Elizabeth Buettner, Professor of Modern History

Elizabeth Buettner has been Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam since 2014.  Her research has centered on British imperial, social, cultural, and migration history since the late nineteenth century along with other European nations’ histories of late colonialism, decolonization, and their domestic ramifications.  Key publications include Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford University Press, 2004) together with articles in Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Journal of Modern History, Itinerario, History & Memory, Scottish Historical Review, Annales de Démographie Historique, Women’s History Review, Ab Imperio, Food and History, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review.  She has also contributed to a number of edited collections, including The Cambridge History of Global Migrations Vol. II, The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, A Concise Companion to History, and Settlers and Expatriates: Britons Over the Seas.  In her book Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2016), she examined British, French, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese histories of coming to terms with the end of empires after the Second World War, focusing on the domestic impact of decolonization, postcolonial migration, the emergence of multicultural societies, and selective memories of empire.

Professor Buettner received her BA from Barnard College of Columbia University and her MA and PhD from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.  Before arriving in Amsterdam she taught in England at the University of York between 2000 and 2013, and in 2012-2013 held a Senior Research Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany in conjunction with a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.  Her research has also been supported by a Senior Research Fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz and a Visiting International Fellowship at the University of Exeter.  She was recently part of a three-year European Commission-funded Horizon 2020 Project, ‘European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities’ (ECHOES).  Together with Britta Timm Knudsen, John Oldfield, and Elvan Zabunyan, she co-edited and contributed to a collection that emerged from this initiative entitled Decolonizing Colonial Heritage: New Agendas, Actors and Practices in and beyond Europe (Routledge, 2022).