Empire Museum: Recent Episodes
Joe Manock
A history podcast ft. academics, activists and more. Empire Museum acts against the national neglect of our imperial past, examines forgotten historical chapters and reflects on legacies still reverberating today. An unsanitized appraisal of Britain's past.
Today's guest is the distinguished and acclaimed Marius Turda, a powerhouse historian of Biomedicine and Eugenics. Marius has been teaching at Oxford Brookes since 2005 and has published extensively during his career. He is the founder of the Working Group on the History of Eugenics and Race (HRE), a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Galton Institute. Marius unpacks eugenics with unwavering nuance in this podcast and provides sprawling, insightful answers to all my questions. If you want to learn more about this crucial topic, Marius is your man. Enjoy!
Subhadra Das is a writer, historian, broadcaster, comedian and museum curator. Her main area of expertise lies within the history of eugenics and scientific racism. Until recently, she worked as the Curator of the UCL Science Collections, shaking up the status quo and breathing new life into how we tell the stories of race science and its legacies. This podcast was a treat to record, and Subhadra drew on her breadth of knowledge to illuminate this neglected history. Enjoy!
Priya Satia is a Professor of International History at Stanford University. Satia specializes in modern British and British empire history, especially in the Middle East and South Asia.
In this podcast, I ask her about her book, Time's Monster: History, Conscience and Britain's Empire, which focuses on the role of the modern historical imagination in the history of the British empire. Ultimately, we answer the question: How does history make history?Enjoy!
Daniel Trilling is a journalist, editor and author who writes about refugees, nationalism and human rights. In this magnificent episode, we talk about the culture war and its political impact, the legacies of slavery and the British Empire and refugees both past and present. Enjoy!
Adom Getachew is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her interests lie within race and empire, postcolonial political theory and the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. In 2019, she wrote Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, on Black Atlantic anticolonial nationalists during the height of decolonization in the twentieth century. Enjoy!
Hakim Adi is currently Professor of the History of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Chichester. He was the UK's first history professor of African heritage. His research has focused on uncovering the history of Africa in Britain, as well as documenting the history of anti-colonialism and Pan-Africanism during the twentieth century.
In this spellbinding conservation, we observe the existence of the African diaspora within Britain for over two millennia. We question the role of Windrush as the symbol and linguistic shorthand for migration and note the problems in seeing 1948 as a watershed moment. From African Roman Emperors to a potential Archbishop of Canterbury: it's clear the African presence in Britain is an ancient story. This is a vast episode which also touches on abolition and Michael Gove. Enjoy!
Dr Joe Mulhall is a historian of fascism and Senior Researcher at HOPE not hate, the UK's largest anti-fascism and anti-racism organisation- where he monitors far-right groups and individuals. He runs Hope not Hate’s anti-Muslim monitoring unit, which tracks organised anti-Muslim groups in Europe and North America. He has completed a PhD on post-war fascism and sits on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
In this podcast, we discuss the continuities of British fascism and complicate the notion that 'classic fascism died in 1945'. I ask Joe about the core arguments of his book: ‘British Fascism After the Holocaust: From the Birth of Denial to the Notting Hill Riots 1939-1958’. We delve into Oswald Mosley, Holocaust denial and post-war reactions to immigration.
In the closing half, we look at where the far-right stand in the modern-day: we touch on conspiracy theories, the deplorable campaign against migrant arrivals across the channel, and the deplatforming of David Icke. Enjoy!
Stephen Welsh is an Independent Curator + Consultant, who previously worked as Project Curator at the International Slavery Museum and Curator of Living Cultures at Manchester Museum.
In this fascinating podcast, we discuss the legacies of museums which emerged during the height of British imperial power.
We consider ways to combat the ongoing impact of colonialism on museums: the conservation touched on cooperation with activists, repatriation, and the need for wholesale structural change within the museum sector. Enjoy!