Stephen Howe is professor in the department of historical studies at Bristol University. His most recent books are Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002), Ireland and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (Verso, 1998).

Recent articles

Forest Whitaker's superb performance as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin cannot redeem a hollow film that washes whiter a complex reality, says Stephen Howe.

When an acclaimed, leftist English director makes a film about nationalist Irish struggles – and wins the top prize at the Cannes festival – controversy is inevitable. The historian Stephen Howe looks behind the shouting to ask: is the film truthful?

Hollywood deals with " counter-terrorism" in Steven Spielberg's new film about the aftermath of the Palestinian seizure of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Good theme, bad film, says Stephen Howe.

The combative cultural and political worldview of Northern Ireland’s working-class Protestant communities is not an atavistic residue but part of a complex response to modern global conditions and national pressures, says Stephen Howe in the second, concluding part of his panoptic essay.

Behind recent violent unrest in Loyalist working-class communities in Northern Ireland is a story of promiscuous cultural borrowings attempting to shore up a collapsed political identity, says Stephen Howe. In the first part of a two-part essay, he examines their manifestations in music, visual display and political rhetoric.