Staff profile

Dr Oliver Godsmark


Senior Lecturer in History; Programme Leader for MA History

Oliver Godsmark in a classroom.

Subject

History

College

College of Arts, Humanities and Education

Department

Humanities

Research centre

Identity, Culture and Representation Research Centre

ORCiD ID

0000-0003-2972-1699

Campus

Kedleston Road, Derby Campus

Email

o.godsmark@derby.ac.uk

About

I am Senior Lecturer in global and South Asian history, with particular expertise in late colonial and early postcolonial India. My research focuses on citizenship and democracy, caste and 'tribe', and borders and territory, principally in the context of India’s independence and partition. Simultaneously, I continue to be interested in global histories of the British South Asian diaspora, particularly in the context of industrial disputes and anti-racism activities in the 1960s.

I am also the programme lead for MA History at Derby.

Before arriving at Derby in 2019, I held lectureships at the Universities of Sheffield, Exeter, Kent and Loughborough, as well as a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of York.

Research interests

My previous research traced the impact of decolonisation and the transition from colonial rule to independence on ideas about and the workings of democracy, citizenship and community amongst Indian society. My doctoral project drew upon the mechanics of state-society relations at the ‘everyday’ level to make inferences about the nature of citizenship and democracy during independence and partition, a moment of great historical change, fear and uncertainty on the Indian subcontinent. This research informed an updated monograph that draws upon and revises some of its central themes. The project also shaped a number of other research publications (see below).

You can read a recent review of my monograph in the context of other scholarship on postcolonial citizenship in India.

My current research focuses on the policing of 'criminal tribes' and ḍakait ('bandits') in central India in the late colonial period. By focusing upon the 'minor' state of India, it reveals the complex roles taken up by ḍakait within the local political economy, often in tandem with local state representatives, illustrating the fragmented nature of sovereignty in late colonial contexts. In doing so, it seeks to challenge older histories that understand banditry primarily as evidence of state evasion or resistance, looks to complicate existing emphases on wider institutional frameworks that classified such communities as 'criminal tribes', and ultimately re-centres ḍakait and ḍakaitī ('banditry') within the historical record. This research has so far led to a journal article in The Historical Journal.

My future research concerns the global context that informed left-leaning politics, industrial disputes and anti-racism activism amongst the South Asian diaspora in the Midlands during the 1960s. The project will be shaped by tracing interactions between individuals, ideas, and institutions in the Midlands and beyond, as well as analysing analogies in the rhetoric they employed. In particular, I am interested in how members of the South Asian diaspora engaged with major developments in the Indian subcontinent during these years, particularly as they related to Sino-Indian relations, decolonisation, and the wider Cold War (e.g., the Indo-China War of 1962 and Naxalbari in 1967).

Recent publications

Membership of professional bodies

Qualifications

Recent conferences

In the media

I have been actively involved in communicating my research to public audiences. Most recently, this has involved collaborative activities with Derby Museums in relation to objects in their collections and galleries. In May 2022, I held two workshops on 'Derby and the World', which discussed these objects as illustrative of larger global and imperial histories.

In November 2020 I participated in the 'Free Thinking' series on BBC Radio Three for an episode entitled 'Postcolonial Derby'. This was linked to the Being Human Festival 2020, for which I also contributed a podcast on 'Curzon of Kedleston and the History of India' as part of the series on 'Global Derbyshire in 10 Objects'. I also discussed Curzon's time in India and its impact upon his subsequent political career in a talk with National Trust volunteers at Kedleston Hall in February 2020.

In October 2017, I appeared at Sheffield’s 'Off the Shelf' annual literature festival as an invited guest of the local Hindu Samaj, where I discussed Indian and Pakistani independence in the context of the life and writings of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore.

In August 2017, I took part in a series of events to commemorate 70 years since the independence of India, including acting as an analyst during a special discussion on individual stories of displacement experienced by ordinary people caught up in partition violence. This discussion was broadcast live on BBC Radio Sheffield as part of 'Eastern Air', a weekly radio programme dedicated to the city’s South Asian diaspora.

Teaching responsibilities

I currently teach on the following modules:

History BA

History MA

Public History and Heritage MA

Courses