Dr Stéphanie Prévost
IASH-SSPS Research Fellow, May - June 2021
Home Institution: Université de Paris / LARCA (CNRS UMR 8225)
Project: British Liberals and the Eastern Question (1896-1915): A Transnational Quest for Global Justice?
Bio
Dr. Stéphanie Prévost is Senior Lecturer in 19th-century British political history in the Department of English Studies at Université de Paris and holds a PhD in English Studies from Tours University (2010). Her research focuses on 19th-century British-Ottoman relations. Within that area, she has widely published on 19th-century British imaginations of the East (Le Touran: entre mythes, orientalisme et construction identitaire, co-edited with Anna Caiozzo & Laurent Dedryèvre, 2019), late 19th-century British humanitarianism to Ottoman Christians and public opinion (‘Humanitarian Accountability: Anglo-American Relief at the time of the Hamidian massacres (1894-8)', in Jo Laycock & Francesca Piana (eds.), Aid to Armenia: Humanitarianism and intervention from the 1890s to the present, 2020) and evolutions of diplomatic practices. She has recently started investigating British aid to Armenian refugees pre-1915 as part of a wider project on international cooperation and refugedom before the development of international refugee law. An early result is forthcoming in Moderne Transimperialitäten --- Rivalitäten, Kontakte, Wetteifer (Patrick Farges & al., Peter Lang, 2021) under the title : „Die Auswanderung der osmanisch-armenischen Flüchtlinge nach Zypern: Kontrolle des Migrationsflusses und humanitäre Hilfe als transimperiale Kämpfe um die Souveränität zwischen dem Vereinigten Königreich und dem Osmanischen Reich (1896–1898)“.
Her approach has increasingly been in transnational history, entangled history and histoire croisée, as with her two ongoing coedited projects (with Dr Bénédicte Deschamps, Université de Paris) on The Immigration and Exile Foreign-Language Press in Modern Britain and the US (forthcoming with Bloomsbury, 2022) and on ‘Printing News in English Abroad: A Historical Foreign-Language Press Phenomenon’ (Media History special issue in preparation for 2022).
Project
While at IASH-SSPS, she will pursue a monograph project provisionally entitled ‘Liberalism and the Eastern Question: From Home Politics to Early Liberal Internationalism. Mobilizing for Progress? 1875-1915’. The overall project lies at the crossroads between history (socio-political and intellectual), IR, international law and humanitarianism. It investigates the centrality of the Eastern Question to the Liberal ideological repertoire (party, intellectuals, publicists and sympathisers), well beyond Disraeli’s death (1881). It exemplifies how at the time of the 1894-1896 Armenian massacres – which caused the estimated death of 250,000-300,000 Ottoman Armenians and probably led about 100,000 to seek refuge outside the Ottoman motherland – Gladstonian Christian moralism inherited from the 1876 Bulgarian atrocities crisis proved a decisive plank for the articulation of early Liberal internationalism by a small group of advanced Liberals, Radicals and progressives. The title of her project for IASH-SSPS is ‘British Liberals and the Eastern Question (1896-1915): A Transnational Quest for Global Justice?’