Newcastle University

Introduction

Research interests: Dr Xavier Guégan is a historian specialised in European and colonial history. He specialises in the history of British and French imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a specific focus on British India and French Algeria; European countries’ ‘race’ to control/rule the world in modern history and the construction of colonial cultures. His current research interests are in nineteenth-century British India, especially the photographical and cultural representation of Indian peoples in the Victorian time.

Background

Born in Marseilles (France) but lived for many years in Cagnes-sur-Mer (near Nice, France) before moving to Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Qualifications

PhD, 'Samuel Bourne and Indian Natives: aesthetics, exoticism, and imperialism' [Northumbria University, England].

Maîtrise (M.A.) in Contemporary History [Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France / Northumbria University, England].

Licence (B.A.) in History [Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France].

Memberships

Member of the Postcolonial Research Group (Newcastle University).

Languages

French, English

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the visual representation of colonized people, of ‘Otherness’, and how it participated in the creation of colonial cultures.

My current expertise is in nineteenth-century British India, especially the photographical and cultural representation of Indian peoples in the Victorian time.

Other Expertise

I am also now starting working on comparative visual studies between British India and French Algeria, and between British/French indirect influence and Ottoman/Modern Turkey.

Current Work

Publications

i) Books:

The Imperial Aesthetic: Photography, Samuel Bourne and the Indian Peoples in the post-Mutiny era, under consideration with the new Britain and the World series from Palgrave Macmillan.

Travellers and Tourists: interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives on the British abroad  [volume 1], co-editor [with Martin Farr]; under consideration with the new Britain and the World series from Palgrave Macmillan.

Experiencing Imperialism: interdisciplinary and transnational  perspectives on the colonial and post-colonial British  [Volume 2], co-editor [with Martin Farr]; under consideration with the new Britain and the World series from Palgrave Macmillan.

ii) Chapters:

‘Transportable Sites: Monuments, Memorials and their Metropole-Periphery Visibility’ [France/Algeria – Britain/India in the 1850s-1900s], in Dominik Geppert and Frank Lorenz Müller (eds), Imperial Sites of Memory. Book under consideration.

‘A common Other? Perspective on the Orients, Gender and Violence in the long nineteenth-century’, in Martin Farr and Xavier Guégan (eds.), Experiencing Imperialism: interdisciplinary and transnational  perspectives on the colonial and post-colonial British  [Volume 2].

iii) Articles:

‘From Princely to Barbaric: Visual and Colonial Construction of Indian Masculinities in Bourne and Bourne & Shepherd’s Photographs’, Interventions, article under review. 

‘Visualising Alienation: Symbolism and Duality in Samuel Bourne’s Photographs of British India’, Visual Culture of British India, in Visual Culture in Britain, Special issue, Nov. 2011, 349-365.

‘Less Smoke and Noise’, Journal of the Royal Photographic Society, Feb. 2010, 38-41.

Projects

Organisation of the Exhibition India through Photography: two times, two photographers Samuel Bourne (1860s) & Xavier Guégan (2002): The Oriental Museum, University of Durham, 25 March-23 May 2010.

Organisation of the touring programme of the Exhibition India through Photography [in preparation]: London, Paris, New York, Bradford.

Co-organiser [with Dr Martin Farr] of the conference ‘From the Grand Tour to Mass Tourism, The Modern History of the British Abroad: Interdisciplinary and trans-national perspectives on British travel experience and its impact from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first century’: University of Newcastle, 1-2 April 2010, Keynote speakers: Jeremy Black, Pablo Mukherjee, and Jill Steward; 12 panels – 36 speakers.

Collaborative Research Project with Dr Enrica Capussotti [in preparation]: The Roots of Postcolonial Europe and Maghreb – Visual and written diaries from French colonial North Africa.

Single Research Project [in preparation]: Visualizing Turkey in Transition: how photographic representation participated in the construction of ideological discourses and identities from a foreign – British and French – and national – Turkish – perspective.

Papers / Conferences

-‘Monuments, Memorials and their Visibility within Newly Established Colonial Rules: Political and Cultural Visual Representations of post-Mutiny British India and of post-Conquest French Algeria’,  in Imperial Sites of Memory, University of St Andrews, September 2011.

-‘British Scholar Annual Conference 2011’, Harry Ransom Center on the University of Texas at Austin campus, April 2011. Chair of the panel ‘Visions of Empire: Visual Art in the 19^th and 20^th centuries’.

-‘The Society for the Study of French History – Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference’, Newcastle University, June 2010. Chair of the panel ‘The Colonial Other’.

-‘L’Algérie française et les Indes britanniques: une culture semblable ?’, Newcastle Lit & Phil Society with l’Alliance Française (in presence of the Attaché for Higher Education at the French Embassy in London), April 2009.

-‘Britain and India: intersections in visual culture, 1800-1900’, University of York, February 2009.

-‘L’Algérie française et la culture Pieds-noirs’, Newcastle Lit & Phil Society with l’Alliance Française, May 2008.

-‘Trajectories of Indian Independence: 1857, 1947, 2007...’, Sunderland University, Nov. 2007.

-‘Picturing People: Image and Representation’, New Voices Conference, A.A.H., University of Birmingham, May 2006.

-‘Contemporary Cultures: Culture and Identity in Practice and Theory’, University of Edinburgh, March 2004.

-‘Presentation on Show-Studio’, Baltic Mill Museum, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, February 2004.

-Royal Historical Society, Annual Conference, ‘Queen Victoria and India’, Newcastle University, October 2003.

-‘Art and Representations of Madness’, SASS Symposium, Northumbria University, April 2003. 

Research Roles

Network Facilitator [Nov 2009 - Aug 2010]:
Research Network in Postcolonial Translation- The case for South Asia
http://www.postcolonialtranslation.net/index.php
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics

Postgraduate Supervision

MA Dissertations

Esteem Indicators

Reviewer for Pearson Education Publisher.

Rapporteur on project evaluations for the E.S.R.C. (Economic & Social Research Council) [2008].

Undergraduate Teaching

HIS3008 - Reading History [group leader: Cannadine's Ornamentalism].

HIS3010 - Writing History [dissertations supervisor - colonial/post-colonial History].

HIS3104 [not active this academic year] - The British Raj: from the Mutiny to the Great War, 1857-1914.

HIS3128 -  France and the Maghreb, 1830-present.

HIS3129 -  Home and Away: The French and the British Travelling, 1789-1920.

HIS2117 - Modern Colonial Empires, 1783-1975.

HIS2136 - From Napoleon to Verdun, 1795-1918.

HIS1029 - Varieties of History.

HIS1030 - Evidence and Argument [group leader: The Indian Mutiny; not active this academic year].

HIS1045 - Themes in European History.

International Summer School 2007 - 2008 - 2009 (History Programme - August) - Culture and Imperialism.
International Summer School 2006 (School of Historicak Studies Programme - August) - Hidden History [in charge of teaching and marking the section 'late Modern British History'].

Postgraduate Teaching

MA in European History [HIS8052 & HIS8053: The impact of colonial conflict on European society & Occupation and contested liberations: the European Civil War (1939-1945)].

MA Dsissertations.