Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Buettner

CV

Born 1967; 1989 BA in History (graduating magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with minor in German and Eugene Byrne Prize in European History), Barnard College of Columbia University; 1992 MA in History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; 1991-1993 Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowships for Hindi-Urdu; 1993 Council for European Studies Pre-Dissertation Fellowship; 1994-1995 Mellon Dissertation Fellowship; 1996-1997 Royal Historical Society Centenary Research Fellowship; 1998 PhD in History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; 1999-2000 Past and Present Postdoctoral Fellowship (declined); 2000-present Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer in History, University of York (UK); 2003 AHRB Research Leave Scheme Award; 2004 Fellow, Royal Historical Society; 2005 British Academy Small Research Grant; 2006 International Research Seminar on Decolonization, National History Center, Washington, DC; 2012-2013 FRIAS Research Fellowship; 2013 12-month British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.

PUBLICATIONS (10 selected)

Book

• Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; paperback edition, 2005).  Joint Winner, Annual Women’s History Network Book Prize for 2004; shortlisted for Young Academic Author of the Year, Times Higher Education Supplement Awards 2005.

Articles in Journals

• ‘La famille britannique entre l’Inde et le Canada: Empire, classe sociale et voyage à la fin du xix e siècle’, Annales de Démographie Historique, 2011-2 (special issue, Familles en situation coloniale), pp. 149-168.
• ‘Chicken Tikka Masala, Flock Wallpaper, and “Real” Home Cooking: Assessing Britain’s “Indian” Restaurant Traditions’, Food & History 7, no. 2 (2009), pp. 203-29 [published in 2010].
• ‘“Going for an Indian”: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain’, Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (2008), pp. 865-901.  Reprinted in Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia, ed. Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 143-74.
• ‘The Postman’s Letters: Long Distance Intimacy and the Family Lives of India’s Colonizers’, Ab Imperio: International Quarterly on the Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space 2/2008, pp. 47-79.  This article appears in Russian translation.
• ‘Cemeteries, Public Memory, and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India’, History & Memory 18, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006), pp. 5-42.
• ‘Haggis in the Raj: Private and Public Celebrations of Scottishness in Late Imperial India’, Scottish Historical Review LXXXI, 2: No. 212 (October 2002), pp. 212-39.  This essay was awarded the David Berry Prize for 2001 by the Royal Historical Society.

Contributions to Edited Collections

• ‘Ethnicity’, in A Concise Companion to History, ed. Ulinka Rublack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 247-67 and 419-22 (endnotes).
• ‘“We Don’t Grow Coffee and Bananas in Clapham Junction You Know!”: Imperial Britons Back Home’, in Settlers and Expatriates: Britons Over the Seas, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, ed. Robert Bickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 302-28.
• ‘“Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Negro?”: Race and Sex in 1950s Britain’, in Gender, Labour, War and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain, ed. Philippa Levine and Susan R. Grayzel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 219-37.

FRIAS RESEARCH PROJECT

"Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture"

Europe After Empire provides the first thoroughly comparative social and cultural history of how Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal made the transition from imperial powers to postcolonial, multicultural nations within the European Union since the Second World War. It demonstrates the extent to which Europe’s tortuous process of decolonization remains unfinished at home, when empires not long past still hover close to the surface within national memory yet simultaneously are subjected to continual reinvention or selective amnesia.  It insists that metropolitan decolonization experiences, multiple inward migrations from ex-colonial arenas (encompassing the repatriation of Europeans as well as ethnic minority immigration), the reshaping of national identities and formation of multicultural societies, and the remembering and forgetting of empire are inseparable and cannot adequately be treated in isolation.  Nor can nationally-specific histories of decolonization and its aftermath be fully understood without a nuanced awareness of transitions occurring in neighbouring European countries. By comparing five European nations’ domestic histories of coming to terms with decolonization after 1945, this project thus differs radically from the vast majority of studies that by and large narrowly restrict attention to one nation alone, or at best two.