Dr Simon Jackson

• BA University of Oxford
• MA NYU
• PhD NYU

I am an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in History at the University of Birmingham, where from 2014-17 I also held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and where I currently direct the British Academy 'Commodities of Empire' research network and serve as Co-Investigator on the 'Feeding the Earth' Swiss National Science Foundation Grant.

I earned a BA in Modern History from the University of Oxford and a PhD in History from NYU. I have also held Max Weber and Jean Monnet Post-Doctoral Fellowships in History at the European University Institute in Florence.

I have designed and taught numerous classes at the University of Birmingham, Sciences-Po, the Sorbonne, and the European University Institute, focused on French colonial history, modern France, the Middle East, historical social theory and world history.

I offer postgraduate supervision in the colonial, international and global history of modern France and its empire, on empire in the twentieth century Mediterranean and in the comparative history of European empire, with an emphasis on environmental history and the history of political-economy.

Current PhD students:

Claire Porcher (Feeding the Earth: Histories of Fertiliser in Modern Morocco).

Masato Tanaka (external advisor -University of Heidelberg, for a project titled 'Men of Business and Money: The Middle Class, Empire, and the Political Economy of the Everyday (or Mundane) in Lebanon, 1860s–1930s')

Tomoki Yamada (The League of Nations Mandates System as a Trans-imperial Arena of (Anti-)Colonialism).

Haixing Wang (co-supervision with SUS-Tech University, China, for a project titled 'Modern Beekeeping Practices and Knowledge Production in Twentieth-Century China')

Yanfeng Wang (From Rochdale to Empire: Labor Perspectives on the Global Outreach of British Co-operatives, 1900-1950)

Completed PhD Students include:

Eliana Hadjisavvas (Jewish displacement at the end of the Second World War and the internment of Jewish refugees in British-run camps in colonial Cyprus)

Andrew Searle (Amnesty International's Opposition to Torture: Norms, Advocacy, Agnotology and the Domestication of Human Rights, 1961-79)

Mustafa Coban (Turkish Foreign Policy on its Borders: The Balkan and Saadabad Pacts and their Domestic Determinants, 1934-1941).

Gemma Jennings (Patriarchy and Poverty? A Transnational Analysis of the Social Implications of the Oil Industry between France and Algeria)

Khalid Abdullah Krairi (John Philby and his political roles in the Arabian Peninsula, 1917-1953).

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

I'm interested in the political-economy of colonial empire—the ways that power hierarchies interact with economic life, from local contexts to global ones. My approach has often emphasised the impact of war on economic life, and the ways that people imagine possible economic futures in contexts of crisis.

To date I have worked on imperial economic development in the French League of Nations Mandate in Syria and Lebanon, on the history of Fordism in the post-Ottoman Middle East, and on the global history of colonial commodities and natural resources.

My current project is a global and imperial history of North African phosphate, showing how imperial mineral extraction influenced the emergence of modern global food production regimes.

I regularly speak in secondary schools about historical topics and write for popular outlets including History Today, The Conversation and Libération. I have contributed interviews to broadcast media including Sky News and LBC Radio.

I also co-convene the Institute for Historical Research seminar 'Rethinking Modern Europe', sit on the editorial boards of Commodity Frontiers and European History Quarterly & serve as external examiner for MA History degrees at Birkbeck, University of London.

Finally, I also serve as an expert peer reviewer for grant making bodies such as the European Research Council, and for scholarly publications including the American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Environmental History, The Historical Journal, Global Governance, Journal of Global History, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, French Historical Studies, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History, Contemporary European History, H-France & H-Diplo.