James Vernon

Professor

Contact

Office: 3229 Dwinelle Hall
Hours: Monday 2-4 (until February 17) thereafter Tuesday 2-4
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). I've been at Berkeley ever since

Syllabi of my courses are available below:

History 101: Imperial Britain

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

History 101: Food

History 100: Britain on Film

History 151C: A Peculiar Modernity. Britain 1848-1997

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

Those interested in other classes or scholarly events relating to Britain should check out the Center for British Studies. Since 2004 the Center has a major Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for a collaborative program with the Universities of Yale and Chicago exploring the state of British history by revisiting the debates around Britain's transition to modernity. Renewed in 2008 the program will run until 2011.

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 British version of democracy relied during the nineteenth century. My most recent book is Hunger. A Modern History. It charts how and why hunger came to be understood as a problem in modern, imperial Britain and the changing ways in which it was addressed. 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, Representations, and Twentieth Century British History.

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