Amanda Behm
I research the intellectual, political and institutional history of modern Britain and the British empire. My dissertation, “Imperial history in Britain: pasts, politics and the making of a field c.1880-1940,” explores why the British turned to a new subject of study to make sense of contemporary crises and promote domestic and overseas reform. While the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long been seen as the heyday of imperialism, the unsteady emergence of imperial history as an academic discipline after 1880 sheds new light on the doubts, conflicts and searching reflection that characterized elite and public discussions of Britain’s global position. It also provides a reference for understanding the efforts of three generations of politicians, journalists and scholars to master the past— how their historical philosophies, intertwined with political belief, influenced policy goals and responded to the challenges of global upheaval. As I have found, imperial history emerged as part of a vast project to promote the diasporic settler colonies at the expense of the dependencies. The long rise, fall and revision of this project shaped the terms by which Britons would later negotiate decolonization and postwar geopolitics. Paul Kennedy, Steve Pincus, Jay Winter, Karuna Mantena and Frank Trentmann are advising the thesis.
My research, conducted in a numerous archives in the U.K. and North America, has received support from the Institute of Historical Research, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fox International Fellowship Program, International Security Studies at Yale, the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the MacMillan Center. I also have benefited from feedback at seminars in New York, Frankfurt, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Paris, Austin, Washington, D.C., and New Haven. My first article, “The bisected roots of imperial history: settler world projects and the making of a field in modern Britain, 1883-1912,” appeared in May 2011 in Recherches Britanniques.
Originally from Grayslake, Illinois, I came to Yale with an A.B. from Dartmouth College (2004) and an M.Phil. in Historical Studies from the University of Cambridge (2006), where I researched British representations of Indian partition violence. My teaching interests include, beyond modern Britain and empire: early modern British history, South Asian history, historiography, comparative empires, decolonization, and political theories of imperialism and resistance.
