Faculty

James Epstein
Professor of History

PhD, University of Birmingham, 1977

History of modern Britain; cultural, political, and imperial history.

Telephone: 615-322-3351
Email: James.A.Epstein@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: T 2:30-4:00, R noon-1:00 pm
Office: Benson Hall 210

James Epstein is a historian of modern Britain, specializing in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century political culture.  He is author of The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement (1982), which re-evaluates the national character of the Chartist movement and its main leader.  He is co-editor, with Dorothy Thompson, of The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830-1860 (1982), which is a collection of essays emphasizing the cultural and lived experience of those involved in what was the largest and most sustained movement for democratic rights in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century.  Professor Epstein has also authored Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 (1994), which explores the ways in which plebeian radicals gave expression to their political beliefs.  The book draws attention to the “situatedness” of political expression, as well as underscoring the importance of meanings expressed not merely in terms of formal ideology or discourse, but within a highly ritualized and highly charged field of symbolic power and display.  Radical Expression won the British Council Prize in the Humanities for the best book in British studies, 1800 to the present, published in either 1993 or 1994. Professor Epstein’s article Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” published in Past and Present (1989), was awarded the Walter D. Love Prize by the North American Conference on British studies.   Most recently, Professor Epstein is author of In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (2003). In Practice offers a series of responses to the changing terrain of historical studies, sustaining an argument about the terms governing the production of political meaning, and about how these terms can be negotiated without collapsing the “logic of practice” into the logic of language itself.   Professor Epstein’s article, “Politics of Colonial Sensation: The Trial of Thomas Picton and the Cause of Louisa Calderon,” American Historical Review (2007), derives from his current research project on political and cultural exchanges across the early nineteenth-century British empire.  Professor Epstein has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Melon Foundation, and the Huntington Library.

From 2000 to 2005, Professor Epstein co-edited, along with Nicholas Rogers, Journal of British Studies.  He currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Southern Conference on British Studies and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize Committee of the American Historical Association.  This year Professor Epstein has delivered papers at several conferences, including “Defining the British World” at Bristol, England, and the American Historical Association annual meeting.  Over his twenty-one years at Vanderbilt, Professor Epstein has taught a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of modern Britain and Europe. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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