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Standing Faculty

Vanessa Ogle

Assistant Professor of History

Vanessa OgleVanessa Ogle teaches and writes about international history. Prior to joining Penn's History Department she completed a doctorate in International & Global History at Harvard University (2011) and earned a MA in Modern European History from the Free University of Berlin. She has received language and thematic training in both modern Western European and Middle Eastern history, and the interactions between Europe and the Middle East are one of her main areas of interest and expertise. In 2013-2014, Ogle is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study - School of Social Science in Princeton, NJ.

Ogle’s first book, “Contesting Time: The Global Struggle For Uniformity and Its Unintended Consequences” is a global history of time reform between 1870 and 1930. The book follows European and American attempts to make clock times, calendars, and social time more uniform, from international conferences to France, British India and other parts of the British Empire, German colonies in Africa, late Ottoman Beirut, Muslim scholars in the Eastern Mediterranean, and eventually to the League of Nations. Contesting Time shows how imposing universal norms like uniform time in societies that lived by other standards, triggered antagonism, prompted creative adoptions, and paradoxically, had the unintended consequence of creating even more difference. The book seeks to revise the conventional assumption that a more interconnected and economically integrated globe meant a more uniform and assimilated world in which nationalism and states no longer played a role. In addition to shedding light on the dynamics of historical globalization and an interconnected world, Contesting Time is a methodological intervention in the practice of global and transnational history and provides one model for writing the history of processes that encompass and affect potentially nothing less than ‘the world.’

Ogle’s next project, entitled “Owning the Earth: The Struggle Over Natural Resources,” is a history of the question, who has the right to own and access resources like minerals, oil, and water. Starting in the late nineteenth century and ending with contemporary debates, the book shows how over the course of the 20th century, resource control has become one of the most contested issues of all times. Two world wars in the first half of the century prompted new approaches to allocating and conserving resources in times of scarcity. Simultaneously, colonial powers molded resource legislation across empires to suit their needs. With the onset of decolonization, newly independent states sought to establish their own sovereignty over nature’s riches, often through expropriation. At the same time, western multinationals snapped up extraction rights all over the developing world. On the local level, communities saw their livelihoods transformed by economic and environmental changes caused by extractive industries. And in the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberalism dictated such rights to resource exploitation be placed in the hands of private enterprise. What ties together all of these different resource regimes is the story of expertise and knowledge, the history of technical, economic, and legal experts dispatched to far-flung places to explore oil, gas, and mining reserves or rewrite water legislation. Owning the Earth is a history of the environment and its natural resources, bringing together economic history, history of science, technology, and expertise, histories of empires and decolonization, international law and organizations, business history, and local histories from Algeria (oil), Kenya (water), Bolivia (minerals), and Nigeria (environment).

Future projects include the history of Tangier from the 1880s to the 1960s, and a biography of Elisabeth Achelis, who toured the world to promote a standardized, neutral world calendar in the interwar years and after WWII.

Professor Ogle’s broader interests include international, transnational, and global histories especially of capitalism and more recently, the environment, European, Middle Eastern history, history of the Mediterranean and North Africa.

 

Publications

Book:

Contesting Time: The Global Struggle For Uniformity and Its Unintended Consequences, 1870-1930 (under contract with Harvard University Press).

Articles:

“Die Kolonisierung der Zeit: Repraesentationen Franzoesischer Kolonien auf den Pariser Weltausstellungen von 1889 und 1900”[Colonizing Time: Representations of French Colonies at the Parisian World’s Fairs of 1889 and 1900], Zeitschrift fuer historische Anthropologie 13, no. 3 (2005): 376-395.

Italian Translation at editor’s request: “La colonizzazione del tempo: rappresentazioni delle colonie francesi alle esposizioni universali di Parigi del 1889 e del 1900”, Memoria e Ricera: Rivista di storia contemporanea 17 (2004): 191 – 209.

Courses Taught (As Schedule Allows)

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