With the university semester gradually receding, it’s time to look back on an exciting inaugural year here at the CSMCH (and, if you missed anything, you can catch up with reports and podcasts simply by following the links in the text).
Our theme for the past academic year has been ‘democracy’, and almost all of our events tied in with this theme. The core of the Centre’s activity has been the fortnightly seminar series, which brought an exceptional range of scholarly talent to the university.
We opened the year with an exciting – and polemical – roundtable on ‘truth and democracy’. This was followed by a series of talks by Vincent Tiberj (Sciences Po) on French democracy, Malte Rolf (Bamberg) on Soviet visions of modernity, Lorena de Vita (Utrecht) on the German-Israeli reparations agreement of 1952, Esra Ozyurek (LSE) on Holocaust memory and Muslim Germans, Jake Blanc (Edinburgh) on dam protests in 1980s Brazil, and a double bill on the history and geography of South Asia with Rakesh Ankit (Jindal) and Nilanjana Mukherjee (IIT Delhi).
In the second semester, we got a chance to listen to Aditya Sarkar (Warwick) on the Hindu right in India, Peter Jackson (Glasgow) on interwar Franco-British relations, Sonja Levsen (Freiburg) on postwar education policy in France and Germany, Malcolm Petrie (St Andrews) on Scottish politics and the European question, and Rana Mitter (Oxford) on the reconstruction of postwar China. Our last event of the semester was a book launch by our Edinburgh colleague Felix Boecking, who discussed his research on the mid-twentieth century Chinese economy with Rana Mitter.
Our seminar series was complemented by a range of other activities, from a Czech New Wave film screening series, to a major public event on academic freedom in Uganda, China, Turkey and Bangladesh. In addition, our enterprising affiliated students set up a CSMCH Discussion Group, which met several times throughout the year. They tackled issues as complex and controversial as the Catalan crisis and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a convivial environment.
Last but not least, we hosted two visiting scholars and students this year. Our inaugural CSMCH-IASH Visting Postdoctoral Fellow was Rakesh Ankit from OP Jindal University in Delhi, who pursued his research on Indian Communism while he was in Edinburgh from November 2017 to January 2018. And we hosted a Belgian Erasmus+ student, Birgit Ampe, who assisted with the running of the Centre and produced a three-part series for the blog on Indian soldiers in the First World War.
Despite this bewildering list of activities, some of this year’s achievements have been more intangible. The conversations in the pub after each seminar; the exchanges between students in the discussion group; the contributions to the CSMCH’s blog and social media pages; or the new ideas that have emerged out of chance encounters. These are exactly the kinds of benefits that a research centre can bring.
So, thank you to all of you for taking part in the life of the Centre. We hope to welcome you back next year – when we will be tackling the theme of ‘space’ – and we look forward to continuing some of the stimulating conversations that have already begun.
— Emile