Hello and welcome to EU today, a podcast from the Center for European Studies, a Jean-Monnais Center of Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Thank you to the Erasmus Plus program of the European

Commission, the EU delegation to the U.S., and the U.S. Department of Education for supporting

our center and its programs. On this podcast, we sit down with scholars and policy leaders to discuss

pressing issues facing the European Union. We hope you enjoy it.

On this podcast, we'll be interviewing UNC History Professor Susan Pennybacker and Chameel Aiden,

both Jean-Monnais Center of Excellence key staff members. In partnership with the Center for

European Studies, professors Pennybacker and Iden organized the April 2019 Global Brexit Panel and Lost Futures

Conference, exploring the past and present of global themes related to Brexit. Susan Pennybacker is a

distinguished professor of European history here at UNC. She's a modern British historian whose work is

on the long British 20th century in a global context.

Jamila Aiden is Professor of Global History here at UNC. His main interests are comparative

and transnational modern world history with area foci on Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.

Interviewing Professor's Pennybacker in Aiden is Mark Reeves, a PhD candidate in history here at UNC.

Well, I thought we would begin by just talking about the origin of the conference idea for global Brexit and lost futures of European empires.

So I don't know, Susan, if you wanted to discuss that.

So the lost futures of European empires was a concept that came through one of our

colleagues who's an Africanist who had partly worked on visions of a federation that had grown

up in Africa after 1945, some of which came to fruition, but others

not, and it's sort of a kind of, in relation to the Commonwealth, the British Commonwealth,

there were parallel movements for Federation, including in the French Empire.

And this led to a notion of, on the one hand, a notion of re-configuring the European

...