The British Academy’s Rising Star Engagement Awards (BARSEAs) are designed to enable established early career academics to actively engage in the work of the Academy and to enhance their own skills and career development through the organisation of events, training, and mentoring activities for a wide range of other early career researchers.

In its rise and interest in populations and space during the later eighteenth and nineteenth century, a subdiscipline and worldview of human geography came to deeply influence, in a human-scientific as well as aesthetic manner, perceptions and uses of space, governance, law, and local behavior. From imperial politics and law to racial theory, from the development of expertise on territories and ethnic groups to the historicity of sovereignty, historical geography facilitated the understanding of the places of human beings on the earth, in and across borders, over real, historicized, or imagined periods of time. It also structured spatial understandings of the environment and human/non-human interaction, which themselves inform our contemporary understandings of biology, genetics and the human future in the age of global warming. This conference attempts to bring focus to the centrality of this often woolly and just as often neglected interdisciplinary approach, mediator-epistemology, and worldview that, arising from studies of climate and its influence, contributed to the fusion of practices of territorially-bound rule, separation and segregation of populations, migration and mobility, and geopolitical conflict.

The recent 'history-in-the making' women’s marches held all around the world after US president Donald Trump’s inauguration have sparked a renewed interest in feminism. And so Earshot travels a century back in time - and across the globe - to another march, when women on the streets of St Petersburg changed the political landscape of their nation - and indeed the world. These women sparked a revolution, brought down the Tsar and brought communism to the world. And it was the idealistic beginning of a dark time. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/kollontai/8322232

Human trafficking, ‘people smuggling’ and clandestine migration are some of the most politically volatile and socially pressing issues in the present day, but they also have a long history. This AHRC-funded project (2016-2019) will contribute significantly to the emerging study of the history of illicit and clandestine migration by examining the history of trafficking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in comparative and global perspective.

'Borders of Biopolitics' was a series of two conferences, organised at UCL and NYU in collaboration with Prof. Yanni Kotsonis and the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. These interdisciplinary conferences explored the possibilities (and limits) of biopolitics as a heuristic device for analysing Russia's past and present. The term 'biopolitics' (which refers to the production of state legitimacy through the use of the human body, and not just territory, as a critical site of control) has long inflected the scholarship on western Europe. However, scholars working on eastern Europe have been slower to draw on the ‘biopolitical’ as a conceptual language. Nonetheless, recent work in Russian history abounds with apparent examples of the exercise of biopolitics. We can see this, for example, in the creation of ‘population’ as a site of intervention in nineteenth century Russia, and in attempts to remake the ‘socialist person’ though new ways of tying individuals to the state in the post-war Eastern bloc. Similarly, theories of biopolitics are potentially useful tools to mobilize in order to analyze the relationship between gender, sexuality, race, nation and geopolitics in the contemporary context.