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Dr. Ole Birk Laursen

Dr. Ole Birk Laursen

Contact

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LMU Munich
Munich Centre for Global History & Modern and Contemporary History
School of History
Lehrstuhl Prof. Wenzlhuemer PF 105
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
80539 München
Germany

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Historicum
Schellingstr. 12, K 024


Profile

Ole Birk Laursen is a historian of South Asia, anarchism, and anticolonialism. His research concerns the social and intellectual history of South Asian anticolonial activists in Europe from the mid-nineteenth century to the era of decolonisation, with a particular focus on Marxism, anarchism, and left-wing radicalism. He holds a PhD in English from the Open University (UK), and an MA and BA in English and History from the University of Aarhus (Denmark). His first book, Anarchy or Chaos: M. P. T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom (forthcoming with Hurst & Co., 2023), is an intellectual biography of India’s most important anarchist theoretician and activist. The book addresses issues around direct democracy and postcolonial visions of freedom, internationalism and the nation-state, terrorism, pacifism, independence, and decolonisation through the lens of anticolonial anarchism.

Positions

  • 2022 Visiting Research Fellow, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin
  • 2021 Teaching Fellow, Department of English, King’s College London
  • 2019 – 2021 IIAS Research Fellow, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University
  • 2019 Visiting Research Fellow, Centre d’histoire de l’Asia contemporaine, Université Paris 1 – Pantheon Sorbonne
  • 2019 Teaching Fellow, English Department of English, King’s College London
  • 2018 – 2019 Teaching Fellow, Department of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary, University of London
  • 2018 – 2019 Lecturer, English Department, New York University, London
  • 2017 Visiting Research Fellow, Danish Institute in Rome
  • 2014 – 2016 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
  • 2011 – 2013 Editorial Researcher, Research Professional, Research Ltd, London

Publications

Monograph

  • Anarchy or Chaos: M. P. T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom (London: Hurst & Co., 2023)

Edited Volumes

  • Lay Down Your Arms: Anti-Militarism, Anti-Imperialism, and the Global Radical Left in the 1930s (Atlanta: On Our Own Authority! Publishing, 2019)
  • We Are Anarchists: Essays on Anarchism, Pacifism, and the Indian Independence Movement, 1923-1953 (Oakland: AK Press, 2019)
  • Stadtler, Florian, and Ole Birk Laursen, eds, Networking the Globe: New Technologies and the Postcolonial (London: Routledge, 2016)
  • Malreddy, Pavan Kumar, Birte Heidemann, Ole Birk Laursen, and Janet Wilson, eds, Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Refereed Journal Articles

  • Spaces of Indian Anticolonialism in Early Twentieth Century London and Paris’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 44:4 (2021), 634-650.
  • ‘“I have only One Country, it is the World”: Madame Cama, Anticolonialism, and Indian-Russian Revolutionary Networks in Paris, 1907–1917’, History Workshop Journal, 90 (Autumn 2020), 96-114.
  • ‘Introduction: Decolonizing the State: Subversion, Mimicry and Criminality’, with Enrique Galvan-Alvarez and Maria Ridda, special issue of Postcolonial Studies, 22:3 (June 2020), 161-169.
  • ‘“Anarchism, pure and simple”: M. P. T. Acharya, Anti-Colonialism and the International Anarchist Movement’, Postcolonial Studies, 22:3 (June 2020), 241-255.
  • ‘Anti-Colonialism, Terrorism and the “Politics of Friendship”: Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and the European Anarchist Movement, 1910-1927’, Anarchist Studies, 27:1 (2019), 47-62.
  • ‘Anarchist Anti-Imperialism: Guy Aldred and the Indian Revolutionary Movement, 1909-1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46:2 (2018), 286-303.
  • ‘Introduction: Comics and the Anarchist Imagination’, with Frederik Byrn Køhlert, special issue of SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, 46:2 (2017), 3-10.
  • ‘Postcolonial Anarchographics: Re-Drawing History in the Trantraal Brothers’ Crossroads’, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, 46:2 (2017), 129-146.
  • ‘Introduction: Networking the Globe: Culture, Technologies, Globalization’, with Florian Stadtler, special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49:5 (2013), 1-2.

Book chapters

  • 'British Anarchism and the Colonial Question: The Case of Freedom, 1918-1962’, in Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals, eds, David Finkelstein, David Johnson, and Caroline Davies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
  • ‘“The Ethics of Dynamite”: Indian Nationalism and the Question of Anarchism in Britain, 1905-1909’, in Radical Encounters in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940: Anarchist, Marxist, and Nationalist Struggles, eds, Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (London: Routledge; in press)
  • ‘Writing Lives, Inventing Selves: Black and Asian Women’s Life Writing’, in Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing, eds, Susheila Nasta and Mark Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 499-520.
  • ‘“A Dagger, a Revolver, a Bottle of Chloroform”: Colonial Spy Fiction, Revolutionary Reminiscences and Indian Nationalist Terrorism in Europe’, in Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture, eds, Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 255-271.
  • ‘Anti-Imperialism’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, eds, Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 149-168.
  • ‘The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865-1914’, in The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance, eds, Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 175-191.
  • ‘“The Bomb Plot of Zurich”: Indian Nationalism, Italian Anarchism and the First World War’, in Anarchism 1914-1918: Internationalism, Militarism and War, eds, Ruth Kinna and Matthew S. Adams (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 135-154.
  • ‘Reading the Riots: Precarity, Racial Injustice and Rights in the Novels of Alex Wheatle’, in Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights, eds, Pavan Malreddy, Birte Heidemann, Ole Birk Laursen, and Janet Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 214-228.

Book Reviews

  • Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (London, Allen Lane, 2020), H-Soz-Kult (June 2021)
  • A.W. Zurbrugg, Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900-1918 (London: Merlin Press, 2018), Anarchist Studies, 28:2 (2020), 120-1.
  • Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton University Press, 2011), Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49: 2 (2013), 241-2.
  • Claire Chambers, British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, 3:2 (2012), 308-10.
  • Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Brill, 2010), Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48:5 (2012), 573-5.
  • Alan Rice, Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Sarah de Mul, Colonial Memory: Contemporary Women’s Travel Writing in Britain and the Netherlands (Amsterdam University Press, 2011), Wasafiri, 27:3 (2012), 83-5.
  • Abigail Ward, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar: Representations of Slavery (Manchester University Press, 2011), Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48:4 (2012), 449-50.
  • Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation (Routledge, 2009) and Philip Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity and the Nation-State (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), Wasafiri, 25:3 (2010), 86-88.

Other Publications