We have a range of scholars that are associated with the centre, including links to their discipline staff profiles (where available).
Director of the CIPCS
Research interests include:
The British empire in Africa.
The socio-cultural and intellectual connections between Britain and empire
Postcolonial Africa
Chris is author of Exporting Empire: Africa, colonial officials and the construction of the British imperial state, c.1900-1939 (2013), Edwardian England and the Idea of Racial Decline (2013), and is currently writing a book on British foreign policy in postcolonial Africa.Email: c.prior@southampton.ac.uk
Associated Scholars
Professor David Brown (History)
Research interests include:
- British political history of the nineteenth century, focusing in particular upon the life and career of Lord Palmerston.
- British foreign policy and the politics of social reform.
David is author of Palmerston: A Biography (2010). Email: d.s.brown@southampton.ac.uk
Research interests include:
- British animation and cinema
- Early and silent film
- ‘Useful cinema’ (industrial, scientific, educational, advertising)
Malcolm is the author Early British Animation (2018), which explores the early development of animation in Britain up to the 1930s and its intermedial connections with stage performances and print cartooning/illustration. This entailed consideration of nation and empire. Malcolm has edited Animation and Advertising (2019), and is currently investigating the role animation has played in the petroleum industries, especially animation produced for BP and Shell, whose complex corporate histories necessarily intersected with British imperial history. Email: M.Cook@soton.ac.uk
Research interests include:
- Literary and legal narratives of the Indian Ocean, law and literature.
- East African literatures, literatures of the South Asian diaspora and postcolonial theory.
Stephanie is the author of ‘Literature, geography, law: the life and adventures of Captain John Avery (circa 1709)', Cultural Geographies, 19, (1) (2012). Email: s.j.jones@southampton.ac.uk
Research interests include:
- The British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
- The East India Company and its worlds.
- Travel, exploration and cultures of collecting.
- Museums, material culture and the representation of empire.
John is the author of Britain’s Maritime Empire: Southern Africa, the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, 1763–1820 (2016), Picturing India: People, Places and the World of the East India Company (2017), and (with Nigel Rigby) Captain Cook and the Pacific: Art,
Exploration and Empire (2017). He is the co-editor (with Douglas Hamilton) of Islands and the British Empire in the Age of Sail (2021). Email: j.mcaleer@southampton.ac.uk
Dr Pritipuspa Mishra (Research Fellow, History)
Research interests include:
- Language politics in India
Pritipuspa is the author of Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha, 1803-1956 (2020) Email: priti.mishra@southampton.ac.uk
Professor Stephen Morton (English)
Research interests include:
- Anglophone literatures from Canada, South Asia and the Caribbean, postcolonial theory, critical theory, poetics and politics, visual culture and globalisation.
Stephen is editor of (with Elleke Boehmer) Terror and the postcolonial: a concise companion (2009) and is author of ‘Fictions of sedition and the framing of Indian revolutionaries in colonial India,' Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2012). Email: s.c.morton@southampton.ac.uk
Professor Kendrick Oliver (History)
Research interests include:
- The Vietnam War; the global history of American evangelicalism; the history of spaceflight.
- The history of cosmology.
Kendrick is the author of The My Lai massacre in American history and memory (2006) and To touch the face of God: the sacred, the profane and the American space program 1957-1975 (2013). Email: ko@southampton.ac.uk
Research interests include:
- The history of colonial settlers and slaveholders, particularly the social and cultural history of the Jamaican planter class.
Christer is author of Slaveholders in Jamaica: colonial society and culture during the era of abolition (2009), and White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution (OUP, 2018). Email: c.petley@southampton.ac.uk
Research interests include:
- African literatures and cultures (with emphasis on Southern Africa), narrative constructions of space-time, the social functioning of literary fictions, city cultures and texts, new cosmopolitanisms, African literature and genre, African literatures as world literatures.
Ranka has a long chapter titled ‘Against “African Popular Literature, or: The Weeping Woman” forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Popular Culture in Africa, edited by Grace Musila. She is the PI of the AHRC-funded research project titled ‘Textual Worlds of South-Eastern Africa’. She co-edits the Boydell & Brewer monograph series African Articulations. Email: r.primorac@southampton.ac.uk
Research interests include:
- The Labour Party and empire, aid and development, humanitarianism and domestic politics. Email: c.l.riley@southampton.ac.uk
Professor Ian Talbot (History)
Research interests include:
- Colonial Punjab, the partition of India and the emergence of Pakistan.
- Refugee resettlement following the partition.
- The political history of post-Independence Pakistan.
- Religion and violence in South Asia.
Ian is the author of Pakistan: a new history (2004). Email: iat@southampton.ac.uk
Research interests include:
- Comparative film and media studies
- Media industries and digital screen cultures in a global context
Jaap’s The Cultural Life of James Bond: Specters of 007 (2020) examines the non-canonical texts and contexts that encompass the cultural life of James Bond beyond Britain and across media platforms, and he is currently working on Eurobrow: Regulating Screen Cultures in a Europe of Many, which chronicles the relationship between governmentality and the development of transnational screen industries, policies, infrastructures, and production cultures in the European Union
Mr Hugh Pattenden - Visiting Academic
Hugh Pattenden is a historian who specialises in the politics and diplomacy of Zimbabwean decolonisation.
His research falls into two broad subject areas. The first is the relationship between Britain and (the then) Rhodesia during the UDI period (1965-80), including the political and legal ramifications of UDI, and the development of British public opinion. His other area of study is Zimbabwean nationalist propaganda. In this, he looks at the ways in which ZANU and ZAPU used their media output to criticise opponents and build support during the 1960s and 1970s. Next, he intends to investigate in further detail how British attitudes towards colonial Rhodesia and post-independence Zimbabwe have developed since the Second World War.
He has a degree in history from the University of Oxford.
Research interests:
- UDI and the decolonisation of Zimbabwe
- Zimbabwean nationalism
- British-Zimbabwean relations
- The Cold War in Africa
Hugh is the author of (selected publications):
(2021) ‘Britain and the Rhodesian Mercenary Issue, c.1970-1980’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 49, 4, 777-804.
(2021) ‘Britain, Rhodesia, and the Law of Treason, 1964-1980’, Journal of Legal History 42, 3, 304-27.
(2022) ‘British Public Opinion on the Rhodesian Issue, 1963-1980’, International History Review 44, 2, 335-56.
(2022) ‘The Representation of the Rhodesian Security Forces in the Propaganda of ZANU and ZAPU, 1965–1980’, War in History (published online first view).
(2022), ‘The Representation of the British Government in Zimbabwean Nationalist Propaganda, 1965-80’, Journal of Contemporary History (published online first view)
