James Vernon is Associate Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley and the Director of the new Center for British Studies. Trained as a political historian of nineteenth century Britain, his first publications - Politics and the People (1993) and an edited collection of essays Re-Reading the Constitution (1996) - helped outline an agenda for what a cultural history of British politics might look like. Recent essays include “Border Crossings: Cornwall and the English (Imagi)Nation" in G.Cubitt (ed.), Imagining Nations (1998), 'For some queer reason ...' The trials and tribulations of Colonel Barker's masquerade in interwar Britain, Signs 25, 1 (Autumn 2000) and “Telling the Subaltern to Speak: Social Investigation and Formation of Social History in Twentieth Century Britain.” He is on the editorial boards of both Social History and Representations and is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Modernity’s Hunger. How imperial Britain created, and then failed to solve, the problem of hunger in the modern world.