Professor Corey Ross MA, PhD

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

I am currently on research leave, but normally teach, among other things, a final-year undergraduate Special Subject on ‘Imperialism and the Global Environment’ and co-teach the two core modules of the MA in Contemporary History: ‘Mass Society and Modernity’ and ‘Globalization since 1945’. 

I am able to offer postgraduate supervision in a number of areas, including various aspects of European and global environmental history since the late 19th century, the history of the media and publicity in twentieth-century Europe, and the social and cultural history of Germany since the late nineteenth century.  I am currently supervising two PhD students: one working on the social and environmental history of oil exploitation and refining in Algeria and France (with Simon Jackson), and one working on processes of democratization in Germany in the late 1980s-early 1990s (with Jan Palmowski, Univ. of Warwick).

Find out more - our PhD History  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

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.