Registration
Reception will run from 3:30pm to 4:00pm, the talk will begin at 4:00pm
Global Southwests traces the interconnected networks of transimperial capital and labor dispossession in Southwestern United States and Southwest Africa or Namibia through the materiality of uranium. Jesse C. Johnson served for decades as the head of the US Atomic Energy Commission’s raw materials division in Grand Junction, Colorado, developing global networks through the Combined Development Agency. Focusing on Johnson’s networks in Southern Africa, his consulting services for private companies, and the transnational capital that developed Rössing Uranium in South Africa- controlled Namibia, this article foregrounds the long reach of transimperial capitalist forces in spaces untouched by the promises of formal decolonization.
Commentator for this event will be Chris Otter.
Speaker
Jayita Sarkar is Professor of Global History of Inequalities at the University of Glasgow's School of Social and Political Sciences in Scotland, UK. Her research and teaching areas are global and transnational histories of decolonisation, capitalism, nuclear infrastructures, South Asia, and the United States. Her first book, Ploughshares and Swords. India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022), was awarded the 2024 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize and 2023 Honorable Mention for Global Development Studies Book Award. She is currently completing her second book, Atomic Capitalism. A Global History (under contract with Princeton University Press, America in the World series). It is a 100-year history of nuclear sites, from mining to energy to weapons-testing, retold through histories of capitalism, empire, and decolonisation.
About the International History Seminar
If you are interested in attending this semester’s events and joining the International History Seminar, please send an email confirming your interest to the Hayes Chair Graduate Research Associate, Cam Givens, at hayeschairgra@osu.edu, and you will be included on the mailing list going forward. Select materials can only be pre-circulated to those who have signed up.
