Dr. Jordanna Bailkin
Jere L. Bacharach Endowed Professor in International Studies, in the history department of the University of Washington
Dr. Susan Amussen
Professor of History at UC Merced
Dr. Susan Amussen is a leading scholar of early modern Britain (1500-1750). Her most recent book, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society looks at what English people had to learn to become slave owners in the Caribbean, and argues that in addition to sugar, English colonizers brought ideas about race and work, about the organization of work, and law and punishment from the Caribbean to the Metropole.
Dr. Jordanna Bailkin is a scholar of Modern Britain and its empire, who has worked broadly on topics such as Victorian liberalism, decolonization, race and decolonization. She will be speaking on a topic related to her forthcoming book, Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2018. The book explores how during the 20th century, dozens of refugee camps in Britain housed tens of thousands of Belgians, Basques, Jew, Poles, Hungarians, Anglo-Egyptians, Ugandan Asians, and Vietnamese. These refugees shared space with Britons who had been displaced by war and poverty. These camps generated unique intimacies and frictions, illuminating the closeness of individuals that have traditionally been kept separate – “citizens” and “migrants,” but also refugees from diverse countries and conflicts.