LSE Festival: Shaping the Post-COVID World

We analysed historical examples of recovery and reconstruction after disasters, including wars, rebellions, and financial crashes as well as pandemics. We discussed the resilience of societies facing adversity and calamity, and the merits and pitfalls of reconstruction planning, with presentations ranging from the eighteenth century to the present and from India and Africa to Europe and Britain. 

Meet our speakers and chair

Dina Gusejnova is Assistant Professor in International History at LSE. Her research interests centre on modern European political, intellectual and cultural history of transitional periods, especially the revolutions of 1918-20 and the two World Wars. She is currently interested in ideas of citizenship and nationality which emerged in the context of forced displacement and internment in the Second World War.

Raghav Kishore is LSE Fellow in International History at LSE. His research primarily focuses on the transformation of urban governance under colonial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

David Stevenson is Stevenson Professor of Internationational History at LSE. His main fields of interests lie in international relations in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; origins, course, and impact of the First World War.

Tim Hochstrasser is Associate Professor of International History at LSE. His research focuses on the two-way relationship between intellectual life and political action in the history of early modern Europe, and above all on the use made of contemporary historical and philosophical writing to legitimate and defend changing concepts of sovereignty and political structure.

Joanna Lewis is Associate Professor of International History at LSE. Timewise, her research covers the precolonial to the contemporary. Currently she is researching a history of Somali women who fled conflict in the 1990s and settled in London.

Farah Bede is the Clinical Lead for IRIS Domestic Violence and Abuse Programme in Tower Hamlets. She is also a practising GP and has published work on a wide range of medical issues affecting her community.

Piers Ludlow is Professor of International History at LSE and Head of Department of International History. His main research interests lie in the history of Western Europe since 1945, in particular the historical roots of the integration process and the development of the EU.

More about this event

The Department of International History (@lsehistory) teaches and conducts research on the international history of Britain, Europe and the world from the early modern era up to the present day.

This event was part of the LSE Festival: Shaping the Post-COVID World, running from Monday 1 to Saturday 6 March 2021, with a series of events exploring the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis and how social science research can shape it.