Professor Corey Ross MA, PhD

Professor Corey Ross

Department of History
Honorary Professor of Modern History

Contact details

Address
Arts Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

I am Professor of Modern History. My primary research interests are in global environmental history and modern European social and cultural history.

Biography

Since arriving at Birmingham in 1998, I've held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Berlin, a J. Walter Thompson Fellowship at Duke University and was Professeur invité at the Université Paris-II.  I recently held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and am currently (2018-21) on a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.  From January to June 2021 I will take up the Vincent Wright Chair at Sciences-Po Paris.  I was previously Head of the History Department and from 2012-2017 was Head of the School of History and Cultures.  I am closely involved in the Centre for Modern and Contemporary History and the Birmingham Seminar for Environmental Humanities

Research

My broad interests are in global environmental history, the history of empire, and the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Europe. My last book was an environmental history of the heyday of European imperialism, from roughly 1880 through the end of the colonial period to the present (Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire, 2017; winner of the 2018 George Louis Beer Prize, AHA). The book explores the environmental transformations and interconnections associated with the explosive growth of commodity production and global trade in the tropical regions under European (mainly British, French, German, Dutch, Belgian) control - transformations that still visibly shape our world today - and how they fitted into broader patterns of social, cultural and political change.

I am currently writing a book (tentatively titled Liquid Empire) on the history of European empire through the lens of water.  Focusing temporally on the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, and geographically on the European colonies of Asia and Africa, it tells the story of how different technologies, institutions, and forms of knowledge transformed human engagements with water in the colonial world, and how aquatic nature was reshaped in the process—with lasting consequences for the post-colonial world 

My previous research has focused on a variety subjects: the history of mass communications, publicity and popular culture; the global history of preservation, and the history of post-war Germany. In 2015 I co-edited (with Paul Betts) a Past & Present supplement on Heritage in the Modern World, which reconsiders the role of historical preservation (of both the man-made and the ‘natural’) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from a global perspective.  In 2008 I published a social history of the mass media in Germany which focuses on how the rapid expansion of modern communications and commercial entertainment fitted into the wider development of social, political and cultural life from the Imperial period through the Third Reich. I also co-edited a volume (with Karl-Christian Führer) on media and society in 20th-century Germany, and another volume (with Fabrice d’Almeida and Pamela Swett) on pleasure and power under National Socialism, which explores the role of consumption, tourism, amusements, and luxury goods in sustaining, and at times undermining, Nazi authority.  Prior to that, my first book explored the building of socialism in East Germany ‘from below’, and my second book offered the first overview of historiographic debates surrounding East Germany and its legacy.

Publications

Recent publications

Book

Ross, C 2017, Ecology and power in the age of empire: Europe and the transformation of the tropical world. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199590414.001.0001

Ross, C & Betts, P (eds) 2015, Heritage in the Modern World: Historical Preservation in Global Perspective . vol. Past & Present Supplement 10, Oxford University Press. <https://academic.oup.com/past/issue/226/suppl_10>

Ross, C, Swett, P & DAlmeida, F (eds) 2011, Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany. Palgrave Macmillan.

Article

Ross, C 2023, 'Constrained river, constrained choices: seasonal floods and colonial authority in the Red River Delta', International Journal of Asian Studies, pp. 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479591423000190

Ross, C 2020, 'Nature, Labour, and the Making of Ecological Peripheries', International Review of Social History, vol. 65, no. 3, pp. 467-479. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859020000565

Ross, C & Uekötter, F 2019, 'Introduction', HCM. International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, vol. 7, pp. 737-740. https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.581

Ross, C 2014, 'The Plantation Paradigm: colonial agronomy, African farmers and the global cocoa boom, 1870s-1940s', Journal of Global History, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 49-71. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022813000491

Ross, C 2014, 'The tin frontier: mining, empire and environment in Southeast Asia, 1870s-1930s', Environmental History, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 454-479. https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emu032

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Ross, C 2017, Developing the Rainforest: Rubber, Environment and Economy in Southeast Asia. in G Austin (ed.), Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene: Perspectives on Asia and Africa. Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp. 199-218.

Ross, C & Betts, P 2015, Modern Historical Preservation: Towards a Global Perspective. in Heritage in the Modern World: Historical Preservation in Global Perspective . Past and present supplements, vol. 10, Oxford University Press, pp. 7-26. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtu023

Ross, C 2015, Tropical Nature as Global Patrimoine: Imperialism and International Nature Protection in the Early Twentieth Century. in Heritage in the Modern World: Historical Preservation in Global Perspective . vol. Past & Present Supplement 10, Past & Present, vol. 10, Oxford University Press, pp. 214-39. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtu019

Chapter

Ross, C 2012, Mass Media and Commercial Entertainments in Germany and Britain: Global Change and National Contexts before the Second World War. in C Eisenberg & A Gestrich (eds), Cultural Industries in Britain and Germany. Wissner Verlag, pp. 92-109.

Ross, C 2011, Cinema, Radio and "Mass Culture" in the Weimar Republic: Between Shared Experience and Social Division. in JA Williams (ed.), Weimar Culture Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 23-48.

Ross, C, D'Almeida, F & Swett, P 2011, Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany: An Introduction. in Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany. Palgrave Macmillan.

Ross, C 2011, Radio, Film and Morale: Wartime Entertainment between Mobilization and Distraction. in Pleasure and ower in Nazi Germany. Palgrave Macmillan.

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