British Academy Raleigh lecture
The Reverend Professor Judith M Brown (University of Oxford) will be giving a lecture on ‘The Making and Breaking of States: the End of Empire in India Revisited’ at the University on 5 December.
Recent events in the Arab world have sharpened and widened public interest in the way states can be broken and made, often very publicly and dramatically given the role of the modern media. Since the end of the Second World War the world has seen three great waves of state-breaking and state-making: the end of European empires; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and the contemporary ‘Arab Spring’. By revisiting perhaps the greatest ‘imperial ending’ – the end of British imperial rule in India in 1947 – we can investigate issues which may prove helpful in probing the dynamics of other phases of turbulence in the structures and nature of states.
The Reverend Professor Judith Brown was born in India and educated in England. As an academic, specialising in South Asia and wider aspects of imperial history, she taught as a Fellow of Girton College, in Manchester University, and then in Oxford, as Beit Professor of Commonwealth History and Professorial Fellow of Balliol College. Most of her writing has been on modern Indian politics (with biographical studies of Gandhi and of Nehru), the South Asian diaspora, and more generally on the British empire.
The lecture will take place:
On: Wednesday 5 December
At: 6-7.15pm
In: Rupert Beckett Lecture Theatre, Michael Sadler Building
The British Academy Raleigh Lecture is given in association with the Leeds Humanities Research Institute and will be followed by a reception in the School of History. Registration is not required for the event. Attendance is free and seats will be allocated upon arrival. For further information, please contact Elaine Wilson, at the Leeds Humanities Research Institute.
Professor Brown is delivering the same lecture in London on Tuesday 27 November at the British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, at 6.00pm–7.15pm. More details can be found online.