Professor James Mark
Professor
History
Overview
My main areas of research are Eastern European cultures of memory, the social and cultural history of Communism, and the relationship between Eastern Europe and global histories of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and race. Where does the region’s experience of decolonisation, nation building, re-occupation, violence and liberation fit within a global history of Empire - across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first centuries?
I have addressed questions of Communist and post-Communist memory in politics, museums, law, archaeology, activism and through oral history. My best-known work on this topic is The Unfinished Revolution. Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (Yale, 2010). I have also recently co-edited a collection The global crisis in memory: populism, decolonisation and how we remember in the twenty-first century (LUP, 2020), which addresses contemporary populist and decolonial challenges to liberal cosmopolitan memory across the world. For a presentation on populist and decolonial approaches to Eastern European memory.
On Communism, I have published extensively, on themes such as activism, anti-imperialism, the Red Army and sexual violence, secret agents, the idea of generation, representations of the West, middle class experience, Europeanisation, rights, racism/ anti-racism, and the system's demise. I contributed to a major project on pan-European activism in the 1960s and 1970s which resulted in the co-authored work Europe's 1968: Voices of Revolt (OUP, 2013) and more recently co-authored a work that considered the end of European Communism in global perspective: 1989: a Global History of Eastern Europe (CUP, 2019).
On Eastern Europe and global histories of Empire, I have co-authored Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (OUP, 2022), and co-edited Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World (IUP, 2020). A co-edited collection entitled Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the global history of race for Manchester University Press, and a co-written monograph rethinking the history of modern Hungary through the lenses of global imperialism, anti-imperialism, race and whiteness for Cambridge University Press, are approaching completion.
Recent Publications
A collectively researched and written monograph, Socialism Goes Global. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Excerpt here. A dicussion of the themes together with Steffi Marung and Péter Apor; another book discussion on Eastern Europe, Empire, migration and race with Paul Betts.
A monograph, 1989. A Global History of Eastern Europe, written with my colleagues Bogdan Iacob, Tobias Rupprecht and Ljubica Spaskovska to co-incide with the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 revolutions, was published by Cambridge University Press in September 2019. There are reviews here here here here here here and here .
We discuss some arguments from the book in the journal Eurozine in The Struggle Over 1989. For interviews about the book in English, English, English, English, English, Lithuanian, Lithuanian, Czech and Czech. It is discussed on this radio show.
Artemy Kalinovsky, Steffi Marung and I have co-edited a collection for Indiana University Press on the way in which socialism connected the world: Alternative Globalizations. Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020)
There are reviews here, here, here, and here.
I have recently been a Principal Investigator on three research projects. The first is a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award (2014 – 2019): '1989 after 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective'. This has brought a team of four research fellows, and two PhD students, to Exeter. Together we have undertaken a range of projects which aim to place the end of state socialism in both longer-term and global contexts, connecting this major historical transformation to broader political, economic and cultural processes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The second is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) funded project, in collaboration with six other institutions and ten colleagues: 'Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections Between the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds'' (2015-20). This explores the political, economic and cultural encounter between eastern Europe and the decolonising world from 1945. See our 'Tito in Africa' exhibition: https://www.muzej-jugoslavije.org/en/exhibition/tito-u-africi-slike-solidarnosti/ . For an interview in Romanian on the project.
The third is an AHRC-Labex funded Franco-British project, Criminalization of Dictatorial Pasts in Europe and Latin America in Global Perspective (2016-2020). This project analyses the criminalisation of dictatorial pasts in Europe and Latin America since 1945. It considers how justice and historical narratives are produced across multiple professions, networks and spaces; and way they ideas and practices of dealing with the past have traveled across and between regions, and on a global scale. In 2020, we published an open-access collection on the global crisis in liberal memory, and how it has been challenged by populist and decolonial approaches to remembering the past.
I am currently an elected Senator representing the College of Humanities (2018-2022).
Biography:
I completed my BA in History, M.Phil. in Russian and East European Studies and a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford. I have worked in the History Department at Exeter since 2004.
Research supervision:
I am keen to supervise on, and can offer expertise in, a number of areas:
1. global histories of socialism
2. global histories of race, especially whiteness
3. eastern European history in decolonial and global contexts
4. the social, cultural and political history of modern Central/ Eastern Europe.
5. Communism and post-Communism in Central/ Eastern Europe
6. memory studies in general, and in particular under Communism/ post-Communism
7. the global rise of populism, particularly as it relates to culture and memory
8. oral history
Qualifications:
M.Phil. D.Phil. (Oxon)
