EUROPE

Marcus Colla [2015] is a lecturer in Modern European Political History at the University of Bergen in Norway. His books include Prussia in the Historical Culture of the German Democratic Republic: Communists and Kings and Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century.

Marcus’ current work is on the history of the Esperanto movement. It is split into two separate book projects - a longer-term history using Esperanto as a lens to explore the relationship between language and identity in the modern world; and a more targeted archival-based study on the movement in Eastern Europe after 1945. He says:

ASIA

Berenice Guyot-Rechard [2009] is a historian of South Asia and international relations based at King’s College London who has special expertise in the connections between state-making, nation-building and geopolitics, notably in border spaces like the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean. Her books include the prize-winning Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-62 and South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent.

Anjali Datta [2009] is a historian of Modern South Asia based at the University of Cambridge, who has particular research interests in socio-economic history, postcolonial feminism, migration, labour and urban transformations in the Global South. 

Joseph McQuade [2013] is a Senior Analyst at Global Affairs Canada and an historian of South and Southeast Asia, global terrorism and international relations. He is the author of  Fugitive of Empire: Rash Behari Bose, Japan, and the Indian Independence Struggle and A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea. 

And Stephanie Mawson [2014] is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York who specialises in the history of early modern Southeast Asia, with a focus on the contested nature of colonisation in the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos. 

MIDDLE EAST

Max Reibman’s PhD broadly concerned the disruptions brought about by World War I to the political and economic landscape of the Middle East. His thesis had a particular focus on the role that wartime Egypt played as a forum for the emerging nationalist movements competing for influence over the post-war territorial settlement. 

After finishing his PhD, he transitioned to a private sector role with a global risk management consultancy, working first in Dubai and then in Washington, DC, where he covered pre-transaction due diligence and analysed the regulatory regimes of key emerging market jurisdictions. 

His work as a consultant brought him close to legal counsel advising on cross border transactions across the energy, industrials and consumer goods sectors. This experience motivated him to pursue a law degree and he has now spent a number of years working as an investment funds attorney at a leading international law firm where he mainly advises clients on forming and structuring investment funds for private equity sponsors that frequently offer limited partner interests to large institutional investors, including sovereign wealth funds. 

Max [2010] says his training as a historian has been invaluable to his career in relation to its focus on detail within a broader historical context and its application to the analytical process he follows in his work. 

AFRICA

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann [2010, pictured below] is a historian of 20th and 21st century Sub-Saharan African in global perspective at the Institute for European Global Studies, University of Basel in Switzerland. She is particularly interested in the interplay between structures and subjectivities in shaping historical agency and experience in settings of social change and political transition. Her published scholarship to date focuses mainly on colonial and post-colonial Southern and East Africa, with particular attention to issues of race and class, labour, identity, state formation, knowledge production, power and resource politics. Danelle is the author of Privileged Precariat: White workers and South Africa's long transition to majority rule and co-author of Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa. 

NEW ZEALAND

Emma Gattey [2020, pictured below] is incoming Lecturer of Law at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. Her current work examines the historical relationship between law and social change, focusing on second-wave feminism and the movement for Māori sovereignty in Aotearoa. Within the field of legal history, she is also researching early 20th century inter-state arbitration and the visual representation of treaties. After her History PhD, Emma worked as a disputes lawyer in London and Paris. She continues to publish widely as a literary and art critic. 

Annalise Higgins [2016] is a Senior Fellow at the think tank, Koi Tū Centre for Informed Futures in New Zealand where she leads the Centre’s work on science diplomacy, and supports its activities in relation to social cohesion. 

ARCHITECTURE AND ART

Several Scholars have had a significant impact in the history of architecture and art.

They include Max Sternberg [2001], Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, whose research and teaching stand at the intersection of architectural history, architectural theory and urban history. Over the past two decades he has worked on the social functions of medieval architecture; the politics of heritage in contested cities, particularly in Jerusalem; and the role of memory in public space in European border towns. 

Most recently, he has been working on the Munich-based architect Hans Döllgast, completing the first monograph that offers a synthesis of designs, drawings and writings. He is currently working on two book projects - a monograph exploring appropriations of medieval architecture in 20th century architecture, ranging from urban design to film architecture and a collection of co-edited essays investigating the role of collaboration in the postwar building boom in Europe. 

Alex Bremner [2001] is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh where he specialises in British architecture of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. His research and writing cover these periods both in Britain and the former British colonial world. He argues that the architectural history of the British Isles cannot be fully understood in isolation from that of its erstwhile global empire. He says: “I believe that this history constitutes a wider ‘British world’ of architectural ambition and intervention…and that this history is best comprehended as a manifestation of the energy consumption context from which it emerged, placing the very existence of the Victorian built environment in a meaningful relationship with the large-scale thermo-industrial processes of the Victorian age.”

His most recent book is Victorian Architecture [published in March 2026]. It presents a new and refreshing overview of 19th- and early 20th-century architecture in Britain and the wider British world. Alex’s work has won a number of prestigious awards, for example, his first monograph, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire c. 1840-70 won several prizes, including the Historians of British Art Book Prize. He is an editorial board member of ABE Journal and formerly Deputy Editor of Architectural History (2022-25). He has also been an Editorial Advisory Committee member of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2015-19) and currently sits on the Publications Committee of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University) and is a Director of the Society of Architectural Historians in the United States.  

 

Some History of Art Scholars are working in art galleries and museum settings. They include Rachel Boyd [2009], who did an MPhil in the History of Art and Architecture at Cambridge and a PhD in Art History at Columbia. She has held a number of academic posts. For instance, she was the David E. Finley Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington DC. Her museum experience includes recent curatorial internships at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In Boston, she contributed research for the 2016–2017 exhibition “Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence”.

Rachel is currently Senior Curator of Renaissance Sculpture at the V&A in London where she oversees the museum's collections of European sculpture from about 1400 to 1600 and manages the museum's suite of Medieval and Renaissance galleries.

She has recently wrapped up a multi-year research project on Italian terracotta sculptures together with conservators and scientists at the V&A and the Louvre.

She is now working on a major exhibition that will open at the V&A in autumn 2028 and is about a famous Italian dynasty of patrons and collectors. 

Julien Domercq [2013], whose PhD in the History of Art, focused on the shift in depictions of the peoples of the Pacific in British and French art from idealisation to demonisation between the Enlightenment and the Age of Empire, is now a curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, having previously worked at the National Gallery where he curated exhibitions on everything from Degas to Post Impressionism. 

Scholars have also broadened our knowledge of history in key areas from human rights and health to food and the environment.

HUMAN RIGHTS

Katherine Bruce-Lockhart [2013] is an Associate Professor in the School of Social, Political and Historical Research at the University of Waterloo in Canada and a faculty member at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo. Her work focuses on how history can inform and impact ongoing struggles for justice. Katherine's research examines the global history of prisons, punishment, colonialism, decolonisation and human rights. She has published widely on these topics, including an edited collection and articles in journals such as Punishment and Society, Critical Criminology, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and the Journal of World History. Her book, Carceral Afterlives: Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda, won the Joel Gregory Book Prize from the Canadian Association of African Studies in 2024. 

Katherine is working on several comparative and collaborative projects, including research on prisons and punishment in British African colonies; the history of the Nelson Mandela Rules and movements for prisoners’ rights and prison abolition within the United Nations and other global governance forums; and how people in prison are affected by COVID-19 and other emergencies. 

Katherine has also trained as an instructor through Walls to Bridges, an organisation that offers university classes for incarcerated and non-incarcerated students in carceral settings, and she has won several teaching awards for her innovative classes on the history of prisons. She also works with community organisations focused on prisoners' rights, abolition and anti-racism.  

Fabrice Langrognet [2014], a former judge and historian of migration and asylum at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, whose current research interests lie in bordering systems, socio-cultural identification dynamics, migrants' agency in norm production as well as issues around housing, gender, age and climate change. His first prize-winning book appeared in English in 2022 as Neighbours of Passage and in French in 2023, under the title Voisins de passage.

ENVIRONMENT

Sarah Dry is finishing two manuscripts for books that will appear in 2027, both with Princeton University Press. Both of them are ‘first’ treatments of their subject matter. 

The Woman Who Took on the World, Dana Meadows, the Limits to Growth, and the Invention of Systems Thinking is about the environmental scientist, educator and writer Dana Meadows who is best known as lead author of the books The Limits to Growth and Thinking In Systems: A Primer. 

Sarah says:

Her other book, co-written with Mike Hulme, Professor in the Geography Department at Cambridge, is When Temperature Became Global: A Brief History of the World’s Most Important Index. The authors describe it as “the first book to present the history of this enormously consequential concept.  In it, we demonstrate the changing motivations, techniques, personalities and institutions which have shaped the concept of a global average temperature.”

The book  draws on archival and published texts and newly collected oral histories of scientists active in the pivotal period of the late 1970s and early 1980s to recount “the untold story of how it became possible to believe that the world might usefully have a temperature and how and why successive generations of scientists sought to measure it”.  

Sarah, who has written many books including Waters of the World, a history of climate science in six lives; and The Newton Papers, a history of Newton's private manuscripts, was a research fellow with the  Leverhulme Trust-funded Making Climate History project, from  2019-2024  and was based at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the Geography Department at Cambridge. She has also completed oral histories of climate scientists as part of the project.

  

FOOD

Emelyn Rude [2018] is a historian of food. She is finishing her role as a Bruno Latour post-doctoral fellow at Sciences Po in Paris and is working on her new book, currently called The American Appetite: a History of a Hungry United States, which is under contract with HarperCollins. Her magazine EATEN will publish its 27th edition for October.