Professor Kim A. Wagner

My early work focussed on key conflicts and turning points in the history of the British Empire and colonial India, and especially on the intersections between crime and colonial knowledge, and anti-colonial resistance and imperial anxieties. The legacies of empire, both ideological and material, remain a central theme in my research and for the past few years, I have been working to repatriate a trophy-skull belonging to an Indian rebel who was executed by the British during the Indian Uprising of 1857. The skull was found in a pub in 1963 and I documented my research to establish its provenance in my book The Skull of Alum Bheg (2018), which also examines the practice of collecting and exhibiting human remains within the British Empire and the Western imperial formations during the colonial conflicts of the nineteenth history. My research and teaching is informed by a commitment to challenging exceptionalist narratives of Western imperialism and to recover silenced voices and marginalized experiences, thereby opening up new and explicitly interdisciplinary vantage points of historical inquiry.

 In 2019, I published Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (Yale/Penguin India), which proposes the original concept of ‘thick periodization’ to explore the manner in which colonial anxieties, originating in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, shaped the British interpretation of Indian nationalist unrest after WWI, and, crucially, dictated the levels of violence required to suppress it. By examining the structural continuities of the Amritsar Massacre, the book encourages a revision of the way we think about colonial violence across imperial formations and different time periods.

In 2025, I published Massacre in the Clouds – An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History (PublicAffairs), which is the first scholarly account of the Bud Dajo massacre in March 1906, during which some 1000 local men, women and children were killed by American troops in the southern Philippines. While the massacre caused controversy in the US at the time, and both W.E.B. Du Bois and Mark Twain wrote about it, it has since been largely forgotten. The central motif of the book is a photograph taken after the massacre which shows American soldiers proudly posing for the camera, surrounded by piles of corpses, including those of women and children. With obvious parallels to both Wounded Knee and My Lai, I argue that rather than being an exceptional episode or unfortunate tragedy, Bud Dajo was in fact the deliberate outcome of US policy; indeed, the massacre marks a historical moment when a distinctly American tradition of racial and settler violence intersected with European doctrines of colonial warfare.

In recent years, I have begun working on the history American empire and violence in a more sustained manner, and my current project on the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War may be said to be the culmination of this shifting focus. An atrocity, I argue, is not simply constituted by physical acts of violence but also by the way it is subsequently justified, covered up, or deliberately forgotten. An atrocity is also the euphemisms used to minimize its brutality and make the violence more palatable, or the outright lies and censorship that obscures the facts. My current research is thus sustained by a set of questions: How do we make sense of seemingly senseless violence? How can a nation perpetrate atrocities yet retain the conceit that it is acting as a force for good in the world? What are the stories that perpetrators and victims tell themselves, and others, about what they have done and what has been done to them? My work, in short, seeks to examine atrocities as more than just discrete historical events and it does so by situating them within deeper histories of violence, between myth and memory.

Single-authored Books

• Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History (New York: Public Affairs, 2024).
• Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (London: Yale University Press/New Delhi: Penguin India, forthcoming 2019).
• The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (London: Hurst, 2017/New Delhi: Penguin India, 2018/ New York: Oxford University Press US, 2018). Short-listed for the Templer Medal 2017.
• The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang Oxford, 2010/Delhi: Dev Publishers and Distributors, 2015/new paperback edition: Rumours and Rebels: A New History of the Indian Uprising, Oxford: Peter Lang Oxford, 2017).
• Stranglers and Bandits – A Historical Anthology of Thuggee (Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2009).
• Thuggee – Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007/New Delhi: Primus, 2014). Short-listed for the History Today Award 2008.

Articles in Peer-reviewed journals

• ‘Fear and Loathing in Amritsar: An Intimate Account of Colonial Crisis’, in Itinerario, The Private Lives of Empire, 42, 1 (Aril 2018), pp. 67-84.
• ‘Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal, 85, 1 (April 2018), pp. 217-37.
• ‘Calculated to Strike Terror: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past & Present, 233, 1 (Nov., 2016), pp. 185-225.
• ‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past & Present, 218, 1 (Feb., 2013), pp. 159-97.
• ‘The Marginal Mutiny: The New Historiography of the Indian Uprising of 1857’, History Compass, 9, 10 (Oct. 2011), pp. 760-66.
• ‘Confessions of a Skull: Phrenology and Colonial Knowledge in early nineteenth-century India’, History Workshop Journal, 69 (Spring, 2010), pp. 28-51.
• ‘Thuggee and Social Banditry Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal, 50, 2 (2007), pp. 353-76.
• ‘The Deconstructed Stranglers – A Reassessment of Thuggee’, Modern Asian Studies, 38, 4, (2004), pp. 931-63.

Contributions to Edited Volumes

• ‘Rebellion, Resistance, and the Subaltern’, in Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel (eds.), The Oxford World History of Empire, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), vol 2, pp. 417-36.
• 'Seeing Like a Soldier: The Amritsar Massacre and the Politics of Military History’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds.) Colonial Counterinsurgency (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 23-37.
• ‘‘Thugs and Assassins’: New Terrorism and the Resurrection of Colonial Knowledge’, in Carola Dietze and Claudia Verhoeven (eds.) Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
• ‘‘In Unrestrained Conversation’: Approvers and the Colonial Ethnography of Crime in nineteenth-century India’, in Kim A. Wagner & Ricardo Roque (eds) Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History, (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 135-162.
•  ‘‘Vengeance Against England!’: Hermann Goedsche and the Indian Uprising’, in Crispin Bates & Marina Carter (eds.) New Perspectives on 1857 (Delhi: Sage, 2013), pp. 150-169.

Co-authored and Co-edited Work

• (co-written with Gavin Rand), ‘Recruiting the ‘Martial Races’: Identities and Military Service in Colonial India’, in Gavin Schaffer (ed.) ‘Racialising the Soldier’ Patterns of Prejudice (link is external), 46, 3-4 (2012), 232-254.
• (co-edited with Ricardo Roque) Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History (link is external) (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), Introduction: 1-32.

Introductions and forewords

• Introduction to Oxford World’s Classics: Philip Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug (orig. 1839, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
• Foreword to Daniel Foliard, The Violence of Colonial Photography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022).
• Foreword to Amandeep Singh Madra & Parmjit Singh (eds.), Eyewitness at Amritsar: A Visual History of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre 1919 (London: Kashi House, 2019).

I welcome applications from candidates wishing to undertake doctoral research in the following areas:

• The global history of mass violence
• Massacres in modern history
• Atrocity Photography
• Myths, memories and museums of violence
• Colonial violence and counterinsurgency
• The legacies of American and European imperialism
• British imperialism and South Asia 1757-1947
• Micro-history and anthropology