Troubling the Island Story

This edited collection engages with the work of the eminent historian Catherine Hall and her influence on the development of recent British Historiography. Over her career Hall has had a pivotal impact on a number of historiographical and disciplinary fields including British History, Colonial, Imperial and Postcolonial Studies, Gender History, Geography, Education, and Museum Studies. In analysing and responding to her work this volume makes a critical intervention into these inter-disciplinary fields.

Providing a distinctive intellectual history of Hall's work and its impact, as well as an accessible route into a range of historiographical and interdisciplinary areas, the essays in this volume bring together leading scholars in the field of critical colonial studies to tackle unanswered questions raised by Hall's work and expand on them. Exploring themes such as masculinity, history writing, historical geography and histories of the home as well as tracing Hall's intellectual trajectory and its relationship to shifting historiographical debates, Troubling the Island Story offers a clear and accessible insight into the changing shape of British historiography over the last forty years.

Esme Cleall is Senior Lecturer in the History of the British Empire, University of Sheffield, UK. She is author of Colonising Disability: impairment and otherness in Britain and its empire, c. 1800-1914 (2022) and Missionary Discourses of Difference: negotiating otherness in the British empire, 1840-1900 (2012). Her work focuses on regimes of difference and the colonial construction and experience of power focusing on ideas about race and disability.

Fae Dussart is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Sussex, UK. She is author, with Alan Lester, of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance Protecting Aborigines in the Nineteenth Century British Empire (2014), and of In the Service of empire: domestic service and mastery in metropole and colony (Bloomsbury 2022). Her work explores the meaning and constitution of British, imperial and colonial identity, and the intersection of these with the formation of spaces and places.

Onni Gust is Associate Professor in the History Department, University of Nottingham, UK. Their work explores the belonging and the human/animal boundary in the eighteenth-century British Empire, and the changing meaning of ‘sex’ in colonial context. Their publications include: Unhomely Empire: whiteness and belonging, c.1769-1830 (2021, Bloomsbury), ‘The Perilous Territory of Not Belonging’ in History Workshop Journal (2018) and a forthcoming chapter ‘History Beyond the Gender Binary’ for the Oxford Handbook of LGBT History.