Troubling the Island Story

Esme Cleall is Senior Lecturer in the History of the British Empire, University of Sheffield, UK. She is author of Colonising Disability: impairment and otherness in Britain and its empire, c. 1800-1914 (2022) and Missionary Discourses of Difference: negotiating otherness in the British empire, 1840-1900 (2012). Her work focuses on regimes of difference and the colonial construction and experience of power focusing on ideas about race and disability.Fae Dussart is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Sussex, UK. She is author, with Alan Lester, of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance Protecting Aborigines in the Nineteenth Century British Empire (2014), and of In the Service of empire: domestic service and mastery in metropole and colony (Bloomsbury 2022). Her work explores the meaning and constitution of British, imperial and colonial identity, and the intersection of these with the formation of spaces and places.Onni Gust is Associate Professor in the History Department, University of Nottingham, UK. Their work explores the belonging and the human/animal boundary in the eighteenth-century British Empire, and the changing meaning of ‘sex’ in colonial context. Their publications include: Unhomely Empire: whiteness and belonging, c.1769-1830 (2021, Bloomsbury), ‘The Perilous Territory of Not Belonging’ in History Workshop Journal (2018) and a forthcoming chapter ‘History Beyond the Gender Binary’ for the Oxford Handbook of LGBT History.

An essential volume. In appreciating Hall’s pioneering scholarship, these essays lay out new grounds of inquiry and debate in settler colonial, Indigenous, queer and disability studies, upholding Hall’s mandate to reconfigure our knowledge of Britain’s past, and future.

• Preface: James Vernon, ‘Catherine Hall and the transformation of modern Britain’ Introduction, Esme Cleall (University of Sheffield, UK), Fae Dussart (University of Sussex, UK) and Onni Gust (University of Nottingham, UK)1. Catherine Hall: a friendship in history, the stranger inside, Sally Alexander (King’s College London, UK)2, From Family Fortunes (1987) to Defining the Victorian Nation (2000): Catherine Hall on the place of the political, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall, (University College London, UK)3. Positioning history-writing: the Supervisor, the Self, the Psyche and the Subject, Esme Cleall (University of Sheffield, UK)4. Mapping Civilizing Subjects: Catherine Hall's geographical imagination, David Lambert (University of Warwick, UK)5. 'The Secret Places of Life': History, the Novel and Catherine Hall, Bill Schwarz (Queen Mary University, London) 6. 'Gender, sexuality, and the queer possibilities of Catherine Hall's historical scholarship', Onni Gust (University of Nottingham, UK)7. 'Revealing the political in the private', Fae Dussart (University of Sussex)8. At (the other) home with empire: colonialism and history-writing between Britain and Canada – or, the view from Canada, Laura Ishiguro (University of British Colombia, Canada) and Adele Perry (University of Manitoba, Canada)9. Britain and India Redux: the relevance of Catherine Hall for Indian History, Mrinalini Sinha (University of Michigan, USA)10. Reflections on Catherine Hall's Embedded Hermeneutics of Irreparable History, David Scott (Columbia University, USA)11. De-centring the 'civilising' curriculum, Jason Todd (University of Oxford, UK)12. My Name is Covered in Blood, Tré Ventour-Griffiths (Independent scholar)13. An unequal inheritance: slavery, family history, and the legacies of British slave-ownership, Katie Donington (The Open University, UK)14. History painting: museum narratives of empire and slavery in Britain and the work of Catherine Hall, Liberty Patterson (University of York, UK)Epilogue: Catherine Hall (University College London, UK) and Meleisa Ono-George (University of Oxford, UK) in conversation