Dr. Jane Mumby

Short CV

Jane Mumby joined the Chair of Modern History in November 2023 as a research fellow in the ERC Adv. Grant project InechO, prior to which she worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA)-funded project The History of Scientific Conferences, based in the Centre for the Study of Internationalism at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was awarded a UK Economic and Social Research Council grant in 2018 to pursue her PhD researching the last years of the League of Nations, which was completed at Birkbeck in the spring of 2022. She additionally obtained her Masters degrees in Historical Research (MSc) and Contemporary History and Politics (MA) at Birkbeck College in 2017 and 2015 respectively.

Her research interests centre on the development of international and intergovernmental organisations during the 20th century, as well as the evolution of thinking on internationalism and transnationalism in historiography. She is interested in the social, cultural, and emotional histories of these organisations, especially in regard to international secretariats and the ways in which internationalism can manifest 'from below'. She is furthermore concerned with the legacies and afterlives of both intergovernmental organisations and the civil services that supported them, as well as how these were reflected in the institutions that followed in terms of practice, assets, and people.

Her first monograph, Dismantling the League of Nations: The Quiet Death of an International Organization, 1945-8, will be published by Bloomsbury in December 2023.

Selected Publications

• Dismantling the League of Nations: The Quiet Death of an International Organization 1945-8. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.
• 'The Last Years of the Secretariat' – online research guide produced for United Nations archives, Geneva: https://libraryresources.unog.ch/LONSecretariat/secondwar.