James Vernon
Professor
Contact
Office: 3229 Dwinelle Hall
Hours: Thursday 1:30-3:30pm
Phone: (510) 642-2362
Email: jvernon@berkeley.edu
"We live in
an age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it:
the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri
de coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with
experience – so unanswerably authentic, and liberally and democratically
dispensed." Martin Amis, Experience. A Memoir (2000), p.6.
Like things used to be, I
was made in Manchester.
It was at the University
of Manchester that I
received both my BA (1987) and PhD (1991), there I
remained first as British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (1991-4), then as
Lecturer (1994-8) and finally as Senior Lecturer in Modern History
(1998-2000).
At Berkeley, I have joined a thriving
interdisciplinary group of scholars working on Britain, a critical mass now
gathered together in the new Center
for British Studies of which I am the Director. The Center provides
detailed listings of all courses, lectures and other academic events relating
to the study of Britain
and its relationships with the rest of the world.
Syllabi of my courses are available below:
History
39Z: Hunger. An Unnatural or Modern History?
History 103:
England/Britain/Empire: The Politics of National Identity in Twentieth Century
Britain
History 101:
No Sex Please, We're British!
History 101:
Food
History
100: Britain
on Film
History 151C:
Britain 1848-1997
History 275:
Britain and the Making of the Modern World
History 275C:
Why Britain Matters: An Exemplary or Peculiar History?
History 280:
Britain and the Empire
History 280:
Governmentality and History
History
280: Twentieth Century Britain
Trained as a political historian of nineteenth century Britain, my
first publications - Politics and the
People (1993) 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 nineteenth
century invention of democracy in Britain
relied. I would now describe myself as part social, and part cultural, historian.
I have recently finished a new book to be
published by Harvard University Press in Fall 2007 called Hunger. A Modern History. It charts the changing ways in which hunger has been understood and governed in modern, imperial, Britain. It is also an attempt imagine what social history and histories of welfare might look like after the cultural and imperial turns. I am on the editorial boards of both Social
History and Representations.
Recent Articles
(with
Tim Pratt) "'Appeal from this fiery bed...' The colonial politics of Gandhi's
fasts and their metropolitan reception in Britain" Journal of British
Studies, 44, 1 (January 2005): 92-114.
"Historian
and the Victorian Studies Question" Victorian Studies 47, 2 (Winter 2005):
274-81
"The
Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the
School Meal in Modern Britain" American Historical Review , 110, 3 (June
2005)
A Few of My Favourite Sites
