Call for Papers


Please note that the deadline was 21 June 2024 and applications are now closed. 


As with other areas of historical study, the history of education is a global field. The ‘transnational turn’ from the late twentieth century has led to the emergence of new approaches and theories that have added complexity and nuance to historical research in education. Meanwhile, growing interest in aspects of imperial and postcolonial history has generated fruitful areas of research on what Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldán Vera (2019) have described as ‘the entanglement and mutual relationships of influence between colonizers and colonized’. This interest is increasingly apparent across a range of articles published in History of Education and elsewhere. It has been further encouraged by scholarship that helps recover histories of Indigenous education and by academic institutions’ ongoing efforts to recognise their own imperial histories.


However, what we now describe as ‘transnational’ has a much longer history: people and ideas have circulated in different contexts for centuries, indeed for millennia, long before the existence of national borders as they are currently conceived. This conference therefore invites papers on all aspects of the history of education in its transnational, global and/or imperial dimensions, including on pre-modern periods of the past.

We welcome papers that focus on any region(s) and countries of the world, and on education, broadly conceived. We are keen to understand education in its broader sense and welcome explorations of educational experiences in later life, in workplaces, in the community, within families, as well as in formal institutional spaces of learning. Similarly, we conceive of transnational, global, and imperial histories very broadly to cover any study of education that goes beyond national boundaries, or which considers the movement of educational ideas and practices beyond countries or even continents. How has education varied across communities, nations, empire, and regions of the world over time? How have imperial ideas influenced education and/or knowledge production? How have racialised/gendered and/or classed identities varied over time and across space?


Please note that the list included below is indicative and is far from exhaustive. We welcome any papers that address an aspect that broadly connects to issues of the global, transnational and/or imperial in the histories of education. Nevertheless, papers may address the conference theme through a consideration of some of the following:



Please submit your proposed paper title and abstract of no more than 200 words to Dr Jody Crutchley at crutchj@hope.ac.uk by 21 June 2024.