Professor W. Fitzhugh Brundage, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will be giving a talk at King’s College London, at 6pm on Wednesday 11 November in the History Department Seminar Room (Strand Building 8th floor, STR807) on his new book project, A Global History of Barbed Wire. Drinks will be served afterwards. Please share details of the event with anyone you think might be interested, using this link (for free tickets): https://buytickets.at/departmentofhistorykingscollegelondon/2482270.
All are welcome!
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A Global History of Barbed Wire
Brundage traces how barbed wire evolved from a cheap nineteenth-century agricultural innovation into a powerful global instrument of territorial control, warfare, imprisonment, and border enforcement. While enabling agricultural expansion, economic growth, and security, it also facilitated dispossession, repression, restricted mobility, and ecological disruption. The project argues that barbed wire underscores how humanity’s pursuit of order and progress have repeatedly, arguably continually, promoted new mechanisms of exclusion and coercion.
Fitz Brundage is the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He previously has written on lynching, utopian socialism, and contested memory in the American South. More recently he has written on the history of torture in the United States and of the prisoner of war experience during the American Civil War. His latest book was A Fate Worse than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War (2026). His Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition (2019) was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.