Category: Research
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Radical history online – a list of collections
I am very interested in the growing amount of radical literature from around the world that is being scanned and digitised. As there are so many and from many different places, I thought it would be useful to make a list. All of those that are included are free to access (there are others that…
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New post at History & Policy on controlling Cypriot migration to UK
History and Policy has published an opinion piece by Andrekos Varnava and I on our research into the controlling of Cypriot migration to the UK in the 1920s-30s. It is based on our article in English Historical Research last year and some of the research we have been doing as part of our ARC project on…
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Precarity and overwork in academia
In December last year, I stopped work on all of my research projects. The following week, I compromised with myself and said no primary research (reading archival documents) or writing for the next month, only secondary source reading. I had one conference paper to present at the end of January, so for the week leading…
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Some highlights from the CIA’s recent document dump online
This week, the Central Intelligence Agency uploaded more than 12 million documents onto its online library, allowing access to previously unavailable declassified material ranging from the 1940s to the 1990s. There is a lot of interesting material for researchers to wade through, but here are some of my initial highlights: A 1949 report on the…
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New article published in TCBH on CPGB and gay rights
This is just a quick post to let everyone know that Daryl Leeworthy and I have just had an article published in Twentieth Century British History journal on the Communist Party of Great Britain and gay rights. The title of the article is ‘Before Pride: The Struggle for the Recognition of Gay Rights in the…
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From Powell to Brexit: My interview with the Weekly Worker on ‘race’, anti-racism and the British left
This week, the CPGB’s Weekly Worker (see here for more info on its background) conducted an interview with me about my forthcoming book, British Communism and the Politics of Race, as well as on my research in general and the anti-racist movement in Britain since the 1960s. You can read the full interview here. It…
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Turning that blog post into a journal article: A quick guide
One of the popular blog posts for academics that I have seen over the last year has been on turning your journal article into a blog post. I am assuming this is aimed at academics who don’t blog regularly and may be considering contributing to multi-authored blog as an opportunity to showcase their research. This…
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How to navigate the Comintern archives online: A guide for the non-Russian speaker
In 2015, the Russian government made freely available the scanned papers of the Communist International that had been digitised in the 1990s. Access to this digital archive was limited to a number of universities in Europe, as well as the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The new portal made the thousands of scanned documents…