Global networks
Birmingham’s history department is at the vanguard of global and international history with world-class research on humanitarianism, international law, transnational activism, global exploration, and environmental and resource history.
Our research uses innovative methodological approaches to trace intricate network structures, highlighting the transcontinental exchange of ideas, environmental change and its social implications, changing patterns of commodity flows and merchant networks, as well as the global proliferation of economic concepts and practices in the context of normative discourses.
Research projects include comparative medieval economic history, the emergence of cooperatives, imperial resource extraction, and global sites of memory. Historians concentrating on more nationally-focused histories, such as regional identities in Brazil or the history of cycling in the American South, have also consistently placed developments in these areas within the context of global networks.
Responding to core questions of the fields of global and international history, Birmingham historians contribute to a better understanding of how knowledge and practices are diffused, how localities diverge in their historical developments, how far these developments contributed to the formation of sub-global identities and how this has shaped the contemporary world.
Researchers
Staff especially engaged with this research theme
Dr Nathan Cardon; historian of the social, cultural, and transnational histories of the U.S. South, mobility, U.S. empire, and race.
Dr Courtney J. Campbell; researches Brazilian cultural and social history, race and representation, gender and representation, transnational consumer culture, popular culture movements, movement and migration.
Dr Jonathan E Gumz; Modern Central and Eastern Europe, modern international history, global insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Dr Simon Jackson; researches the colonial, international and global history of the modern Middle East and the Mediterranean in the twentieth century.
Dr Mo Moulton; works on the political and social history of 20th century Britain, Ireland, and empire.
Professor Corey Ross; works on global environmental history and modern European social and cultural history.
Dr Shirley Ye; works on modern China, environmental history, cities, science and technology, frontier and transnational history, gender.