HST2509: Empires and revolutions in continental Europe, 1905-1923

Module Summary

This module explores the disintegration of Europe's continental empires from the 1900s to the early 1920s. The aim is to proceed from a comparative perspective of national and regional revolutionary processes to an understanding of the transnational and transimperial connections underlying the forms of agency and identity in this period.

Most models of modern revolutions are drawn from narratives associated with the French Revolution of 1789-93 and the Russian Revolution of 1917. However, much of this narrative is centred on nations and states, which gives an incomplete understanding of the implications resulting from the collapse of multi-ethnic empires such as Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Engaging with the complexity of various ideas of ‘self-determination’ on the ruins of these empires,Michel Valstar

Automatic Understanding of Human Behaviour

Michel Valstar is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham, School of Computer Science, and a researcher in Automatic Visual Understanding of Human Behaviour. He is a member of both the Computer Vision Lab and the Mixed Reality Lab. This encompasses Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and a good idea of how people behave in this world. He was recently a Visiting Researcher at the Affective Computing group at the Media Lab, MIT, and a research associate with the iBUG group, which is part of the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. Michel’s expertise is facial expression recognition, in particular the analysis of FACS Action Units. He recently proposed a new field of research called 'Behaviomedics', which applies affective computing and Social