Professor Kim A. Wagner

My research explores the forms and functions of violence and cultural (mis-)understanding within British and other imperial formations, and between the Western and the non-Western Worlds more generally. My work has largely focused on key conflicts and turning-points in the history of British India, and especially on indigenous resistance, involving ‘Thugs’, rebels, ‘fanatics’, or nationalists. The attempt to reconstruct multiple perspectives, and move beyond conventional imperial history, has been central to this endeavor, for which I draw from the insights of anthropology and literary- and post-colonial studies. In my book, The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and death of a Rebel of 1857 (Hurst/OUP/Penguin India, 2017), I sought to recover the experience of an Indian rebel through a critical reading of the colonial archive ‘against the grain’. The micro-history of one man’s skull was furthermore situated within a broader, globally comparative, exploration of the wider colonial phenomenon of collecting war-trophies and exhibiting human remains.

My last book on the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 relies on the concept of ‘thick periodization’ to demonstrate how colonial anxieties, originating in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, shaped the British interpretation of unrest, and, crucially, dictated the levels of violence required to suppress it. This work speaks directly to current debates on the legacies of Empire, and especially the calls for reparations, repatriation and the decolonization of museums and universities in the West.

I am currently writing the first scholarly account of the Bud Dajo Massacre of 1906, which situates U.S. Empire and colonial violence in the southern Philippines within a global comparative context. Current research projects include: U.S. colonial violence and atrocities in the southern Philippines ‘Savage Warfare’ – colonial warfare and mass violence in the European and U.S. empires, 1885-1914 The colonial genealogy of modern counterinsurgency Colonial violence and the collecting of human trophies Legacies and afterlives of Empire in contemporary Britain The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 (Jallianwala Bagh) ‘Yellow Peril’ scares and the Boxer Rebellion 1900 in a global perspective The ‘Rashomon’-effect and historical narratives The concept of ‘going native’ as a (fictional) mode of colonial governance.

Single-authored Books

• Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (London: Yale University Press/New Delhi: Penguin India, forthcoming 2019).
• The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (London: Hurst, 2017/New Delhi: Penguin India, 2018/ New York: Oxford University Press US, 2018). Short-listed for the Templer Medal 2017.
• The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang Oxford, 2010/Delhi: Dev Publishers and Distributors, 2015/new paperback edition: Rumours and Rebels: A New History of the Indian Uprising, Oxford: Peter Lang Oxford, 2017).
• Stranglers and Bandits – A Historical Anthology of Thuggee (Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2009).
• Thuggee – Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007/New Delhi: Primus, 2014). Short-listed for the History Today Award 2008.

Articles in Peer-reviewed journals

• ‘Fear and Loathing in Amritsar: An Intimate Account of Colonial Crisis’, in Itinerario, The Private Lives of Empire, 42, 1 (Aril 2018), pp. 67-84.
• ‘Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal, 85, 1 (April 2018), pp. 217-37.
• ‘Calculated to Strike Terror: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past & Present, 233, 1 (Nov., 2016), pp. 185-225.
• ‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past & Present, 218, 1 (Feb., 2013), pp. 159-97.
• ‘The Marginal Mutiny: The New Historiography of the Indian Uprising of 1857’, History Compass, 9, 10 (Oct. 2011), pp. 760-66.
• ‘Confessions of a Skull: Phrenology and Colonial Knowledge in early nineteenth-century India’, History Workshop Journal, 69 (Spring, 2010), pp. 28-51.
• ‘Thuggee and Social Banditry Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal, 50, 2 (2007), pp. 353-76.
• ‘The Deconstructed Stranglers – A Reassessment of Thuggee’, Modern Asian Studies, 38, 4, (2004), pp. 931-63.

Contributions to Edited Volumes

• ‘Rebellion, Resistance, and the Subaltern’, in Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel (eds.), The Oxford World History of Empire, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), vol 2, pp. 417-36.

• 'Seeing Like a Soldier: The Amritsar Massacre and the Politics of Military History’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds.) Colonial Counterinsurgency (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 23-37.

• ‘‘Thugs and Assassins’: New Terrorism and the Resurrection of Colonial Knowledge’, in Carola Dietze and Claudia Verhoeven (eds.) Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

• ‘‘In Unrestrained Conversation’: Approvers and the Colonial Ethnography of Crime in nineteenth-century India’, in Kim A. Wagner & Ricardo Roque (eds) Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History, (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 135-162.

• ‘‘Vengeance Against England!’: Hermann Goedsche and the Indian Uprising’, in Crispin Bates & Marina Carter (eds.) New Perspectives on 1857 (Delhi: Sage, 2013), pp. 150-169.

Co-authored and Co-edited Work

• (co-written with Gavin Rand), ‘Recruiting the ‘Martial Races’: Identities and Military Service in Colonial India’, in Gavin Schaffer (ed.) ‘Racialising the Soldier’ Patterns of Prejudice (link is external), 46, 3-4 (2012), 232-254.
• (co-edited with Ricardo Roque) Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History (link is external) (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), Introduction: 1-32.

 

I welcome applications from candidates wishing to undertake doctoral research in the following areas: