Dr Kim Wagner
Location: Arts Two 3.31email: k.wagner@qmul.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7882 8428
Kim A. Wagner did his BA and MA in History at the University of Copenhagen and in 2003 he completed a Ph.D. in South Asian history at the University of Cambridge. He was a junior Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, from 2004 to 2008, and an Associate Researcher on the AHRC-funded project ‘Mutiny at the Margins’ at the University of Edinburgh, where he taught South Asian History from 2008 to 2009. From 2009 to 2011 he taught imperial and world history at the University of Birmingham, where he was also director of the Centre for Modern and Contemporary History. Dr Wagner joined the History Department at Queen Mary in 2012.
Research interests:
Dr Wagner works on imperialism, conflict and culture, and has published extensively on banditry and rebellion in colonial India, especially on the subject of ‘Thuggee’ and the Indian Uprising of 1857. He is particularly interested in British fears of indigenous conspiracies and his research focusses on colonial policing and intelligence gathering as well as the correlation between knowledge, panic and anxieties within the context of empire. Dr Wagner is currently working on several smaller projects including a study of colonial panic and the history of emotions, and colonial rites of execution and exemplary punishment during crises. He is also working on two major research projects on 1) imperial policing and the British imagination, and 2) the Amritsar massacre and the crisis of empire 1919.
Postgraduate supervision:
Dr Wagner would be interested in hearing from potential Ph.D. students in the following areas relating to imperialism, culture and conflict:
• British Imperialism and South Asia 1757-1947
• Colonial knowledge, policing and intelligence gathering
• Colonial panics and popular culture
• Crime and banditry in World History
• Orientalism and Postcolonial Theory
• Micro-history and Anthropology
• Counter-insurgency and colonial state violence
• Riots, resistance and rebellion in South Asia
• Anglo-Indian literature
Publications:
Books
The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang Oxford, 2010).
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).
Articles and book-chapters
‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past & Present (forthcoming 2013).
‘Recruiting the ‘Martial Races’: Identities and Military Service in Colonial India’ (co-written with Gavin Rand), in Gavin Schaffer (ed.) ‘Racialising the Soldier’ (special issue of Patterns of Prejudice, forthcoming 2012).
‘The Marginal Mutiny: The New Historiography of the Indian Uprising of 1857’, History Compass, 9, 10 (Oct. 2011), 760-66.
‘‘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).
‘Confessions of a Skull: Phrenology and Colonial Knowledge in early nineteenth-century India’, History Workshop Journal, 69 (Spring, 2010), 28-51.
‘Thuggee and Social Banditry Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal, 50, 2 (2007), 353-76.
‘The Deconstructed Stranglers – A Reassessment of Thuggee’, Modern Asian Studies, 38, 4, (2004), 931-963.
Undergraduate teaching:
Narratives of the Raj: the History of Modern India, 1757-1947 (Level 5)
Anxieties of Empire: Rumours, Rebellion and the Imperial Imagination (Level 6)