SOAS History Blog Podcast, Ep. 4: The Ramayana – History as Storytelling, Storytelling as History
Listen to our two part episode about the Ramayana, the history of story telling, and the place of storytelling in history.
Poetry as History Analysis: Seeking Ancient Egypt’s Urban History in Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias
Percy Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ serves as an analytical lens for both the Europeanisation of contemporary notions of ancient Egypt, and is itself a testament to the legacy of Ramasses II’s legacy.
A Tribute to bell hooks: For a Revolution in Education
hook’s engaged pedagogy is deeply connected to the idea of decolonisation. Although bell hooks comes from a particular imperial background – a “rural southern black experience (…) through the struggle for racial desegregation” in the USA – her ideas speak to a broader audience outside North America.
A Pair of Male Ducks: Traces of Queerness in Jin Dynasty China
This article is chiefly an examination of an ivory-white porcelain from Ding kiln in Quyang produced for mass domestic use during the Jin dynasty (1115-1234 CE).[1] This porcelain shows a pair of male Mandarin ducks which, this article contends, could be read as a trace of queer aesthetics.
Queer Baroque: Nikko Mausoleum
The construction of modern sexuality emphasises the sameness of biological gender between sexual object and sexual subject, which did not operate in Japan as it could not accommodate these existing gender constructions. The intense connection of the Nikkō Tōshōgu to the Tokugawa meant that it was intrinsically connected to a time that was becoming increasingly demonised as deviant.
When Things Go Wrong: Smuggling Artefacts from Baghdad to London in the late 19th Century
Many of the artefacts we see today in the ‘Ancient Near East’ collections of European and American museums were purchased in the late 19th and early 20th century from dealers who specialised in smuggling archaeological artefacts to Europe from Baghdad.
Thinking through Australian Coloniality: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Ancestry, Epistemology and Academia
Though I would not refer to myself as one, being ‘a colonial’ is an uncomfortable place to be when your ancestors were simultaneously the victims of horrific British penal codes, and also the instigators of genocide.
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SOAS History Blog Podcast, Ep. 3: Sudanese History through Music
More about this episode Saffa Khalil Interviewee Saffa is an interdisciplinary researcher and recent SOAS graduate in History and African Studies. Her work is mainly concerned with the ability of music to shape our understanding of transnational identities and historiography. Dissertation Abstract: From intimate moments to more comprehensive historical events, Sudanese music provides a lens…
SOAS History Blog Podcast, Ep. 2: Histories of Childhood in Algeria – Researching an Undergraduate Dissertation During COVID-19
More about this episode Mia Bellouere Interviewee Mia is an undergrad alumni from SOAS with a degree in History and Korean. Having worked in the arts for charity and organisational development sectors, she is currently pursuing a career in humanitarian project management. Dissertation Abstract: Mia’s paper examines the experience of childhood in colonial Algeria,…
Remembering the French Nation through Colonial Forgetting: An Analysis of the Exhibition of Hervé di Rosa’s ‘1794 – L’abolition de l’an II’ (Part of the series ‘L’Histoire en peinture de l’Assemblée nationale’, 1991)
by Darja Wolfmeier Résumé: Depuis 1991, une série de 13 fresques d’Hervé di Rosa est accrochée aux murs de l’Assemblée nationale française, représentant des étapes majeures de l’histoire constitutionnelle française – l’une d’entre elles étant l’Abolition de l’esclavage dans les colonies en 1794. Cette représentation ne reproduit pas seulement des stéréotypes racistes, mais s’inscrit également dans…