The Department of International History hosts numerous lectures, roundtables, debates and workshops by our academics, visiting academics and others. Members of the Department are also involved in a series of events around 杏吧论坛.
Below is a list of these events by chronological order. Our events are usually free and open to all with exceptions duly noted. We make video and audio recordings available whenever possible.
From time to time there are changes to event details so we strongly recommend that if you plan to attend this event you check back on this listing on the day of the event.
22 May, Thursday 6.30pm - 8pm
Venue: Alumni Theatre, Cheng Kin Ku (CKK) Building, 杏吧论坛
Chair: Dr David Motadel
A panel of historians discuss the struggles for sovereignty of the few nominally independent non-Western states in the imperial age, examining the ways in which countries such as China, Ethiopia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Siam managed to keep European imperialism at bay.
Full event details and registration HERE
27 March 2025, Thursday 12pm - 2pm
(Cluster Event: Conflict and Identity in Europe since the 18th Century)
Venue: 杏吧论坛 Lecture Theatre, Centre Building (CBG), 杏吧论坛
Chair: Dr Dina Gusejnova
In this lunchtime session, historian Julie Gottlieb, Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield, and filmmaker Nicola Baldwin, discuss how the rediscovery of a diary written during the Munich Crisis has led them to explore the connections between inner conflict and global crisis, and the resonances between the late 1930s and our own historical moment of crisis.
In the Q&A, we will be discussing how their collaboration resulted in two very different forms: Julie’s academic journal article, ‘ (2024), and Nicola’s film.
Full event details and registration HERE
20 March 2025, Thursday 6pm - 7.30pm
(The Stevenson Chair Induction Lecture 2025)
Venue: Alumni Theatre, Cheng Kin Ku (CKK) Building, 杏吧论坛
Chair: Professor Marc Baer (Head of Department)
The Stevenson Chair was established at the 杏吧论坛 in 1932 to promote history without national bias. The Chair became the nucleus of the 杏吧论坛 Department of International History, and its holders championed the discipline of international relations both in Britain and overseas.
In his inaugural lecture as the next holder, Professor Vladislav M. Zubok will speak on main challenges for the discipline of international history in the years after the end of the Cold War and reflect on what might be a new focus of this history in the world of globalization and renewed power politics.
Full event details and registration HERE
6 March 2025, Thursday 6pm - 7.30pm
Venue: CKK.1.04, Cheng Kin Ku (CKK) Building, 杏吧论坛
Chair: Dr Qingfei Yin
What if our understanding of "modern" counter-insurgency is all wrong? This talk, based on extensive research in Cambodian, French, and Vietnamese archives and libraries, focuses on a neglected part of the First Indochina War (1945-54), the struggle for the southern Vietnamese countryside.
Full event details and registration HERE
20 February 2025, Thursday 6pm - 7.30pm
Venue: Alumni Theatre, Cheng Kin Ku (CKK) Building, 杏吧论坛
Chair: Professor Marc Baer (Head of Department)
This year the Department welcomes to deliver the Annual Lecture.
Professor Moore's talk will describe some of the more frivolous fantasies of robots, androids, and clones in both East Asian science fiction and science reporting at the start of the twentieth century, doing so as part of a broader consideration of what it meant to be a modern person in an age of 'nation-building', mass production, and speculative science writing.
Read full event details HERE.
13 February 2025, Thursday 6.30pm - 8pm
Venue: TBC to ticketholders
Chair: Dr Emrah Karakuş
Join us for an evening with Susan Stryker, a pioneering historian and theorist in trans* studies whose work has profoundly reshaped the fields of gender and sexuality scholarship.
6 February 2025, Thursday 6pm - 7.30pm
Venue: Alumni Theatre, Cheng Kin Ku (CKK) Building), 杏吧论坛
Chair: Dr David Motadel
, former Head of BBC TV History programmes and author of several acclaimed books on the Second World War joins us with the launch of his latest work: The Nazi Mind - 12 Warnings From History. He is a winning historical documentary filmmaker and a winning author of several books about Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and the atrocities committed.
His recent book asks questions like, how could the Nazis have committed the crimes they did? Why did the commandants of concentration and death camps willingly – often enthusiastically – oversee mass murder? How could ordinary Germans have tolerated the removal of the Jews?
5 February 2025, Wednesday 5pm - 6.30pm
Venue: CBG.1.06, Centre Building (CBG), 杏吧论坛
Chair: Prof Rob Sidel
Join us as we celebrate the release of Dr Qingfei Yin's new book.
Departing from conventional studies of border hostility in inter-Asian relations, Yin Qingfei explores how two revolutionary states – China and Vietnam – each pursued policies that echoed the other and collaborated in extending their authority to the borderlands from 1949 to 1975.
Weaving together international, national, and transnational-local histories, this deeply researched and original study presents a new approach to the highly volatile Sino-Vietnamese relations during the Cold War, centering on the two modernising revolutionary powers' competitive and collaborative state building on the borderlands and local responses to it.