About

Jordanna Bailkin is a professor of history at the University of Washington with a Ph.D. from Stanford University obtained in 1998. Her scholarly work focuses on modern Britain and empire, emphasizing the global dimensions of British studies and engaging in scholarly and public conversations about Britain’s changing role in the world. Her research interests include decolonization, legal history, urban identity, gender history, and the history of material culture and emotions. Bailkin has authored three significant books: 'The Culture of Property,' which explores the legal and philosophical evolution of cultural property in Britain and its empire; 'The Afterlife of Empire,' which examines how decolonization transformed British society and the welfare state in the mid-20th century; and 'Unsettled,' which investigates the history of refugee camps in Britain and their social dynamics during the 20th century. Her forthcoming book, 'Friends and Neighbors,' considers how state policies have shaped personal relationships in Britain from World War II to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bailkin’s work extends beyond Britain, exploring transnational circuits of culture and politics, including archives and decolonization, tattooing in British Burma, interracial murder in South Asia, and radio in decolonizing Africa. She has served as Director of Graduate Studies and on the Board of Editors for prominent historical journals, with research support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Physics
• Engineering
• Mechanical engineering
• Thermodynamics
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Love in Communities

  2025-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Who cares for me? This was one of the most troubling questions of our pandemic moment. During the cataclysmic days of 2020, we were told of strangers making masks for each other, of neighbors buying groceries for each other—stories of community and connection that also expose the state’s utter failu

  PublisherDOI

• Forum: The Past, Present, and Futures of Modern British History

  Modern British history. · 2024-03-01

  editorial

  For the first issue of the renamed journal, Modern British History co-editor Erik Linstrum convened a group of scholars to reflect on the past, present, and possible futures of the field. The resulting contributions make no claim to provide a comprehensive or representative survey. Rather, they offer a variety of perspectives on where modern British history has been and where it might be going. Several contributions, written by former editors of Twentieth Century British History, drawn on the history of the journal as a way of thinking about the direction of the field and its subfields. Others consider the place of modern Britain in the wider discipline of history, grappling with questions of temporality and embodiment; the institutional and material contexts of scholarship; the role of national histories in a transnational world; and the response of historical writing to epidemiological, humanitarian, and ecological crisis. The sequence of contributions mirrors the evolution of the journal since its founding in 1990, beginning with political history and gradually encompassing a much broader range of subjects and methodologies as well as an expanded geographical ambit. Here are archive stories, pleas for new subjects, roadmaps for new approaches to old subjects, and attempts to identify master narratives. Taken together, these contributions demonstrate that modern British history has many houses-which is both a sign of intellectual vitality and a challenge for anyone wishing to generalize about the 'state of the field'. If British modernity remains an abundant resource for 'thinking with', its contours and frontiers are tantalizingly up for grabs.

  PublisherDOI

• Shaul Bar-Haim, <i>The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State</i>

  Psychoanalysis and History · 2023-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• JBR volume 62 issue 2 Cover and Front matter

  Journal of British Studies · 2023 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Freddy Foks. Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain. Berkeley Series in British Studies. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. Pp. 280. $85.00 (cloth).

  Journal of British Studies · 2023-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Freddy Foks. Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain. Berkeley Series in British Studies. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. Pp. 280. $85.00 (cloth). - Volume 62 Issue 4

  PublisherDOI

• ‘On Camps, past and Present’*

  History Australia · 2021-07-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article reflects on the experience of writing a book about the history of refugee camps in Britain during the global refugee crisis. It explores the relationship between camps of the 20th and 21st centuries, and considers the role of historians in participating in debates about contemporary political issues.

  PublisherDOI

• JBR volume 59 issue 1 Cover and Front matter

  Journal of British Studies · 2020 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• CHAPTER 3. Indian Yellow: Making and Breaking the Imperial Palette

  2020-09-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• JBR volume 58 issue 3 Cover and Front matter

  Journal of British Studies · 2019-07-01

  articleOpen access

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  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Unsettled

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-06-21 · 25 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Today, no one thinks of Britain as a land of camps. Instead, camps seem to happen “elsewhere,” from Greece to Palestine to the global South. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, dozens of British refugee camps housed hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Jews, Basques, Poles, Hungarians, Anglo-Egyptians, Ugandan Asians, and Vietnamese. “Refugee camps” in Britain were never only for refugees. Refugees shared space with Britons who had been displaced by war and poverty, as well as thousands of civil servants and a fractious mix of volunteers. <italic>Unsettled</italic> explores how these camps have shaped today’s multicultural Britain. They generated unique intimacies and frictions, illuminating the closeness of individuals that have traditionally been kept separate—“citizens” and “migrants,” but also refugee populations from diverse countries and conflicts. As the world’s refugee crisis once again brings to Europe the challenges of mass encampment, <italic>Unsettled</italic> offers warnings from a liberal democracy’s recent past. Through anecdotes from interviews with former camp residents and workers and archival research, <italic>Unsettled</italic> conveys the vivid, everyday history of refugee camps, which witnessed births and deaths, love affairs and violent conflicts, strikes and protests, comedy and tragedy. Their story—like that of today’s refugee crisis—is one of complicated intentions that played out in unpredictable ways. This book speaks to all who are interested in the plight of the encamped, and the global uses of encampment in our present world.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Deborah E. Harkness

  McGill University

  12 shared

• Philippa Levine

  The University of Texas at Austin

  9 shared

• Maureen Garvie

  Queen's University

  7 shared

• Stephen Brooke

  York University

  7 shared

• Michelle Tusan

  7 shared

• Robert Tittler

  Concordia University

  7 shared

• Richard Bourke

  University of Cambridge

  7 shared

• Ethan H. Shagan

  University of California, Berkeley

  7 shared

Awards & honors

• Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the American Historical Associ…
• Stansky Book Prize from the North American Conference on Bri…
• Biennial Book Prize from the Pacific Coast Conference on Bri…
• Walter D. Love Article Prize from the North American Confere…