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Laureate Research Program in International History

Home to the research theme ‘Inventing the international’
Hosting academics, postdoctoral scholars and junior research fellows to explore the history of how economics and politics intersected after 1815 to make the modern, globalised world.

About us

'Inventing the International' brings together a team of specialist researchers to ask innovative questions about how people have imagined the international as a realm of politics and society in the past.

  • What constituted internationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries?
  • What role did economic ideas and entrepreneurs play in the determination of the international as a realm of political and social life and in shaping geopolitical and civilisational divisions?

We run research workshops and seminar programs on several themes: 

  • Sites of international memory
  • What is international history now?
  • Economics and international history
  • Climate and capital
  • Planetary pasts and futures.

Research themes

'Inventing the international' comprises four main themes

We bring together a team of researchers to ask innovative questions about how humans imagine the international as a realm of politics and society.

Our people

The Laureate Research Program in International History comprises academics and researchers from across the University and we welcome visiting international scholars.

Director

Professor Glenda Sluga

Steering committee

Sunil Amrith, Birkbeck, University of London

Jens Boel, UNESCO

Patrizia Dogliani, University of Bologna

David Engerman, Brandeis University

Madeleine Herren-Oesch, University of Basel

Akira Iriye, Harvard University

Sandrine Kott, University of Geneva

Marilyn Lake, University of Melbourne

Fiona Paisley, Griffith University

Liang Pan, University of Tsukuba

Emma Rothschild, Harvard University

2018

Dr Philippa Hetherington, The University of Sydney

Associate Professor Vanessa Ogle, University of California Berkeley

Professor Patricia Owens, University of Sussex

Professor Naoko Shimazu, Yale-NUS College, Singapore

Dr Lucia Sorbera, The University of Sydney

Our events

Free ports

Workshop: Free Ports and Free Trade 

Programme

  • Koen Stapelbroek, ‘Global trade, concessions and commercial extraterritoriality: reconstructing the history of the free port’
  • Ben Huf, ‘Balance of Power, Balance of Trade?’
  • Toby Nash, ‘Disorderly Commerce: Black Markets, Port Infrastructure, and Trade Policy in Kingston and Bombay, 1700-1775’
  • Nicholas Hoare, ‘L'affaire des phosphates in the interwar Pacific: A French critique of the British Phosphate Commissioners’
  • Glenda Sluga, ‘Sites of Economic Memory: Financial landscapes and actors in international concessions’
  • Discussants: Sophie Loy-Wilson, Andrew Fitzmaurice and Michael Beggs.

6 November
2-5 pm
Western Tower Boardroom (Quadrangle)
The University of Sydney

Click here for more information

To explore our events, please visit the University of Sydney's What's On calendar.

In the media

ABC Radio National Saturday Extra
1 June 2019
Sabine Selchow, Research Fellow in International History:
A Foreign Affair panel on Australian foreign policy, Indonesian election tension and European Parliamentary elections.

S2Ep3: Skeletons of Empire – History Lab podcast
December 2018
In the aftermath of World War One, nations came together in an attempt to ensure war on the same devastating scale could never occur again. The result? The League of Nations: a revolutionary idea to form the world’s first international organisation. But clearly it did not stop the world from going to war.

Director

Contact details

Program officer