Global Identities International Conference 2025

The Historic Houses Global Crossroads project team is delighted to invite you to attend the Global and Local Identities Conference, which will be held at the Edgbaston Park Hotel, University of Birmingham on 14 November 2025.

Confirmed speakers: Professor Durba Ghosh (Cornell University, New York), Professor Chandrika Kaul (University of St Andrews), Professor Diane Urquhart (Queens University, Belfast), Dr Kate Smith, University of Birmingham, Dr Oliver Cox (Head of Academic Partnerships, Victoria & Albert Museum).

The conference aims to

1. 1. Collaboratively explore expressions of ‘national’ and international identity linked to U.K. historic houses across time, particularly expressions of ‘national’ identity that can be shown to be more porous and unstable than previously thought, counteracting previous patriotic and military constructions of imperial identity that privilege conquest, violence and national supremacy as exclusively determinant;
   2. Showcase expressions of identity surrounding Great British historic houses and their grounds that were linked to Indigenous or other diverse cultural logics and to egalitarian movements structured around non-racial self-determination. Such expressions of identity manifested in elite and non-elite revivals of ‘traditional’ cultures that based around kinship, clan, and lineage connected to specific colonized lands;
   3. Problematize the profound desire within some of the British empire’s diplomatically significant figures to connect with invented or ‘lost’ pasts;
   4. Generate a body of research for dissemination within an edited collection within the Routledge series Global Approaches to Public History (series co-editor Professor Olwen Purdue).

Programme

09:30 - Welcome and Introduction

• Professor Insa Nolte, Head of the School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham
• HHGC Project Co-Lead: Dr Emma Reisz, Centre for Public History, Queen’s University Belfast

09:50-10:30 - Empire Global Identities and Moving Monuments

• Introduction: HHGC Project Lead: Professor Joy Porter, 125th Anniversary Chair, College of Arts & Law, University of Birmingham, Principal Investigator, Treatied Spaces Research Group
• Durba Ghosh, Professor of History, College of Arts & Sciences, Cornell University, New York

Taylor Family Director of the Cornell Society for the Humanities, Associate Editor, Journal of Asian Studies. Author of Moving Monuments, forthcoming, CUP, 2026; Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919-1947 (CUP, 2017); Sex and the Family in Colonial India: the making of empire (CUP, 2006); co-editor Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (2006).

10:30-11:10 - A Brave New World? Empire, Media and Cultures of Benevolence

• Introduction: TBC
• Chandrika Kaul, Professor of Modern History, University of St Andrews

Chandrika Kaul’s research interests focus on British imperialism and decolonisation, the monarchy, media, and popular culture, and Global media networks. She has published widely in these areas as well as being passionate about public history contributing frequently to national and international media including television, radio, newspapers and podcasts. Her monographs include, Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Britain and India in the twentieth century; and Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India 1880-1922 – the first book on the subject. Her edited and co-edited books include News of the World and the British Press; Media and the British Empire; International Communications and Global News networks; Media and the Portuguese Empire; and M.K. Gandhi, Politics, Media and Society: New Perspectives. She is currently completing a major new monograph on the BBC and India to be published by Oxford University Press in 2026.

11:10-11:30 - Break

11:30-13:00 - Panel 1 (3 papers) – Global Identities and the Historic House

• Commentary Dr Kate Smith, University of Birmingham

Kate Smith is Head of Research in the School of History and Cultures. She is author of The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 | UCL Press

13:00-14:00 - Lunch

14:00-15:30 - Panel 2 (3 papers)

• Commentary TBC

15:30-15:40 - Break

15:40-16:20 - Being Lady Londonderry: identity and aristocratic decline, 1875-1959

• Professor Diane Urquhart, Queens University Belfast, author of The Ladies of Londonderry: Women and Political Patronage (2022)

Professor Urquhart is an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; President of the Women's History Association of Ireland (WHAI) and Deputy Editor of the Women's History Review. Her monograph, Irish Divorce: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020) won the James S. Donnelly, Sr. prize for best book in the Humanities and Social Sciences, ACIS, 2021. Her next book is Ireland’s Criminal Conversations: Gender, Law and Adultery 1701-1981 (forthcoming, 2028).

16:20-16:50 - Reflecting on the Themes of the Day

• Dr Oliver Cox Head of Academic Partnerships, V&A

Dr Cox leads the V& A’s growing portfolio of partnerships with universities in the UK and internationally in support of their mission to champion design and creativity in all its forms, advance cultural knowledge, and inspire makers, creators and innovators everywhere. This includes responsibility for Collaborative Doctoral programmes, PhD placements, Fellowships and Exchanges, alongside the development of new teaching and research opportunities across the V&A’s family of sites. Dr Cox is also the national lead for the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership consortium, which comprises 15 cultural and heritage organisations and consortia. He is an historian by training, and received his undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford. His research interests are rooted in the global histories of the eighteenth-century country house and the ways in which these collections and spaces have been understood and interpreted by visitors. He is currently Principal Investigator on a British Academy Innovation Fellowship – ‘Private’ Spaces for Public Benefit: Country Houses as sites of Knowledge Exchange Innovation.

16:50-17:30 - Concluding HHGC Panel: Historic Houses & Identity Over Time

• Chair: Co-Lead Professor Olwen Purdue, founding Director of Centre for Public History, Queen’s University Belfast.

RIA Dr Briony Widdis, Queen’s University Belfast; Co-Lead (International) Professor Mark McGowan, Principal Emeritus, St Michael’s College, University of Toronto; Co-Lead Professor Annie Tindley, Co-Lead, Centre for Landscape, University of Newcastle; Co-Lead Julieanne McMahon, Cultural Heritage Curator, National Trust.