Global Identities International Conference 2025
- Location
- Edgbaston Park Hotel
- Dates
- Friday 14 November 2025 (00:00)
The Historic Houses Global Crossroads project team is delighted to invite interested parties to submit paper proposals for the project’s upcoming 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), Antony Cary CMG, Chairman, Canada-UK Council, Dr Kate Smith, University of Birmingham, Dr Oliver Cox (Head of Academic Partnerships, Victoria & Albert Museum).
The conference aims to:
- 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;
- 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;
- Problematize the profound desire within some of the British empire’s diplomatically significant figures to connect with invented or ‘lost’ pasts;
- 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).
Call for Papers
We welcome submissions that engage with one or more of these themes in the form of an individual paper presentation, no more than 20-minutes in length.
Submission Guidelines
- Please send your proposed paper Abstracts (no more one page) to Lynn Wadding at l.wadding.1@bham.ac.uk, by 15 August 2025.
- You will receive a response by 15 September 2025.
- Advice on travel and conference administration is also available from Lynn Wadding at l.wadding.1@bham.ac.uk
- The conference is free to attend. We are able to offer limited travel support (GBP50) to selected ECR presenters only.
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
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
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
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 Anthony Cary CMG, Chairman Canada-UK Council, ‘Canada: Global Crossroads’
Anthony Cary holds an MA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University and an MBA from Stanford Business School. He served in the British Diplomatic Service from 1973-2011, in Berlin, Kuala Lumpur, Washington DC, as British Ambassador to Sweden, and finally as British High Commissioner to Canada from 2007 to 2010. In London, he was on the Policy Planning Staff and headed the European Union Department. He was twice seconded to the European Commission in Brussels, where he was chief of staff to Chris Patten as Commissioner for External Relations. He was made a Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1997.
15:30-15:40 - Break
15:40-16:20 - Being Lady Londonderry: identity and aristocratic decline, 1875-1959
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 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.
Partners:
Funded by UKRI under Standard Research Grant AH/Z506436/1 ‘Historic Houses Global Crossroads’.