For the tenth year in a row, The John W. Kluge Center will welcome the International Seminar on Decolonization to the Library of Congress for the month of July. This year we’re particularly delighted that two Kluge Center alumni will be among the cohort.
Historian Emily Baughan was an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow at the Kluge Center in 2012. While in residence, Baughan researched and wrote portions of her Ph.D. thesis, which analyzed the history of the major non-governmental organization Save the Children. Baughan’s research examined the ways in which international aid was dependent upon British imperial identities, ideals and networks. Her thesis is currently under revision for publication as a monograph. Now a Lecturer in 19th and 20th century British history at the University of Bristol, Baughan returns to the Center this summer as a Seminar participant, where she will continue her research into the connections between international aid, development and imperialism. She will explore a new project titled, “An Operation Anvil for Children: Youth, NGOs and the Colonial State in Kenya, 1950-1963.”
Historian Kevin Kim was the Center’s most recent J. Franklin Jameson Fellow in American History in 2014. Now a Senior Lecturer at Vanderbilt University, Kim’s project at the Kluge Center traced the Cold War’s “rich veins of contestation, contingency, and often surprising moral and intellectual clarity” using the Library of Congress holdings. In particular, Kim examined the influence of Henry Wallace and Herbert Hoover during the Cold War years, drawing on the Library’s extensive manuscript collections. Kim returns to the Center this summer to work on a second Cold War project, titled “From Empire to Cold War: Kim Yong-jeung and the Transpacific Origins of Non-Alignment.”
See the full list of this year’s Seminar participants by clicking here.
What is “Decolonization”? Click here to learn.
The International Seminar on Decolonization brings sixteen young scholars from around the world to Washington, D.C. for four weeks of research and discussion into the dissolution of colonial empires in the period after the Second World War and the emergence of new nations, particularly in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Now in its tenth year, the seminar has brought more than 100 emerging scholars from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa to the Library of Congress to use the Library’s extraordinary global collections–in 470 different languages. The seminar has helped establish decolonization as a distinct and emerging field within the history profession, with scholarship informed by the Library of Congress collections. Funding for the seminar is generously provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the seminar is organized and administered by the National History Center. Professor Wm. Roger Louis, a distinguished scholar of British history and the British empire, a member of the Library of Congress Scholars Council, directs the seminar.