Dr Simon Jackson

• BA University of Oxford
• MA NYU
• PhD NYU

I am an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Birmingham, where from 2014-17 I also held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and where I currently direct the British Academy 'Commodities of Empire' research network. I earned a BA in Modern History from the University of Oxford and a PhD in History from NYU. I have also held Max Weber and Jean Monnet Post-Doctoral Fellowships in History at the European University Institute in Florence.

I have designed and taught numerous classes at the University of Birmingham, Sciences-Po, the Sorbonne, and the European University Institute, focused on French colonial history, modern France, the Middle East, historical social theory and world history.

I offer postgraduate supervision in the colonial, international and global history of modern France and its empire, on empire in the twentieth century Mediterranean and in the comparative history of European empire.

I currently supervise or co-supervise several PhD students:

Gemma Jennings (Patriarchy and Poverty? A Transnational Analysis of the Social Implications of the Oil Industry between France and Algeria)
Tomoki Yamada (The League of Nations Mandates System as a Trans-imperial Arena of (Anti-)Colonialism)
Eliana Hadjisavvas (Jewish displacement at the end of the Second World War and the internment of Jewish refugees in British-run camps in colonial Cyprus)
Mustafa Coban (Turkish Foreign Policy on its Borders: The Balkan and Saadabad Pacts and their Domestic Determinants, 1934-1941)

Find out more - our PhD History  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

I'm interested in the political-economy of colonial empire—the ways that power hierarchies interact with economic life, from local contexts to global ones. My approach has often emphasised the impact of war on economic life, and the ways that people imagine possible economic futures in contexts of crisis.

To date I have worked on imperial economic development in the French League of Nations Mandate in Syria and Lebanon, on the history of Fordism in the post-Ottoman Middle East, and on the global history of colonial commodities and natural resources.

My next project is a global and imperial history of North African phosphate, showing how imperial mineral extraction influenced the emergence of modern global food production regimes.

I direct the Centre for Modern and Contemporary History and convene its seminar series. I also convene the MA in Contemporary History at the University of Birmingham and co-convene the Institute for Historical Research seminar on Rethinking Modern Europe. I am the co-ordinator of the British Academy's Commodities of Empire research network.

For full details see my website at www.simon-jackson.eu