The Transnational Turn

PhD course, 3-7 June 2013

European University Institute, Florence
Villa Schifanoia

Course Program
Over the past decade, a new concept has acquired a prominent place in the humanities and social
sciences, pervading academic journals, university curricula and research agendas all over the world:
the concept of transnationalism. On the face of it, the term implies that national paradigms have
become inadequate as a means of comprehending complex social and cultural interactions that obey
no laws of geography or statehood. It offers a new perspective for studying a vast array of
contemporary and historical phenomena, ranging from migration to gender, politics, race, ethnicity,
literature, religion, citizenship and identity. But the term is by no means self-explanatory, and
deserves closer examination to understand its intellectual origins, impetus and relationship with
other related concepts such as globalisation, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, postcolonialism
and world history. This seminar series is designed to introduce PhD students to some leading
figures in the study of transnationalism, who will reflect on their own personal intellectual history in
their use of the concept.
The course will consist of a series of workshops over four days and will conclude with a day of
student presentations. Students will have the opportunity to discuss their own projects and receive
advice and feedback about their methodological and conceptual framework. In short, the course is

designed to furnish students with a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of one of the
key conceptual tools of contemporary humanities scholarship.
Course structure and thematic focus: The course will be taught by a team of specialists from
Copenhagen University, Kings College London, University College Dublin and the European
University Institute. The students attending the course will also be drawn from these four
institutions.

Monday 3 June
10am:

Introduction: What do I think I mean when I say Transnational? Professor

Stuart Ward, Copenhagen University

This introductory seminar raises the fundamental question: is transnationalism a serviceable

concept? A methodology? A theoretical framework? A buzzword? It will trace the evolution of the
term from its original use by Randolph Bourne in 1916, to the explosion in transnational
scholarship since the mid-1990s. It invites students to think critically (even skeptically) about the
concepts available to them, and the subtle processes whereby ideas become paradigmatic. What
factors enabled the resurrection of this long-dormant concept, and to what extent has it superseded
other notions that compete for scholarly attention?
Reading:
- Randolph Bourne, Transnational America, Atlantic Monthly, 118 (July 1916) pp. 86-97.
- Leslie J. Vaughan, Cosmopolitanism, Ethnicity and American Identity: Randolph Bournes
Transnational America, Journal of American Studies 25:3 (Dec 1991), pp. 443-459.
- Theodore Levitt, The Globalization of Markets, Harvard Business Review, May-June 1983.
- Ernest Gellner, A Note on the Weakness of Nationalism, in Nations and Nationalism (Oxford,
Blackwell, 1983).
- Stuart Ward, Transcending the Nation: A Global Imperial History?, in Antoinette Burton
(ed.), After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham NC: Duke
University Press, 2003).

1.30pm:

The transnational turn: Professor Robert A. Gross, University of Connecticut.

The idea of American exceptionalism that the United States is a unique nation, born of
unprecedented favorable circumstances and founded on universal principles applicable to all
humankind has been central to American nationalism and national identity since 1776. But that
ideology masks its own origins in the transnational flow of ideas across the Atlantic in the
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eighteenth-century age of Enlightenment and Revolutions, and it has long served to obscure the
entanglement of the European and English settlements of North America in the global expansion of
slavery, capitalism, and empire that have made the modern world. Challenging such narrow notions
of national uniqueness has inspired the great wave of enthusiasm for transnational approaches in the
interdisciplinary field of American Studies. And it has opened up the field to multiple new voices.
Unfortunately, that enthusiasm has its own built-in distortions. In the name of contesting a narrow
nationalism, it takes an empirical question the extent to which a nations history is shaped by
wider movements, forces, and peoples within and beyond its borders and turns it into an
oppositional stance. In the process it misreads the very history of nineteenth and early twentieth
century Americans engagement with the wider world. Transnational involvements were far more
common than is often appreciated, though they did not necessarily generate more cosmopolitan
ways of thinking and acting.

Reading:
- Robert A. Gross, The Transnational Turn: Rediscovering American Studies in a Wider World,
Journal of American Studies, 34 (2000) 3, 373-393
- Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies
Presidential Address to the American Studies, American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2005): 17-57
- Ian Tyrrell, Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and
Practice, Journal of Global History 4, number 3 (November 2009): 453-474
- Robert A. Gross, Introduction in An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the
New Nation 1790-1840, vol. 2, University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

4.30 pm:

Studying Violence Transnationally, Professor Dirk Moses, European University

Institute.

Is violence a phenomenon that lends itself to transnational analysis? Not really. Clearly, specific
conflicts need to be set in their various contexts, or the circulation of biopolitical or counterinsurgency techniqueslike concentration campsreconstructed empirically. Judging by the
contrasting arguments of Mhlhahn and Smith/Stucki, historians differ markedly on whether this
task is analytically possible. The same applies to the separate argument about the colonial/imperial
origins of National Socialism and the Holocaust, and attempts to explain them transnationally. This
session considers these issues to assess whether the various transnational approaches help us
account for violent policies and acts, which are, ultimately, locally experienced.
Reading:
- Klaus Mhlhahn, The Concentration Camp in Global Historical Perspective, History
Compass, Vol. 8, No. 6 (2010): pp. 543-561.

- Iain R. Smith and Andreas Stucki, The Colonial Development of Concentration Camps (1868
1902), Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 39, No. 3 (2011): pp. 417-437.
- A Dirk Moses, Redemptive Antisemitism and the Imperialist Imaginary, in Christian Wiese
and Paul Betts (eds.), Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedlnder and the
Future of Holocaust Studies (London, Continuum, 2010), pp. 233-254.
Further Reading:
- Jonathan Hyslop, The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the
Philippines, 18961907, South African Historical Journal, Vol. 63, Vol. 2 (2011): pp. 251-276.
- Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, Hannah Arendts Ghosts: Reflections on the
Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz, Central European History, Vol. 42, No. 2
(2009): pp. 279-300.

Tuesday 4 June
1pm:

The Prehistories of Transnational History, Professor Richard Drayton, Kings

College London

The transnational turn of the 1990s is clearly associated with the politics of the late twentieth
century, with decolonisation, and with the idea of 'globalization'. It is also linked in ways we
usually ignore to the internal crisis of history c. 1960, and in particular with the challenge of 'history
from below' to an earlier disciplinary focus on the state, the church, diplomacy and war. But
Transnational History, in the sense of Universal History, and later as Imperial (and anti-Imperial)
Histories, was there from the origins of the modern discipline. We shall examine both c. 2000
parameters of 'Transnational History' and its relationship to some of its ancestors. We may find that
it is easier for historians to assert than to achieve a genuine rupture with the old histories of nation
and empire.
Reading:
- C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol and Patricia Seed
(participants), AHR Conversation: On Transnational History, American Historical Review,
(December 2006).
- Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Public
Culture, vol. 1, number 2, (Spring 1990), 1-24
Further Reading:
- A. G. Hopkins, Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History, Past &
Present, (1999) 164(1), 198-243

- Arif Dirlik, Performing the World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World
Histor(ies), Journal of World History, vol. 16, number 4, (December 2005), 391-410
Patrick OBrien, Historiographical traditions and modern imperatives for the restoration of
global history, Journal of Global History, (2006), 3-39

4 pm:

Transnational History and International Relations, Dr William Mulligan,

University College Dublin

The term transnational has its roots in a programmatic statement about the international order.
Written at the height of the First World War, in the year of Verdun, the Somme, and the Brusilov
offensive, Bourne presented the United States as a model of a society, in which different
nationalities jostled alongside each other and interacted peacefully. Only in the last decade,
however, have historians of international relations begun to approach their subject through the
transnational lens. This seminar will examine the purchase of transnational approaches to the
history of international relations. Why was the term ignored for so long by historians of
international relations, particularly diplomatic historians, given its roots in the foundational debates
about the international order in the twentieth century? What are the conceptual borders between
transnational, international, and diplomatic history? Do porous conceptual borders enable scholars
to profit from combining approaches or do they give rise to conceptual slippage and the
repackaging of old wine in new bottles? Can approaches from transnational history enable us to
better understand the classic questions about war and peace? Are historians who adopt transnational
perspectives interested in the classical questions of war and peace? Is there a space for the
transnational at the moment of decision, or the diplomatic twitch to use David Reynolds term?
Does the term transnational have a normative value, derived from its origins as a critique of the
violence of the First World War? If so, what assumptions about international politics are inscribed in
the concept?
- Patricia Clavin, Defining transnationalism, Contemporary European History, 14, 4 (2005),
pp. 421-39.
- Hogan, Michael, The next big thing: the future of diplomatic history in the global age,
Diplomatic History, 28, 1 (2004), pp. 1-22.
- Iriye, Akira, Transnational history, Contemporary European History, 13, 2 (2004), pp. 21122.
Charles Maier, 'International Associationalism: the social and political premises of
peacemaking after 1917 and 1945', in Paul Kennedy, William Hitchcock (eds.), From war to
peace. Altered strategic landscapes in the twentieth century (New Haven, 2000), pp. 36-52.

Further Reading:
- Reynolds, David, International history, the cultural turn, and the diplomatic twitch, Cultural
and Social History, 3, 1 (2006), pp. 75-91.
- Maier, Charles, Consigning the twentieth century to history: alternative narratives for the
modern era, American Historical Review, 105, 3 (2000), pp. 807-31.

Thursday 6 June
9.00 am: The American roots of transnationalism: Professor James Curran (UCD)
The initial impetus for the (re)emergence of transnationalism undoubtedly came from the United
States, by way of a major intervention by the Australian historian Ian Tyrell in the early 1990s. This
seminar will examine the debate that Tyrells work generated, and discuss its foundations in the
problem of American exceptionalism.
Reading:
- Ian Tyrrell, American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History, American Historical
Review, Vol. 96, No. 4 (Oct 1991), pp. 1031-1055.
- Michael McGerr, The Price of the New Transnational History, American Historical Review,
Vol. 96, No. 4 (Oct 1991), pp. 1056-1067.
- Ian Tyrell Responds, American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 4 (Oct 1991), pp. 1068-1072.
- Thomas Zeiler, The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field, The Journal of
American History (March 2009)

Further Reading:
See articles in March 2009 issue of The Journal of American History by Frederik Logevall, Mario
Del Pero and Kristin Hoganson.

11.30 am

The British World: A Transnational Civic Idea? Professor Stuart Ward,

University of Copenhagen

In the last fifteen years or so scholars have taken a new look at the cultural glue and other more
tangible sinews of empire that held the British diaspora together during the Britannic moment
from about 1880 to the 1960s. This seminar introduces students to the key conceptual and
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historiographical issues associated with the study of the British World and British settler societies.
It considers the extent to which the Britain and Britishness can be understood as the worlds first
global civic idea; an idea of the people located ambivalently between the national and the
transnational.
Reading:
- Carl Bridge & Kent Fedorowich, Mapping the British World, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, Vol. 31, No. 2, May 2003, pp. 1-15.
- James Belich, The Rise of the Angloworld: settlement in North America and Australasia,
1784-1918, in Phillip Buckner & R. Douglas Francis (eds), Rediscovering the British World
(2005), pp. 39-58.
- J.G.A. Pocock, British History: a plea for a new subject, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 47,
No. 4, December 1975, pp. 601-21.
Further Reading:
- James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld,
1783-1939 (2009)
- John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830-1970
(2009)
- Gary B. Magee & Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation (2010)

Friday 7 June
9.30am:

Global History: Promises and Challenges, Professor Sebastian Conrad, Free

University of Berlin

1pm:

Student Presentations of Projects

This final afternoon session allows participants to present their own projects in smaller groups.
Having heard a variety of practitioners voice their own perspective on the transnational turn,
students will have the opportunity to reflect on the relevance and applicability of the
transnationalism to their own work (or otherwise), thereby adding a new dimension to the previous
five days of discussion. Students will be divided into two groups, and each will have approximately
20 minutes allotted to their project (including discussion, so please try to be a concise as possible).
The aim is to encourage an informal exchange of (inevitably) raw, unrefined ideas, and to air some
of the common problems students encounter when working outside of national contexts. It is
emphatically not a mock PhD defence, or an occasion for dense argumentation and power-point
slides. The emphasis will be on broader contextual outlines, and the concepts that shape our work.
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