Dr Xavier Guegan

Senior Lecturer

School of History, Archaeology and Philosophy

Xavier.Guegan@winchester.ac.uk

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Biography

I am Senior Lecturer (equivalent to Associate Professor) in Colonial and Postcolonial History, with a ‘Teaching with Enhanced Responsibility for Research' role profile.

After graduating in History (2000) at the Université de Nice (France), I moved to the North East of England to do an MA in Modern History (2001) within the frame of an Erasmus exchange programme between the Université de Nice and the University of Northumbria. I then taught at Ashington High School for several years while doing a PhD in Visual Culture and Colonial History at the University of Northumbria, which was completed in 2009. Between 2005 and 2013 I held a position as a teaching fellow and then lecturer in Colonial and European History at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University. I joined the Department of History at the University of Winchester in January 2014, as Senior Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial History.

I research, publish and lecture on South Asian history under British colonial rule and North African history under French colonial rule, including imperial culture and ideologies, as well as on violence and anti-colonial resistance. I also have expertise on the correlation between photography and history.

I was on the editorial team (Book Review Editor, 2016-2022) of Britain and the World, an academic journal published by Edinburgh University Press, which focusses on Britain’s relations with the wider world since the seventeenth century.

Between 2015 and 2019 I was the Director of the Modern History Research Centre, and between 2017 and 2021 the Programme Leader for the MA History. I am currently the Chair of the Historical Association, Winchester Branch.

I regularly assess and review articles, book and funding proposals and projects (including for the Carnegie Trust, E.S.R.C., Bloomsbury, Palgrave Macmillan, Gale, Pearson Education Publisher, and for academic journals such as the International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, International Relations, Early Popular Visual Culture, Journal of Perpetrator Research, and Contemporary British History).

Higher Education Teaching Qualification: I was awarded Senior Fellow status of the HEA in 2017. I am a mentor on the CASTLE scheme (Celebration & Accreditation Scheme for Teaching & Learning Expertise).

Between 2018 and 2023 I was the External Examiner for the MA History and MA Maritime History at the University of Plymouth. Since 2024, I am the External Examiner for the BA Modern History at University of Surrey / Farnborough College of Technology.

Areas of expertise

Modern Colonial World (nineteenth and twentieth centuries)
British Empire - British India
French Colonial Empire - French Algeria
Global connections and ideas within the colonial and post-colonial world
Cultural Colonial History
Political and Social Colonial and Anti-colonial History
History of Photography
Travelling and Migration
Postcolonial theory

Publications

Books

The Imperial Aesthetic: Photography, Samuel Bourne and the Indian Peoples in the post-Mutiny era (Leiden: Brill, 2025).

The British Abroad since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 1, Travellers and Tourists (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); co-edited with Martin Farr.

The British Abroad since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 2, Experiencing Imperialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); co-edited with Martin Farr.

An Entangled History, France and the Maghreb: A Sourcebook (in preparation with a book proposal).

Chapters and articles

‘Analysing Tropes in Colonial/Postcolonial Films’ in AM Research Methods: Interrogating Colonial Archives and Narratives (Marlborough: AM, 2024).

'Post-Colonial Branding and Self-Branding in a Destination Marketing Strategy' (co-written with Hugues Seraphin and Vanessa Gowreesunkar), in Hugues Seraphin, Maximiliano Korstanje and Vanessa Gowreesunkar (eds.), Post-Disaster and Post-Conflict Tourism: Toward a New Management Approach, 2^nd edition (Abingdon: Apple Academic Press, 2023).

‘Using Scrapbooks in Historical Research: the case of the Institute of Race Relations, 1947’, in Research Methods for Primary Sources (Marlborough: Adam Matthew Digital, 2021).

'Colonial Photography', in Charles Forsdick et al. (eds), Postcolonial Realms of Memory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 360-370.

'Post-Colonial Branding and Self-Branding in a Destination Marketing Strategy' (co-written with Hugues Seraphin), in Hugues Seraphin, Maximiliano Korstanje and Vanessa Gb Gowreesunkar (eds.), Post-Disaster and Post-Conflict Tourism: Toward a New Management Approach (Abingdon: Apple Academic Press, 2020), 83-106.

'The Mysterious Cities of Gold: An educational adventure through colonial, transnational and postcolonial history and fiction', Postcolonial Studies Association Newsletter: Postcolonialism and Visual Culture, 23 (2019): 7-9.

‘From Princely to Barbaric: Indian Masculinities as Colonial Landscape in Bourne and Bourne & Shepherd’s Photographs’, in Marcus Banks and Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes (eds), Visual Histories of South Asia (Delhi: Primus Books of Ratna Sagar, 2018), 143-170.

'Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth: Embodying the Anti-colonial Action', in Rachel Hammersley (ed.), Revolutionary Moments, in J. C. Davis and John Morrow (general editors) Textual Moments in the History of Political Thought (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2015), 167-174.

'Transmissible Sites: Monuments, memorials and their visibility on the metropole and periphery', in Frank Müller and Dominik Geppert (eds), Sites of Imperial Memory: Commemorating colonial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 21-38.

'Against "the Usual Restraints Imposed upon their Sex": Conflictive Gender Representations in Nineteenth-Century Orients', in Martin Farr and Xavier Guégan (eds), The British Abroad since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 2, Experiencing Imperialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 93-115.

'Visualising racial alienation: Duality and symbols in Bourne's India', Visual Culture of British India, in Visual Culture in Britain, Special issue, 12:3 (Nov. 2011): 349-365.

'Less Smoke and Noise', Journal of the Royal Photographic Society, 150:1 (Feb. 2010): 38-41.

Book reviews, blogs and magazine articles

‘Family photographs, thorny histories and the archives’, Blog entry for the Hampshire Archives Trust Social (May 2023).

‘Review of Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City by Tom Allbeson’, in Contemporary British History, 37:1 (2023).

‘Review of Mercy and British Culture, 1760-1960 by James Gregory’, in Britain and the World, 15:2 (2022): 190-192.

‘Review of Réveiller l'archive d'une guerre coloniale. Gaston Chérau, correspondant de guerre, 1911-1912 by Pierre Schill (ed.), in French History 36:2 (2022): 268-270.

'How to approach family photographs of empires and our ancestors’ history', Real History Magazine: For things you might not hear in school, 1 (2019): 38-39.

'Q&A: 'The impact of British rule', History Revealed, 48 (Nov. 2017): 33.

Conferences

I have organised conferences and workshops, and I regularly attend and give papers at conferences and research seminars. These include the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, King’s College London, Charles University (Prague), Newcastle, Northumbria, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Sunderland, York, St Andrews, Austin, Minnesota, Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Harlaxton College, Chichester, ANOM (Aix-en-Provence), Exeter, Westminster, Plymouth, and Winchester; and public lectures at the Alliance Française Newcastle, Ealing, Bournemouth and Winchester Historical Associations, and Winchester Cathedral's 'Contested Heritage' series.

Exhibitions

Organisation of the Exhibition 'India through Photography: two times, two photographers Samuel Bourne (1860s) & Xavier Guégan (2002)', The Oriental Museum, University of Durham, 25 March-23 May 2010.

Organisation in the frame of the partnership between the Modern History Research Centre and the Discovery Centre at Winchester:

LGBT+ History Exhibition (2017 & 2018)
People on the Move: A History of Modern Migration (2018)
Transitions, Resistance and Dissent (2019)

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Research interests

My general research interests are in the history of British and French imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a specific focus on British India and French Algeria. My forthcoming monograph examines the photographic and cultural portrayal of Indian peoples in the Victorian time. Furthermore I have published on the impact of British travelling in modern time; on comparative visual studies between British India and French Algeria; on anti-colonial and postcolonial visual representation; and on photography and colonial sites of memory. My current research focusses on comparative photographic depiction of famines in India and Algeria in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Supervision of research students

I am Director of Studies / Supervisor, and I have PhD students who have successfully been awarded their Doctorate. I am currently the Director of Studies to three PhD students (including the fully funded scholarship 'Recording the dismantlement of empire: contested narratives and the after-lives of colonial statues in de-colonizing Britain and France, 1950-2021'), and the Second Supervisor to another PhD student.

I welcome proposals for postgraduate research; my areas of supervision are: British & French imperialism in India & Algeria; comparative visual studies of imperialism; colonial and anti-colonial photography; History of anti-imperialism; colonial / anti-colonial sites of memory; postcolonial theory in historical context.