Panelists and chairs in alphabetical order:
Reem Abou-El-Fadl is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East at SOAS University of London. Her research interests are in the politics of nationalism and solidarity with a focus on the Middle East. She is the author of Foreign Policy as Nation Making: Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and editor of Revolutionary Egypt: Connecting Domestic and International Struggles (Routledge, 2015), and of the Egyptian Africanist Helmi Sharawy’s memoir, Sira Misriyya Ifriqiyya [‘An Egyptian African Story’] (Dar al-Ain, 2019). Her edited translation of this memoir is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Her current research projects examine the popular politics of nationalism and Palestine solidarity in 1970s Egypt, and the politics of Egypt’s African and Afro-Asian relations during the Nasser era, including a collaboration with Professor Hilary Sapire on Egypt’s relations with southern African liberation movements.
Jocelyn Alexander is Professor of Commonwealth Studies at the University of Oxford. She is a social and political historian of southern Africa and has written widely on histories of state formation, agrarian change, rural and nationalist politics, oral history, political prisoners, and, most recently, the transnational lives of southern Africa’s liberation armies. This latter work builds on a collaborative Leverhulme Research Project titled ‘Global Soldiers in the Cold War: Making Southern Africa’s Liberation Armies’ (see https://global-soldiers.web.ox.ac.uk), which builds primarily on veterans’ oral histories and memoir.
Jennifer Altehenger is associate professor of Chinese History and Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History at the University of Oxford and Merton College. Her research focuses on the history of the People’s Republic of China, from law and civic education to design and materiality, and cultural production and information management. She is the author of Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1989 (2018) and is currently completing a book entitled Socialism by Design: How Mass-Produced Furniture Modernized China (under contract with Princeton University Press).
David M. Anderson is Professor of African History in the Global History & Culture Centre, University of Warwick, holds a Research Associateship in History at Stellenbosch University, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. He has published several books on the history and politics of eastern Africa, among them Africa’s Urban Past (1999, edited with Richard Rathbone), Eroding the Commons (2002), Histories of the Hanged (2005), The Khat Controversy (2007), Politics and Violence in Eastern Africa (2015, edited with Oystein Rolandsen), Allies at the End of Empire (2017, edited with Dan Branch), and Conservation in Eastern & Southern Africa (2026 in press, edited with Michael Bollig). Anderson was founding Editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies. He is now completing a monograph on the history of the occult in Kenya’s Western Highlands, and is researching the history of Caprivi, from the colonial conquest to the Cold War.
Maxwell Kwesi Asabere is a doctoral candidate and a Graduate instructor in the History Department at West Virginia University, USA. His research focuses on agricultural and cash crop production in colonial and post-colonial Ghana. His PhD dissertation explores colonial and post-colonial scientific/agricultural research, the toxicology of chemicals, workforce development, human resources, and transnational collaboration between the West African Cocoa Research Institute (WACRI), now the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG), and other global agricultural research institutes between 1900 and 2000. He has an M.A. in History Education from the University of Education, Winneba, a PGD in Theology from the Valley View University, and a B.A. in History and Philosophy from the University of Cape Coast. He has taught courses in World History and Modern European History and is currently teaching Modern Military History.
Norman Aselmeyer is Tutorial Fellow in Modern History at Wadham College, University of Oxford. Before taking up his post at Oxford, he held a postdoctoral position at the University of Bremen and a Junior Research Fellowship at University College London and the German Historical Institute London. His research spans African history, urban history, and the history of popular protest, with a focus on the political and social transformations associated with colonial rule and its aftermath in the British and German empires.
Natalya Benkhaled Vince is a Tutorial Fellow at University College Oxford and Associate Professor in French and Francophone History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria 1954-2012 (2015) and The Algerian War, The Algerian Revolution (2020). She is currently working on a project on students and state-building in Algeria, and is co-producer of the open access documentary series Generation Independence: https://www.youtube.com/@generationindependence1069.
Koni Benson is an historian, organiser, and educator. She is an associate professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Her research focuses on mobilisation, demobilisation, and remobilisation of struggle histories in southern Africa’s past and present. She is author of Crossroads: I Live Where I Like (illustrated by the Trantraal Brothers and Ashley Marais, forward by Robin D. G. Kelley, PM Press, 2021/Jacana Press 2022), and coauthor with Faeza Meyer of Writing Out Loud: Interventions in the History of a Land Occupation (forthcoming). With Mahvish Ahmad and Hana Morgenstern she coedited a special issue on Revolutionary Papers for Radical History Review (No.150, 2024) and a special series for Africa is a Country (2023-2024).
Eric Burton is Associate Professor at the Department of Contemporary History, University of Innsbruck, specialising in the global histories of decolonization, development and socialisms. In 2025, he received the ASTRA Award of the Austrian Science Fund for “Provincializing Coloniality”, a five-year research project on Tyrol’s anti/colonial entanglements. He is currently finalizing a monograph on institutionalized infrastructures in African ‘hubs of decolonization’ and the related emergence of a global division of labour for the support of liberation struggles.
Clarence Chongo holds a PhD in African history from the University of Pretoria. He is currently a lecturer in African and Russian history in the Department of Historical and Archaeology Studies at the University of Zambia, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Clarence’s PhD thesis focused on the significance of Zambia’s role in the struggle for black majority rule in southern African and particularly Zimbabwe’s war of national liberation. His current research interest revolves around transnational histories of African liberation movements and Zambia’s diplomatic history in the context of southern African wars of national liberation.
John Darwin is Emeritus Professor of Global and Imperial History, and currently a Senior Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. His most recent book is Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalisation in the Age of Steam, 1830–1930 (Penguin, 2020).
Immanuel Harisch is currently a Guest Professor of Global Histories of Labour and Transport at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. His PhD dissertation, which won the Walter Markov Prize for Global History, examined the institutions, networks, and mobility of African trade unionists within the international labour movement. He is co-editor of the edited volume Navigating Socialist Encounters: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements Between Africa and East Germany During the Cold War (de Gruyter, 2021), and his work has appeared in Revue d’Histoire Contemporaine de l’Afrique, International Labour and Working-Class History and the International Journal of African Historical Studies. He is currently co-editing a special issue on the World Federation of Trade Unions and trade unionists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who shaped this global trade union federation for the International Review of Social History.
Jennifer Hart is a Professor of History and Department Chair at Virginia Tech. A historian of technology, mobility, infrastructure, and urban space, Hart is the author of Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Indiana University Press, 2016) and Making an African City: Technopolitics and the Infrastructure of Everyday Life in Colonial Accra (Indiana University Press, 2024). Her work is found in numerous edited collections and journals including Technology and Culture, International Review of Social History, International Journal of African Historical Studies, African Economic History, Urban Forum, Africa Today, History in Africa, and the Journal of British Studies. She is a recipient of the Boahen-Wilks Prize from the Ghana Studies Association and was a 2016 Finalist for the book prize from the African Studies Association.
Jim House is an historian of Algeria, France and Morocco and teaches at the University of Leeds. He is the author (with Neil MacMaster) of Paris 1961. Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford University Press), and is currently completing a monograph on the social and political history of shantytowns in colonial Algiers and Casablanca, again for OUP.
Sara Hussein is a History PhD candidate at UCLA specializing in intellectual and diplomatic histories of pan-Africanism, Cold War internationalism, modern Egypt, and Afro-Arab solidarities in the mid-twentieth century. Her research and teaching interests include modern Middle East history, African studies, and anticolonial thought, and she serves as an editor at Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Locating Revolutionary Cairo Between Pan-Africanism and Afro-Asianism, 1952–1975.”
Dr. Su Lin Lewis is Professor of Global and Asian History at the University of Bristol specialising in cities, gender, decolonisation, and transnational activism in Southeast Asia and beyond. She is the author of the award-winning Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 (Cambridge 2016), co-editor (with Carolien Stolte) of The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (Leiden, 2022), and co-editor (with Nana Osei-Opare) of Socialism, Internationalism, and Development: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonisation (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is currently working on a book on socialist internationalism in decolonising Asia.
Maria Ketzmerick-Calandrino (she/her) is an international relations scholar specializing in peace, conflict, and security, with a focus on their historical reverberations. She is a postdoctoral researcher in the CRAFTE project at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. Previously, she was a lecturer at the Chair for Sociology of Africa and a Principal Investigator in the Postcolonial Hierarchies Network at the University of Bayreuth. Maria studied Political Science, International Law, and Global Studies at the University of Münster, IEP Lyon, Roskilde University, and Leipzig University, and earned her doctorate at the University of Marburg’s Center for Conflict Studies within the collaborative research center Dynamics of Security. Her research focuses on post/decolonial security studies and historical-sociological international relations at regional, transnational, and global levels. She explores how social orders are (re)negotiated in contexts of global change, from decolonization and the Global Cold War to contemporary conflicts, using qualitative methods such as archival research and interviews. Beyond research, Maria co-chairs the DVPW working group Gewaltordnungen (“Orders of Violence”) and curates the EISA 2025 section on (Post-)Socialist Internationalism.
Prashant Kidambi is Professor in Colonial Urban History at the University of Leicester. His research explores the interface between British imperialism and the history of modern South Asia. Kidambi is the author of Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire (2019) and The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (2007).
Sophie-Jung Hyun Kim is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford. She specializes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transregional Asian history, with a particular focus on U.S.–India and India–Korea connections. She has published on topics including religious universalism, global publics, interculturalism, and long-distance Hindu nationalism in Journal of World History, American Historical Review History Lab, and Religion, among others. Her first monograph on great-man politics is currently under peer review, and she is working on a second monograph on intercolonial interaction across Asia. Previously, she held postdoctoral and lecturing positions at Freie Universität Berlin.
Marius Kothor is an Assistant Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Dr. Kothor is an historian of 20th century West Africa, and her work examines the political and economic lives of a group of Togolese women merchants known as the Nana Benz. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at Yale University and her work has been published in academic and popular outlets including: The American Historical Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of African History, Africa is a Country, and Black Perspectives.
Nora Lafi is a professor of Islamic Studies at Universität Bayreuth (Germany). She has published extensively on the history of the cities of the Ottoman Empire, as well as on cities under colonization in North-Africa and the Middle East. She currently leads, together with Suaad Alghafal, the Ghadames Heritage Project, financed by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the object of which is the restoration of an old library that was bombed in 1943 and the digitalization of the retrieved archives and manuscripts. She also studied networks of anti-colonial solidarity during WWI between the people of Italian occupied Libya and French occupied Tunisia as well as the historical anthropology of female resistance networks in this context.
Professor Stephen Legg undertook his degree, doctorate and Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge before joining the University of Nottingham in 2005. His research centres on the geographies of late-colonialism, with a particular focus on British-Indian relations in the interwar period. His projects return to core interests in space and scale. In terms of the former he has studied Delhi as the capital of the Raj, the end of tolerated Indian “red light” brothel zones in the interwar period, London as a conference city for Indian delegates in the early 1930s, and Delhi as a forum for anticolonial politics. In terms of scale he has explored Indian internationalism via the League of Nations, central-provincial relations in the Indian constitution, and the ways women in Delhi negotiated the boundary between public and private space. His books include Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2007); Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India (2014); Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (2023); and Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2025). He is currently Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Historical Geography.
Yasmina Martin is Visiting Assistant Professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She earned her PhD in history from Yale University in 2025. Her book manuscript, “A Sometimes Home: South African Exiles in Tanzania, 1960-1990,” is a social and political history of South African anti-apartheid activists in post-colonial Tanzania. Her work has been published in the Journal of Southern African Studies and History Workshop. Her wider interests include Black internationalism, decolonization, Southern African liberation movements, and the global anti-apartheid movement.
Anna Nasser is a historian of modern Europe and European empires. She holds a PhD in Global History and Governance from the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, University of Naples Federico II, in a co-direction with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris. For the academic year 2025–2026, she is the Deakin Fellow at the European Studies Centre and at the Maison Française d’Oxford. Her current research focuses on the role of women’s organisations in the process of the decolonisation in the French empire, in particular in France and French West Africa as well as other colonial settings. Her research interests are related to French colonial and imperial history, history of social rights, women’s and feminist transnational history and decolonisation in a comparative perspective.
Joseph Ben Prestel is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Roskilde University and lecturer in history at Freie Universität Berlin. His research and teaching focus on modern global and urban history with an emphasis on the entangled histories of Europe and the Middle East. His first book Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 was published with Oxford University Press, in 2017. An Arabic translation of the book was published in 2024. Joseph’s current book project analyzes the rise and fall of the solidarity movement with Palestinians in West Germany, between the 1950s and 1980s. An article that stems from this research was published in The American Historical Review (September 2022 issue) with the title “A Diaspora Moment: Writing Global History Through Palestinian-West German Ties.”
Chris Saunders taught in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) for many decades, then worked at the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town. He is now attached to the Institute for Democracy, Public Policy and Citizenship in Africa at UCT. He has published widely on southern African history, in recent years especially on aspects of the Namibian and South African liberation struggles. His most recent publication is Communist Actors in African Decolonial Transitions (Berlin, 2025), which he co-edited with Helder Fonseca and Lena Dallywater.
Hilary Sapire is Professor of Southern Africa in the School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research interests include the histories of urban protest and culture in Southern Africa, and transnational liberation movements in the subcontinent and global solidarity. The latter includes a new collaboration with Dr Reem Abou-El-Fadl on southern African liberation movements’ relations with Egypt. Her other interests include the intertwined histories of indigenous and imperial monarchy, and imperial citizenship in Southern Africa. She recently published British Royal Visits and Black Loyalism in Twentieth Century Southern Africa (Palgrave, 2024) and is co-authoring a book with Cindy McCreery on nineteenth-century encounters between visiting British royal figures and African monarchs and rulers in South Africa and Sierra Leone.
Alexander Sedlmaier read History and Philosophy at Technische Universität Berlin; 1994 MA; 2000 PhD. 2003–2007 Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Wadham College, University of Oxford. Since 2007 Reader in Modern History at Bangor University, Wales. Selected publications: »Provocations at the Limits of Urbanity: Historical Perspectives on Cold-War Urban Social Movements«, in Tim Verlaan and Christian Wicke (eds): Urban Activism in Western Europe from the 1950s to the 1980s (2024), 21–51; editor: Protest in the Vietnam War Era (2022); Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany (2014); editor with Freia Anders: Public Goods versus Economic Interests: Global Perspectives on the History of Squatting (2017); Deutschlandbilder und Deutschlandpolitik: Studien zur Wilson-Administration, 1913–1921 (2003). In preparation: Protest in the Hot Wars of the Cold War: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, 1950–1989.
Wallace Teska is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. in African History from Stanford University in 2024. Teska’s research explores histories of law, religion, and environmental change in modern francophone West Africa. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from, among others, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, Fulbright IIE, the American Society for Legal History, the West African Research Association, and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory. His articles have appeared in Slavey & Abolition, French Historical Studies, and The Journal of African History.
Malika Zehni is a historian of mobility, borderlands, and documentation, focusing on and around Central Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently a Fellow at the Society of Fellows, University of Hong Kong, and the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Her research explores how mobile subjects navigated and subverted imperial frontiers. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2023, and her upcoming work on medical borders is supported by the Wellcome Trust.