloway, University of London

“Federations I Have Known…” Jason Parker, Texas A&M University

Eurafrique: Decolonization by Participation Anne-Isabelle Richard, Leiden University

10:45 am–12:15 pm Roundtable: Teaching the End of Empirechair: Annalisa Urbano, Universitaet Bayreuth

Stephen Jackson, University of Sioux FallsMairi MacDonald, University of TorontoJessica Pearson-Patel, University of OklahomaKate Stevens, University of OtagoAkhila Yechury, University of St. Andrews

12:15–1:30 pm Lunch

1:45–3:15 pm Languages of Independence, Histories of Decolonization chair: Erik Linstrum, University of Virginia

Two Corollaries to the Monroe Doctrine: Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperial Imperialism Charlie Laderman, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge

Taming Babel: Language, Colonialism, and Legacies in British Malaya Rachel Leow, University of Cambridge

Decolonizing Words: A Contribution to the History of French Empire’s Decline Élodie Salmon, Paris-Sorbonne University

Decolonization and the Writing of Indian History Rajagopal Vakulabharanam, University of Hyderabad

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3:30–5:00 pm Global Connections in a Decolonizing Worldchair: Elizabeth Buettner, University of Amsterdam

The Mutual Influence of India and Palestine, 1933–1939 | Lucy Chester, University of Colorado Boulder

Developing Control: Development Policies and Violent Trajectories of Late Colonialism in Portuguese Africa (1945–1975) | Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, University of Coimbra

Orientalism at Bay: Lebanon, the United States, and Edward Said’s Postcolonial Moment | Maurice Jr. Labelle, University of Saskatchewan

“They Are All Lumumbas”: Anti-Colonial Solidarities and Media Representations in the United Arab Republic during the Congo Crisis, 1960–1961 Zoe LeBlanc, Vanderbilt University

Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War: A Collaborative Research Network Su Lin Lewis, University of Bristol

Nehruvian Ideals; African Realities: Apa Pant and Disciplined Decolonization in East Africa, 1948–1954 | Gerard McCann, University of York

thursday, July 7

9:00–10:30 am Between Empire and Independence chair: Ellen Feingold, Smithsonian Institution and Georgetown University

In the Aftermath of Power Transfer: Anti-French Sentiments and the Rhetoric of “Unfinished” Decolonization in Postcolonial Ivory Coast | Abou B. Bamba, Gettysburg College

To Mecca by Land or by Air: Decolonizing the Hajj in Nigeria, 1955–1963 Matthew M. Heaton, Virginia Tech

Afterlife of Empire: The Life History and Colonial/Postcolonial Careering of Arthur Hugh Bunting | Joseph M. Hodge, West Virginia University

Leaving New China: Decolonisation and the Departure of Foreigners from Communist Shanghai, 1949–1966 | Jon Howlett, University of York

The Specter of Secession: Decolonization and the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution of India | Srijan Sandip Mandal, University of Hyderabad

10:45 am–12:15 pm Roundtable: Humanitarianism and Developmentchair: Juan Romero, Western Kentucky University

John Aerni-Flessner, Michigan State UniversityEmily Baughan, University of BristolCharlotte Lydia Riley, University of SouthamptonKara Moskowitz, University of Missouri–St. LouisTehila Sasson, Institute of Historical Research

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12:15–1:30 pm Lunch

1:45–3:15 pm Decolonizing Global Governance: International Organizations and the End of Empirechair: Laura Robson, Portland State University

Medicine and Public Health in North Africa: State-Building and International Aid, 1956–1975 | Jennifer Johnson, Brown University

Molding the Intercultural Mind: Peace Corps Training in Hawai’i Sarah Miller-Davenport, University of Sheffield

The Internationalization of Social Policies and Late Colonialism: The Portuguese Empire and the International Labour Organization (1944–1963) | José Pedro Pinto Monteiro, Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa

The Turn to Sanctions by the Anti-Apartheid Movement Simon Murray Stevens, European University Institute

“World Organization Intoxication”: The Arab League at the San Francisco Conference, 1945 | Stefanie Wichhart, Niagara University

3:30–5:00 pm Rethinking the End of Empire: New Approaches to the Study of Decolonization chair: Emma Hunter, University of Edinburgh

Decolonization and the History of Emotions: A Case Study from British Africa Ellen Boucher, Amherst College

Two Commonwealths? Re-Thinking the Commonwealth of Nations: 1921–1975 Andrew Richard Dilley, University of Aberdeen

Rehabilitating the Home: Women’s Self-Help at the End of Empire Elizabeth Prevost, Grinnell College

Apartheid’s Playground: Decolonization and the Pleasures of Holding Ground Caio Simões de Araújo, Graduate Institute, Geneva

The Unfinished Decolonisations of Settler Colonialism Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne University

7:00–9:00 pm Closing Reception at the National Museum of Women in the Arts1250 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005

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Recent publicationS

Aerni-Flessner, John. “Homemakers, Communists and Refugees: Smuggling Anti-Apartheid Refugees in Rural Lesotho in the 1960s and 1970s” Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies 13 (2015): 183–209.

———. “Development, Politics, and Public Perceptions of independence in Lesotho, 1960-1975” Journal of African History 55:3 (2014): 401–421.

Alon, Yoav. The Shaykh of Shaykhs: Mithqal al-Fayiz and Tribal Leadership in Modern Jordan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016.

———. “Shaykh and Pasha: Ottoman Government in the Syrian Desert and the Creation of Modern Tribal Leadership.” Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 59, no. 3 (2016): 442–472. 

———. “From Abdullah (I) to Abdullah (II): The Monarchy, the Tribes and the Shaykhly Families in Jordan, 1920-2012.” In Uzi Rabi. Ed. Tribes and States in a Changing Middle East. London: Hurst, 2016.

Bamba, Abou. African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016.

Boucher, Ellen. Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869-1967. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Byrne, Jeffrey. Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Chester, Lucy. Borders and Conflicts in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of the Punjab. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.

Clancy-Smith, Julia. Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

——— and Charles Smith. The Modern Middle East and North Africa: a History in Documents. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Dallasheh, Leena. “Preserving through Colonial Transition: Nazareth’s Palestinian Residents after 1948,” Journal of Palestine Studies (2016).

———. “Troubled Waters: Governing Water and Struggling for Citizenship in Nazareth,” International Journal of Middle East Studies (2015).

Dietrich, Christopher. “Oil Power and Economic Theologies: The United States and the Third World in the Wake of the Energy Crisis,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 3 (2016): 500–529.

———. “Mossadegh Madness: Oil and Sovereignty in the Anti-Colonial Community,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6, no. 1 (2015): 163–178.

Fletcher, Robert. British Imperialism and ‘The Tribal Question’: Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919–1936. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

———. “Decolonization in the Arid World,” in M. Thomas and A. Thompson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Fontaine, Darcie. Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

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Foray, Jennifer. “The Trauma of Liberation: Dutch Political Culture and the Indonesian Question in 1945,” Historical Reflections 41, no. 3 (2015): 79–94.

Gerits, Frank. “Bandung as the Call for a Better Development Project: US, British, French and Gold Coast Perceptions of the Afro-Asian Conference,” Cold War History 16, no. 3 (2016): 1–18.

Heaton, Matthew M. Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013.

Howlett, Jonathan and Robert Bickers. Britain and China, 1840–1970: Empire, Finance and War. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Hunter, Emma. Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy, and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Immerwahr, Daniel. “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” Diplomatic History 40 (2016): 373–391.

Irwin, Ryan. Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Johnson, Jennifer. The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Kuitenbrouwer, Vincent. “Beyond the ‘Trauma of Decolonisation’: Dutch Cultural Diplomacy during the West New Guinea Question (1950–1962),” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44, no. 2 (2016): 306-327.

Leduc-Grimaldi, Mathilde. Going Postal: (Hi)stories and Philately in Belgium. Royal Museum for Central Africa.

———. “New Light on the Writing of H.M. Stanley’s The Congo and the Founding of its Free State (1885),” English Studies in Africa 59, no. 1 (2016).

Leow, Rachel. Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Lewis, Su Lin. Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920–1940. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

Linstrum, Erik. Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016.

MacArthur, Julie. Cartography and the Political Imagination: Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016.

Marsh, Brandon. Ramparts of Empire: British Imperialism and India’s Afghan Frontier, 1918–1949. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Moskowitz, Kara. “‘Are You Planting Trees or Are You Planting People?’ Squatter Resistance and International Development in the Making of a Kenyan Postcolonial Political Order (c. 1963–78),” The Journal of African History 56, no. 1 (2015): 99-118.

Parker, Jason. Hearts, Minds, Voices: U.S. Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World. Oxford University Press, 2016.

———. “Decolonization, the Cold War, and the Post-Columbian Era,” in Robert McMahon, ed. The Cold War in the Third World. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Pearce, Justin. Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola, 1975–2002. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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Richard, Anne-Isabelle. “The Limits of Solidarity: Europeanism, Anti-Colonialism and Socialism at the Congress of the Peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa in Puteaux, 1948,” European Review of History 21, no. 4 (2014): 519–537.

Sasson, Tehila. “From Empire to Humanity: The Imperial Origins of International Humanitarianism and the Russian Famine of 1921–22,” Journal of British Studies 55 (2016): 519–537.

———. “Practising the British Way of Famine: Technologies of Relief, 1770–1985,” Co-authored with James Vernon, European Review of History: Revue Européenne D’histoire 22, no. 6 (November 2, 2015): 860–72.

Sebe, Berny, K. Nicolaidis, G. Maas (eds.), Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies. London: IB Tauris, 2015.

———. “From Post-Colonialism to Cosmopolitan Nation-Building? British and French Imperial Heroes in Twenty-First-Century Africa”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 5 (2014): 936–968.

Stanard, Matthew. Selling the Congo: A History of European Pro-Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

———. “The colonial past is never dead. It’s not even past: Histories of Empire, Decolonization, and European Cultures after 1945,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte/European History Yearbook (2016).

———. “Après nous, le déluge: Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, edited by Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Stevens, Simon. “Bloke Modisane in East Germany,” in Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War, ed. Quinn Slobodian. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015.

———. “The External Struggle Against Apartheid: New Perspectives,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 7, no. 2 (2016): 295–314.

Von Bismarck, Helene. British Policy in the Persian Gulf, 1961–1968: Conceptions of Informal Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Von Bulow, Mathilde. West Germany, Cold War Europe and the Algerian War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Veracini, Lorenzo and Edward Cavanagh (eds). The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Vince, Natalya. Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory, and Gender in Algeria, 1954–2012. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.

Watt, Lori. “Embracing Defeat, Eliding Empire in Post-Colonial Seoul, Autumn 1945,” Journal of Asian Studies (2015).

Wintle, Claire and Ruth Craggs (eds). Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945–1970. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.

Yechury, Akhila. “Imagining India, decolonising l’Inde française, c. 1947–1954,” The Historical Journal 58, no. 4 (2015): 1141–1165.

———. “‘La République continue, comme par le passé’: The myths and realities of the Resistance in French India,” Outre-Mers, Revue d’histoire 103 (2015).

Young, Alden. “African Bureaucrats and the Exhaustion of the Developmental State: Lessons from the Pages of the Sudanese Economics,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 7, no. 4 (forthcoming).

———. with Michael Woldemariam. “After the Split: Partition, Successor States, and the Dynamics of War in the Horn of Africa,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2016).

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SeminaR Faculty

Roger Louis, Seminar Leader, is Kerr Professor at the University of Texas and an Honorary Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. While President of the American Historical Association, he founded the National History Center and the Decolonization Seminar. He is the Editor in Chief of the Oxford History of the British Empire and its Companion Series. In October he will give a lecture to the US Naval Academy on Sea Power and Empires; and in November, the Weizmann Memorial Lecture in Israel, ‘Bevin Days’.

Julia Clancy-Smith is a Regents Professor of History at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She is the author of: Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900 (California UP, 2010) and Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904) (California UP, 1994) as well as co-editor and author of Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City in Text and Image (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009). Clancy-Smith is currently completing a co-authored text entitled, North Africa: from Queen Dido to the Arab Spring (Cambridge, 2017).

John Darwin is Professor of Global and Imperial History and Directory of the Oxford Centre for Global History at Oxford University. He is the author of numerous works including Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (2012) and The Empire Project: the Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830-1970 (2009).

Jennifer L. Foray (Seminar Faculty, 2012; Seminar Member, 2008) is an Associate Professor of History at Purdue University, where her work focuses on modern imperialism and decolonization, particularly in the Netherlands. Her seminar research focused on the Dutch commonwealth idea, popular in the 1930s and 1940s, and an expanded version of her seminar paper appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History in 2012. Her first book, Visions of Empire in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands (Cambridge University Press, 2012; paperback reissue, 2014) demonstrates how World War Two forced a rethinking of Dutch colonial practices and relationships. Her present book project is entitled “Occupational Aftershocks: War, Decolonization, and Dutch Political Culture.”

Dane Kennedy is the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University, where he teaches modern British, British imperial, and world history. He also directs the National History Center. He is the author of a half-dozen books, including The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (2005), The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (2013), and Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (2016).

Philippa Levine is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities and Co-Director of the Program in British Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently working on three main projects: a book she hopes to call The Empire Has No Clothes; a 3rd edition of The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset; and a four-volume compilation for Bloomsbury, The British Empire: Critical Readings.

Jason Parker completed his PhD in 2002 at the University of Florida under Bob McMahon. He joined the Texas A&M History Department in 2006, after teaching at West Virginia University. He is the author of Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937-1962 (2008) which won the SHAFR Bernath Book Prize. He has received research fellowships from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Truman Library Institute, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Mershon Center in support of

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his forthcoming book Hearts, Minds, Voices: U.S. Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World (2016) and of his next project, a comparative study of postwar federations in the Third World.

Pillarisetti Sudhir has been involved with the summer seminars on decolonization from the very beginning. He served as one of the seminar leaders for all the ten seminars. The former editor of Perspectives on History, he received his PhD in South Asian history from the School of Oriental and African Studies for a thesis on British attitudes to Indian nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. He is interested in the economic and cultural dimensions of decolonization.

Lori Watt is Associate Professor of History and International & Area Studies, and Director of East Asian Studies, at Washington University in St. Louis. Author of When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA, 2009), she is currently working on a manuscript called The Allies and the Decolonization of the Japanese Empire, which explores the intersection of decolonization, foreign occupation, and population transfers throughout the Asia-Pacific region after World War II. She has been affiliated with the National History Center’s International Seminar on Decolonization, as a participant in 2008 and as a facilitator in 2013.

Marilyn B. Young, New York University. Marilyn B. Young received her Ph.D. in 1963 from Harvard University and went on to teach at the University of Michigan and New York University. She is the author of Rhetoric of Empire and The Vietnam Wars and co-editor, often with Lloyd Gardner, of a number of collections of essays on Americans permanent wars.

cover: Chou, Jui-chuang, Resolutely support the anti-imperialist struggles of the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (detail), 1967. Yanker Poster Collection, Library of Congress.