Dr Catherine Bergin

Research & Interests

My research focuses on Black Atlantic writing, and I am widely published in this area. My 2015 monograph. 'Bitter with the Past but Sweet with the Dream': Communism in the African American Imaginary (Brill/Haymarket) is an examination of the impact of Communism on a generation of seminal mid-century African American writers, and the impact of African American and Caribbean writers on Communism in the US.  

My edited collection African American Anti-Colonial Thought: 1917-1937 (EUP: 2016) traces the genesis of African American and Caribbean transnational anticolonial politics in the US between the wars through the excavation of radical journalism and protest poems from the period. 

I have written extensively about imaginative transnational solidarities of twentieth-century Black Atlantic writers in relation to the Russian Revolution, the Irish revolution and the Spanish Civil War.   This interest in transnational and diasporic solidarities in relation to literary and cultural representation informed my co-edited book (with Zeina Maasri & Francesca Burke), Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the global sixties (MUP: 2022). Our co-written introduction focuses on how transnational solidarity in the Global South is expressed in and carried through the itineraries of migrants and revolutionaries in literature, film, art and sport. The volume includes contributions relating to Cuba, the US, Uraguay, Palestine, Pakistan, Angola and Mozambique. 

I am a co-editor (with Anita Rupprecht) of a special edition of the Race and Class journal (“Reparative histories: radical narratives of ‘race’ and resistance” 57:3 2016). This issue presents a series of essays by leading scholars of postcolonialism and anti-racism.

I am engaged in a collaborative multi-scaler research project (with Anita Rupprecht) exploring the idea of reparative history. The project focuses on how claims on the past are shaped by the contemporary politics of race, and the particular ways in which those claims tend to occlude the centrality of the black radical tradition. The project explores how we might conceptualise and trace the historical legacies of transatlantic enslavement both within the history of capitalism and as challenges to dominant liberal paradigms of `freedom. The project critically engages the politics and practices of history-making as well as occluded, erased and hidden transnational diasporic histories. Outputs for the project thus far include two conferences, four conference papers,  an edited special journal issue (Race and Class), and an ongoing local history project, https://www.brighton.ac.uk/about-us/news-and-events/news/2019/01-23-tracing-brightons-forgotten-slave-owners.aspx

 I have been a member of the editorial board of Race & Class since January 2024. 

PUBLICATIONS

Books 

'Bitter with the Past but Sweet with the Dream': Communism in the African American Imaginary (Brill, 2015)  [paperback reissue by Haymarket Books 2016] 

African American Anti-Colonial Thought: 1917-1937 (Edinburgh University Press: 2016)

Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the global sixties (Manchester University Press: 2022) [paperback, 2025] (co-edited with Zeina Maasri and Francesca Burke)

Book Chapters 

“Interwar Antifascism in Britain: Caribbean migrants and the black radical press” in Kasper Braskén & Nigel Copsey (eds)  Anti-Fascist London Routledge [forthcoming 2025]

 “Transnational solidarity in  long sixties” an introduction (co-written) in Zeina Maasri, Cathy Bergin. & Francesca Burke (eds) Transnational solidarity: Anticolonialism in the global sixties (Manchester University Press: 2022)

“Writing Reparative Histories of Connection: The 1831 Tortola Slave Conspiracy in the Atlantic World” [with Anita Rupprecht] in James Spady (ed) New Perspectives in Black Anti-Slavery (University Press of South Carolina: 2022)

“Bolshevism and African American agency in the African American radical Press (1917-1924)” in David Featherstone & Christian Hogsbjerg (eds) The Red and the Black (Manchester University Press: 2021)

“African American Internationalism and Anti-Fascism” in Nigel Copsey & Kasper Braskén (eds) Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective (Routledge: 2020) 

“’The Rotten, Lousy, Stinking, Double Crossing Communists’: The Communist Party and Chester Himes’ Lonely Crusade” in Kristin Moriah (ed) Black writers and the Left (Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2013) 

Journal Articles

“Introduction” (with Christian  Hogsbjerg)  special issue of Socialist History on Friedrich Engles [guest editors] no.65 Autumn 2024 

“‘Something real’: Black Bolshevism and the Comintern” in Twentieth Century Communism:  A Journal of International History. No 24, June 2023

“Debate: Decolonising Fascist Studies” in Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies. 10:2, 2021

“Reparative histories: tracing narratives of black resistance and white entitlement” (with Anita Rupprecht) in Race & Class  60:1 2018

“The Russian Revolution and Black Radicalism” in Soundings 68, 2018

“History, agency and the representation of ‘race’ – an introduction” (with Anita Rupprecht)  in Race & Class, 57:3  2016 [guest editors for special issue on Reparative Histories]

"Unrest Among the Negroes": the African Blood Brotherhood and the politics of resistance” in Race & Class, 57:3 2016   

“Race/ class politics: the Liberator, 1929-1934” in Race & Class, 47:4 2008   

Further publications

The Black Antifascist Tradition by Jeanelle K. Hope & Bill V Mullen, book review  in Race & Class Volume 66:3, January 2025

African and Caribbean People in Britain by Hakim Adi, book review in New West Indian Guide October 2024

“Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright: Communism and the lived experience of 'race' - an interview with Catherine Bergin” 2018 

"Searching for the Truth of Vietnam,” book review  of Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War by John A. Wood in History Today, Vol 66 Issue 9. 2016

Commemorating the Holocaust: The dilemmas of remembrance in France and Italy by Rebecca Clifford book review in History Today Volume 64 Issue 4, 2014

The Event of Literature by Terry Eagleton, book review in Irish Marxists Review, Vol. 1 No. 2, 2012.

“Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States” in 501 Must-Read Books (Bounty Books, 2007)

Keynote and Invited Speaker 

Invited: “The Black Radical Tradition and Transnational politics: vectors of resistance”, Socialist Theory and Movements Research Network seminar series University of Glasgow, June 2024

Invited: “Fascism, Democracy and Empire” at the Histories of Anti-fascism conference, Bishopsgate Institute and QMUL, April 2024

Invited: Reparative Histories Plenary (with Anita Rupprecht) at “Connected Sociologies: From Culture Wars to Reparative Histories” event held at the Brighthelm Centre, Brighton, 31  March 2023  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNSsc6DTZ_w

Invited: “‘Black Bolshevism’ and internationalism in the interwar African American radical press” at the Communist Anti-Racism and Anti-Imperialism ARHC funded Rethinking International Communism network, University of Exeter, April 2022 

Invited: “Anti-Fascism in a global perspective: Transnational networks, exile communities, and radical internationalism” special panel at the European Conference on World and Global History: Minorities, Cultures of Integration and Patterns of Exclusion, June 2021 [Online due to Covid]

Invited: "Tracing Black Protest in the Present" Joint paper (with Anita Rupprecht) given at "Anti-Racist Research in the Age of Black Lives Matter" online symposium organised by the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories (CMNH), University of Brighton, June 2020

Invited: “Write offs, Wright downs and Reparations” at Finance: Ghosts of Empire, conference, University of Sussex, April 2019  

Invited: "Black Bolsheviks: Race, Class and the Russian Revolution" at Thinking the Politics of Race Centre for Applied Philosophy and Ethics, Public Lecture Series, University of Brighton, October 2017

Keynote:  "Bolshevism and African American Agency in the African American Radical Press"  The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic  Conference, at the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR), University of Central Lancashire, (UCLan), Preston, UK, October 2017 Final Programme for The Red and the Black

Invited: "Transnational Anti-Fascisms"  at the Ruptures, Empires, Revolutions  conference, European Congress on World and Global History, Budapest, September 2017  

Invited: "'The Irish fight for liberty is the greatest Epic of Modern History’: The Irish revolution and African American radicals" at London Socialist Historians Group Conference: 100 years since the Easter Rising , Senate House, London, April 2016 

Invited: "Internationalism and black agency in the African American radical Press (1918-1924)" at the  Marxism in Culture  Seminar series, Institute of Historical Research,  University of London, April 2016 

Invited: "Reparative Histories: Radical Narratives of Race and Resistance" launch for special edition of Race & Class  (with Anita Rupprecht) at the  Institute of Race Relations, London, February 2016  

Invited: 'Hatred there must be': African American agency & Communism during the Depression" at The Northern Bridge American History Colloquium, Queens University Belfast, March 2015  

Invited: "Communist Anti-Racism in the US: The Crusader 1919-1922" at the British Sociological Association Conference, University of Leeds, April 2014

Invited: ‘“Towards Soviet America”: The Communist Party of the United States and questions of race and colonialism’ at The Postcolonial Literatures Research Group of The Open University and The Institute of English Studies Senate House, London, May 2013

Selected Conference Papers 

“Thinking outside the Humanities” panellist at “Radical Futures: inaugural conference of the Radical Humanities Laboratory”, May 2024, University College Cork.

"Writing Reparative Histories of Connection: The 1831 Tortola Slave Conspiracy in the Atlantic World" (with Anita Rupprecht) at The Vesey Conspiracy at 200: Black Antislavery in the Atlantic World, College of Charleston, South Carolina, February 2019.

Book Launch Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties with Francesca Burke, Zeina Maasri, Talat Ahmed, Victor Barros and Marina Cardozo. Hybrid symposium   University of Brighton 29 Sep 2022

 “Anti-Fascism and African American volunteers in the International Brigades” at  the Empire, Capital & Transnational Resistance conference, Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics (CAPPE) University of Brighton, September 2017 

"Multicultural resistance and reparative histories" (with Anita Rupprecht) at Reparative Histories II: The Making Unmaking and Remaking of 'Race' conference, University of Brighton, April 2017

“African American Anti-Colonial Thought: 1917-1937” (with David Johnson) Book Launch and Seminar, November 2016 

"Radical ‘race’ politics and the 1916 Easter Rising" at the  CAPPE Radical Interventions   conference, University of Brighton, September 2016

“Reparative Histories: history, agency and the representation of ‘race’” (with Anita Rupprecht) Special issue, journal launch at the Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics Seminar series, University of Brighton, March 2016

 "The Twenty-First Century Novel: Securing or Securitising Space?" (with Patricia McManus) at the Bloomsbury, C21:Writing and Insecurity conference, March 2016

 "Reparative Histories: Trauma and Politics" (with Anita Rupprecht) at Repairing the Past, Imagining the Future: Reparations and Beyond conference, University of Edinburgh, November 2015

"Game On: Dystopia, Gender and Resistance in The Hunger Games" (with Patricia McManus) at the Utopias CAPPE conference, University of Brighton, September 2015

 "'Seeking to Foment Unrest Among the Negroes': The African Blood Brotherhood and the politics of resistance" at the Reparative Histories: Radical Narratives of ‘Race’ & Resistance conference, University of Brighton September 2014

"The Politicisation of Everyday life: neoliberal ‘feminisms’" (with Patricia McManus) at the Neoliberalism and Everyday Life CAPPE conference, University of Brighton, September 2014

 “‘Literature’, the state and sexual violence” (with Patricia McManus) at the Representation, Politics and Violence CAPPE conference, University of Brighton September 2013

 "Historicising the Novel" at the Historical Materialism Conference, SOAS, November 2012

 “September 11th and the limits of liberal humanism: The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ at The “9/11” Decade: Rethinking Reality CAPPE conference University of Brighton, September 2011

"On ‘Race’, Universalism and the Novel" IOTA Seminar series, University of Brighton, January 2010

“Democracy and the Novel” at the Problems of Democracy Conference, Prague, May 2010