James Vernon

Professor

Contact

Office: 2214 Dwinelle Hall
Hours: TU 1-3
Phone: (510) 642-2362
Email: jvernon@berkeley.edu

Like things used to be, I was made in Manchester - or at least the academic me was. I received both my BA (1987) and PhD (1991) from the University of Manchester, UK. I remained there for the best part of a decade as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (1991-4), a Lecturer/Assistant Professor (1994-8) and finally as a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor (1998-2000). I’ve been at Berkeley ever since. Here I teach modern British history but I do so through broad comparative and theoretical interests in questions about the nature of modernity, imperialism and state formation.

Syllabi of some of my recent courses are available below:

History 39Z: Hunger. An Unnatural or Modern History?

History 101: Anything on Imperial Britain

History 100: Britain on Film

History 151C : A Peculiar Modernity. Britain 1848-1997. Podcast available here and on ITunes U.

History 275C: Why Britain Matters: An Exemplary or Peculiar History?

History 280: Governmentality and History

History 280: Twentieth Century Britain

History 280: Histories of the British Empire

History 285: Modern Imperial Britain

Those interested in other classes or scholarly events relating to Britain should check out the Center for British Studies.
Trained as a political historian of nineteenth century Britain, my first publications - Politics and the People ([1993] splendidly reissued in paperback in 2009 ) and an edited collection of essays Re-Reading the Constitution (1996) - helped outline an agenda for what a cultural history of British politics might look like. In particular, they addressed the cultural practices and forms of subjectivity upon which the British version of democracy relied during the nineteenth century. My next book Hunger. A Modern History (2007) explored how and why hunger came to be understood as a problem in modern, imperial Britain and the changing ways in which it was addressed by civil society and the state. It was also an attempt imagine what social history and histories of welfare might look like after the cultural and imperial turns.

Most recently I have co-edited a collection of essays The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (2011). It is the first book in the new Berkeley Series in British Studies edited by myself and Mark Bevir. Published by GAIA and the University of California Press the series is designed to reassess the nature of Britain's modern economy, society, politics and culture within broad imperial and transnational frames. I am currently working on a new book called 'Distant Strangers. How Imperial Britain Became Modern' which offers an interpretive history of modernity in Britain from the late seventeenth to the middle of the twentieth century.

I am on the editorial boards of Social History, Representations, Twentieth Century British History and History Compass.