Keynotes

Labour coercion and punitive configurations

Christian G. De Vito is Professor of global economic and social history at the University of Vienna. He has published extensively on global labour history and the social history of punishment, and has addressed the relationship between microhistory and global history. His ongoing research focuses on the interaction between punitive and imperial processes in the Spanish monarchy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

Nordic gender equality revisited

Pirjo Markkola is Professor of history and director of the CoE in the History of Experiences at Tampere University. She has published widely in gender history, labour history and the history of welfare in the Nordics. Her recent publications include Lived Institutions as History of Experience, ed. with J. Annola & H. Lindberg (2023), “Working-class women living religion in Finland at the turn of the 20th century,” in S. Katajala-Peltomaa & R.M. Toivo (eds) Histories of Experience in the World of Lived Religion (2022), and “Nordic Gender Equality: Between Administrative Cooperation and Global Branding,” in J. Marjanen, J. Strang & M. Hilson (eds) Contesting Nordicness: From Scandinavianism to the Nordic Brand (2022).

Popular resistance to the enclosure of urban public space in the long 19th century: protest and the commons in England

Katrina Navickas is Professor of history at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She works on the history of protest and social movements from the eighteenth century to the present day. She is author of Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 (Manchester University Press, 2015) and Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798-1815 (Oxford University Press, 2009), and is currently completing her next monograph, Contested Commons: a History of Protest and Public Space in England (Reaktion Books, forthcoming). She was a British Academy mid-career fellow in 2018-19, and has taught at the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh before joining Hertfordshire in 2009.

Anna Hammerin (University of Hertfordshire) is the director of The Potato Revolution: Telling the Story of the Women who Inspired the Swedish Hunger Uprisings of 1917, a powerful documentary to be screened at NLHC2025. Set during the First World War, the film explores the largely forgotten hunger protests that swept through neutral Sweden in 1917, driven by women demanding food, justice, and political change. These grassroots movements played a pivotal role in Sweden’s democratic transformation. Blending archival footage with moving interviews, The Potato Revolution brings to life a critical yet overlooked chapter in European history. At the conference, Hammerin will present a keynote talk on the making of the film and introduce the public impact project that extends its reach beyond the screen.