Most recent event listed first:
Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad,
1870–1950
Workshop 2: ‘Investigating Asian Bloomsbury’
Saturday 5 July 2008
St John’s College Research Centre, St Giles, Oxford
This one-day workshop was the second in a series of events hosted
by the collaborative AHRC-funded project, Making Britain: South
Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950, led by Professor
Susheila Nasta. The workshop sought to redefine Bloomsbury, central
London, as a site of cross-cultural interaction and exchange in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Locating South
Asian editors, writers, activists and soldiers at the core of London,
it explored the varied ways in which these early migrants negotiated
and reshaped this iconic space. The workshop opened with a keynote
paper by Kristin Bluemel (Monmouth University, NJ) on Mulk Raj Anand
and ‘intermodernism’. This was followed by a range of
papers on literary figures and movements, publishing ventures and
political activism, and a panel on the First World War as an ‘Indian
war’. Follow
this link for more details and to register
Conference on 'Crossculturality: English Studies and World
Literature in China', a collaborative event organised by the Ferguson
Centre for African and Asian Studies and Institute of World Literature/
Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies, Peking University.
Date: 24-25 April 2008
Venue: Peking University, Beijing, P.R. China
The emphasis of this workshop was on the academic pursuit of the
disciplines of English Studies (with an emphasis on English Literature)
and World Literature (incorporating Comparative Literature) at an
advanced level in China. For more details please email Suman Gupta
(s.gupta@open.ac.uk).
Call for papers
pdf (123 kb)
Making Britain: South
Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950
Workshop 1: ‘South Asian contact zones in the metropolis’
Date: Wednesday 23 April 2008, 9.30am to 4.30pm
Institute of Historical Research, London
This one-day workshop was the first in a series of events hosted
by the collaborative AHRC-funded project, Making Britain: South
Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950, led by Professor
Susheila Nasta. The workshop considered South Asians and their varied
interactions with the metropolis in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Keynote speakers were Antoinette Burton (Professor
of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois) who
addressed the methodology of transnationalism in relation to a migrant
doctor, and Partha Mitter (Emeritus Professor of Art History, University
of Sussex) who addressed ideas of cosmopolitanism in relation to
migrant artists.
Event
poster pdf (334 kb)
Project
poster pdf (326 kb)
Seminar by Professor Baisheng Zhao, Crossculturalism: British
Challenges and Chinese Responses
1.30 –3 pm on Tuesday 22 January 2008
Professor Zhao is Professor of Comparative and World Literature
and Director of the Institute of World Literature at Peking University,
Beijing. He was spending a month at the Open University as a Ferguson
Fellow, working with colleagues in the English Department on plans
for a conference on 'Crossculturality: English Studies and World
Literature in China', which is being organised jointly by the Ferguson
Centre and the Institute of World Literature, and will take place
in Beijing in April 2008.
Poster
pdf (100 kb)
The Nollywood Film Industry and the African Diaspora in
UK: Workshop
Date: 9-11 August 2007
Venue: Open University Camden Town
For more details please go to the project website: Nollywood
Project website
Also
Nigerian Film Event
Date: 9-11 August 2007
Venue: Nigerian High Commission, London
Nigerian film event held at the Nigerian High Commission, leading
on from our projects on the 'Nollywood Film Industry and the African
Diaspora in the UK'.
The event consisted of evening and Saturday screenings of films
and talks by influential directors Tunde Kelani, Amaka Igwe. Other
attendees included Afolbai Adesanya, MD of the Nigerian Film Corporation
and Emeka Mba GM and CEO of Nigerian Films and Videos Censors Board.
Programme
Word document (40 kb)
Commodities of Empire: International Workshop
Date: 13-14 July 2007
Venue: Open University, London Regional Centre, Camden Town
For an overview of the project, please go to the Collaborative
Projects page.
Contemporary Indian Literature in English for Indian Markets
Date: 25-27 June 2007
Venue: Open University Camden Town
For more details please contact Dr Suman Gupta (s.gupta@open.ac.uk).
For an overview of project please go to Collaborative
projects.
Programme
Word (30 kb)
Programme
Pdf (14 kb)
Seminar by Professor Khalid Bekkaoui, Refashioning National
Identity in Moroccan Fashion Photography
Wednesday, 20th June 2007 in Milton Keynes Campus
Professor Khalid Bekkaoui is Visiting Research Fellow, International
Development Centre based in the Ferguson Centre
In recent years, a number of women's magazines, both in Arabic and
French, appeared in Morocco, and quickly gained popularity among
the female youth. The most attractive section in these glossies
is fashion photographs. Fashion photography is the space of the
female body, beauty, fashion and consumption. Professor Bekkaoui's
presentation discussed this space also as a site for conflicting
cultural and ideological agendas, where ideas of gender, nationhood,
and cultural identity in postcolonial Morocco are reconstructed
and reinvented.
Poster
Word doc (80 kb)
Seminar by Professor
Khalid Bekkaoui, Picturing the Moorish Woman in Colonial Postcard
Photography
Venue: Open University Camden Town, London
Joint presentation with Gender in the Humanities Research
Group
Professor Khalid Bekkaoui is IDC Fellow based in the Ferguson Centre.
The conquest and pacification of Morocco were accompanied with
a massive production of postcards depicting aspects of native people,
customs, towns and villages, guilds, etc. These postcards were read
as authentic ethnographic documentations of indigenous life and
culture and were hugely reproduced in colonial encyclopaedias, tourist-guides,
travel narratives and geographical magazines.
Professor Bekkaoui’s paper analyzed the representation of
the mauresque (Moorish woman) in the colonial postcard photography
and discussed the extent to which representation is implicated in
discourses of racism, imperialism and pornography. It then problematized
the configuration of the mauresque by foregrounding the native gaze
and its subversion of the European photographic eye. The images
of the mauresque were discussed in comparison with those of the
North African Jewess as well as the Senegalese nude.
Poster
Word doc (80 kb)
Seminar by Professor
Tapan Basu, Religious Conversion and the Anxieties of De-Nationalisation:
The Case of Babasaheb Ambedkar
2.00 – 3 pm on Tuesday 19 June 2007
Milton Keynes Campus
Professor Tapan Basu is Ferguson Fellow employed to work on the
Centre’s Contemporary Indian Literature in English for Indian
Markets Project, more details of which can be found on the Centre’s
website (details below). Professor Basu is a Reader and teaches
in the Department of English, Hindu College, University of Delhi.
Professor Basu is a keen student of the social and political history
of modern India.
Poster
Word (207 kb)
Seminar by Professor Karega Munene, The Challenge of Promoting
Heritage Resources for Social and Economic Development in Kenya
Time: 1.30 - 2.30pm on Thursday 24 May 2007
Venue: GC004, Geoffrey Crowther Building, Milton Keynes Campus
Professor Karega Munene is a Ferguson Fellow involved in the Centre's
collaborative project on Kenya, Museums and counter-museums in the
postcolony. He is also an Associate Professor of History at the
United States International University (USIU) in Nairobi, and an
archaeologist and anthropologist.
Poster
pdf (18 kb)
Commodities of Empire seminar
Date: 16 May 2007
Venue: Open University, London Regional Centre, Camden Town
This initial workshop was for project members only and focused on
the ethics of collaboration as well as on the project's research
framework over the year. Please see the Commodities
of Empire website for more details.
Daniel Defoe and White Slavery in North Africa - talk by
Bob Owens
Date: 12.00 Sunday 20 May 2007
Venue: The British Museum, London
The hero of Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe spends two years
as a slave in Morocco. This talk explored the history of white slavery
in North African, and its significance for Defoe and his contemporaries.
British
Museum Website
Flyer
Pdf (240 kb)
Paper at Conference at National Maritime Museum: Exploring
and Being Explored: Africa in the Nineteenth Century, Friday 30
March–Saturday 31 March 2007
On Sat 31 March
Dr Lotte Hughes gave a paper at the Bodies panel:
'Beautiful beasts' and 'brave warriors': the longevity of a
Maasai stereotype
Website: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conWebDoc.21309
Joint Seminar Series with Institute of English:
Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar Series: Postcolonial/Jewish
Histories and Literatures
Spring 2007
Designed to explore links between Postcolonial and Jewish histories/literatures,
the seminars focused primarily on South Asia. The series was organised
by Dr Susheila Nasta (Open University) in partnership with Professor
Bryan Cheyette (University of Reading ) and will lead, in 2008,
to a collaborative symposium on this subject and to a special issue
of the journal Wasafiri.
Contemporary Indian Literature in English for Indian Markets
Date: 8-10 March 2007
Venue: Delhi
For more details please contact Dr Suman Gupta (s.gupta@open.ac.uk).
For an overview of project please go to Collaborative
projects.
Programme
Word (9 kb)
Pictures
from the event
Seminar: New Voices in African Writing
Wednesday 28 February 2007, 5.30pm
Venue: The October Gallery, Bloomsbury
Brian Chikwava and Parselelo Kantai
read from their work, and discussed the role of young African writers
in times of social and political transition.
Discussant: Dr Stephanie Jones, University
of Southampton
Chair: Dr Lotte Hughes, The Ferguson Centre, The
Open University
Brian Chikwava, from Zimbabwe, won the Caine Prize for African
Writing 2004, while Kenyan Parselelo Kantai was runner-up the same
year. Brian, also a musician, is the author of Seventh Street
Alchemy (2003), and is currently working on a novel and collection
of short stories. Parselelo, also an investigative journalist and
former editor of the East African environmental magazine, Ecoforum,
is the author of Comrade Lemma and the Black Jerusalem Boys
Band (2004). Part of the new generation of writers emerging
from East Africa, he is involved with the Kenyan literary magazine
Kwani?. He is currently working on a novel set in 1970s
Nairobi during the Kenyatta years, and a work of investigative non-fiction.
Poster
Word (207 kb)
Poster
pdf (20 kb)
Workshop on Religion and Spirituality in the Constitution
of Public and Private Lives
Date: 29-31 January 2007
Venue: Pietermaritzburg, South Africa
This workshop is being organised by the University of KwaZulu Natal
in collaboration with The Ferguson Centre in Pietermaritzburg. For
details please contact Suman Gupta (s.gupta@open.ac.uk).
Programme
Word (33 kb)
Programme
Pdf (16 kb)
Archiving the Contraband Modern in the Fes Medina, Morocco
Date: 10-11 January 2007
Venue: University of Fes, Morocco
For an overview of project please go to Collaborative
projects.
A lecture by Professor G K Das, Emeritus Professor, Delhi
University and former Vice Chancellor, Uktal University, India
“Beyond empire and nation: A Plea for a Commonwealth English”
Date: Tuesday 21 November 2006
Over the past 150 years, ever since the first three Universities
of India were
founded with the study of English as a key 'help language' intended
to facilitate the development of India's many regional languages,
the English language has been the centre of continued debate. Its
great advantages have been stressed time and again by eminent nationalists
from Nehru to Nirad C Chaudhuri., whose "reputation as an English
conversationalist got abroad" early in his school days. Likewise,
there has been firm and wide-spread opposition to it, also from
eminent nationalists like Gandhi. “To give millions a knowledge
of English," wrote Gandhi, "is to enslave them".
Speaking about children's education in the HInd Swaraj he
remarks: "It has always been my conviction that Indian parents
who train their children to think and talk in English from their
infancy betray their children and their country.'' Gandhi outlined
something like a blueprint for the introduction of what later on
came as the "three-language formula" vigorously advocated
and pursued in our national educational system.
Nearly one hundred years have passed since Gandhi wrote the 'Hind
Swaraj' with the
avowed purpose of building a truly independent India. At end
of the book he declared:
"My conscience prompts me to declare that my life henceforth
is dedicated to the attainment of that Swaraj."
What is the position of English language to-day, in independent
India? The situation remains and is likely to remain ambiguous in
the foreseeable future. English is by and large better taught to-day
than before, when Englishmen, Scotts and Irishmen and women taught
English in Indian schools and colleges. Indians to-day are in leadership
positions in the areas of World literature, philosophy, social and
material sciences,
which has been possible through communication chiefly in the English
language.
At the same time, the growing emphasis on English in globalizing
India, causes much damage to the development of the many rich regional
languages. Some of those
are facing the threat of extinction in a process of what one may
call ‘cultural Darwinism,' contrary to the cherished goal
of the prime initial advocates of English as a means of enrichment
of the country's indigenous multi-lingual heritage.
Can one think in terms of a "Commonwealth of English"
form which to draw resources to mutual advantage through a voluntary
and committed pursuit of the world language in vital link to one's
own native language and culture?
Professor Das is Emeritus Professor, Delhi University, and
former Vice Chancellor, Utkal University, India.
Poster
Pdf (22 kb)
Research day: How does research
on Africa fit into the culture of universities and visions for the
humanities?
Date: Thursday 05 October 2006
CMR15 Milton Keynes Campus
Our keynote speaker was Professor Daniel Herwitz,
the Director of the Institute for Humanities at the University of
Michigan. His most recent book, Race and Reconciliation (Minnesota
Press, 2003), is about the South African transition.
Professor Herwitz’s lecture was followed by short presentations
from a panel of respondents and an open discussion.
Poster
(204 kb)
Lecture by Professor Taieb Belgahzi:
The Modernity/Coloniality Research Project and the New Global Arrangements
Date: Thursday 21 September 2006, Milton Keynes Campus
Professor Belghazi explored the relevance of work
done on modernity/coloniality to research done elsewhere and its
pertinence in coming to terms with the new global arrangements.
The lecture was followed by comments from a panel of respondents
and an open discussion.
Professor Belghazi is Professeur de l'enseignement supérieur,
Department of English, Faculty of Letters, University Mohamed V,
Rabat, Morocco. He is a member of the UNESCO International Panel
on Literacy and a member of the Rabat Culture and Development Research
Unit. His current research is on issues of memory and cosmopolitanism,
social movements, globalization and cultural development.
Poster
( 206 kb)
Fes Medina Project: Workshop
02-04 September 2006
The Open University Camden Town
This workshop marked the end of the second phase of the Fes Medina
pilot project organised jointly by The Ferguson Centre for African
and Asian Studies at The Open University and the University of Fes,
Dhar Mehraz.
The project seeks to explore the interface between the impact of
a global flow of goods through the holy space of the Medina in Fes
and various strategies of the politics of location waged by its
inhabitants. What we focus on especially in this project is the
significance of the ever-proliferating and increasingly powerful
articulation of this interface via contraband exchanges - both material
and conceptual.
Phase two of the project consisted of collection and collation
of data from the field by five groups of students each of which
were chosen to research the circulation of a particular commodity
in the Medina. Their findings were presented at the workshop and
taken up for further discussion. The workshop discussed the epistemological
value of the project as well as the directions such research might
take in the future.
Please see the attached poster for the full programme.
Poster
Word (210 kb)
Poster
pdf (20 kb)
Book Launch: Moving the Maasai A Colonial Misadventure.
Date: 02 March 2006
Dr Lotte Hughes launched her book Moving the Maasai A Colonial
Misadventure, at St Anthony's College, Oxford. For more details
please see the attached.
Flyer
(PDF file 189 kb)
OU Staff only:
"Postcolonial spaces: politics, representation, hybridity"
Date: Wednesday 16 November 2005
Geography Seminar Series joint seminar with The Ferguson Centre.
Info:
Poster Word file (85 kb)
Globalization, Identity
Politics, and Social Conflict (GIPSC) workshop - Tehran
Globalization and Religion: Identity and Power
Date: 17-18 November 2005
This workshop was organised in collaboration with the GIPSC Project
and held in collaboration with the Centre for Globalization Studies,
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Iran. For more
information and details of the call for proposals, please follow
the link below to the GIPSC Website
Info:
Website: GIPSC
website, please go to "Workshops", "Tehran"
"Self and Subject:
African and Asian Perspectives"
Date: 20 - 23 September 2005
An international conference organised by The Ferguson Centre for
African and Asian Studies.
There are few areas of research that have attracted so much interest
in the arts and humanities as the constitution and representation
of the self, whether as a unit of literary and philosophical reflection,
or as embodied entity or as product and producer of cultural life.
Yet with the increasing movement of people, goods and ideas within
and beyond national boundaries, it is not only the identity and
status of the individual subject that has been called into question
but also many of the assumptions and methodologies that once characterised
different disciplinary approaches to the self.
This conference invited a double questioning of the subject. It
sought to foreground recent innovative reflections on the status
of the individual subject through a questioning of different disciplinary
approaches. It asked how the recognition that individual lives are
formed in increasingly complex “multi-cultural” and
“trans-national” contexts demands new methodologies
for re-thinking the subject within and across disciplinary boundaries.
There were papers from literary theorists, historians, anthropologists,
philosophers, art historians and other specialists of Africa and
Asia who have an interest in such domains as life histories, post-colonial
literature, autobiography, visual representation, material culture,
aesthetics, the media, ethnicity, ethnography, migration and diaspora
studies, and the politics of identity.
Info:
Programme
Word file (456 kb)
Programme
PDF file (99 kb)
Abstracts
Word file (504 kb)
Abstracts
PDF file (290 kb)
Globalization,
Identity Politics, and Social Conflict (GIPSC) workshop -
Beijing:
Perceptions/Constructions of the West from 'Outside' in Contemporary
Cultural Texts and Discourses
Date: 20-22 August 2005
This workshop was held in collaboration with the Centre for
Cross-Cultural Studies and the Institute for World Literature of
Peking University, Beijing, P.R. China. For more information please
follow the link below to the GIPSC Website
Website: GIPSC
website, go to "Workshops", "Beijing".
Globalization, Identity Politics, and Social
Conflict (GIPSC) workshop - Plovdiv:
Clash of Civilizations?: Migration, Modern Nationalism
and Nostalgia for Homeland in the Age of Globalization.
Date: 5-7 April 2005
This workshop was organised by GIPSC and held in collaboration with
the Faculty of Philology, Paisiy Hilendarski University of Plovdiv,
Bulgaria. For more information please go to the GIPSC
website, "Workshops", "Plovdiv".
Open
Door Seminar series "Violences remembered" 2004-05
Colonial and postcolonial conflicts in the twentieth
century
Location: British Empire & Commonwealth Museum,
Clock Tower Yard,
Temple Meads, Bristol, BS1 6QH
Some aspects of the global history of the last century:
Urban violence. Conflicts in the Third World. The break up of countries.
The suspension of democracy. Terror. Oil…
How are all these events linked together? And are
they at all connected to the British Empire? The second of our seminar
series Entitled Colonialism and Violence, sought to engage with
these questions. The programme included talks by renowned imperial
historian, Terence Ranger, on urban Rhodesia in the twentieth century;
Peter Carey on Indonesian intervention in East Timor; Joya Chatterji
on Bengal during India’s Partition; Valerie Johnson on the
Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Iran and more…
All seminars were held at the British Empire &
Commonwealth Museum and were jointly organised by the Ferguson Centre
for African and Asian Studies at the Open University and the Museum.
Programme - Colonial
and postcolonial conflicts in the twentieth century
May 25:
The Colonial past in contemporary Algeria.
Martin Evans, Portsmouth University
May 11:
Constructions of French decolonisation, 1944-54.
Martin Thomas, Exeter
April 27:
Colonial violences: The French Army and torture during the
Algerian War.
Raphaelle Branche, Institute of Political Studies, Paris
April 13:
Knowledge and Power in the Rubber industries of Malaya, Ceylon,
and Singapore in the early 20th century.
Emma Reisz, Jesus College, University of Oxford
February 23:
Civil unrest in a Colony at war. The Gold Coast in World
War I.
Elizabeth Wrangham, Surrey Roehampton
February 9:
French and British colonial administrations: comparisons
revisited.
Veronique Dimier, Universite Libre de Bruxelles
January 26:
Imperial ‘transfer’: the case of the Anglo-Persian
Oil Company in Iran during the first half of the 20th century.
Valerie Johnson, Cambridge
January 12:
Conflicting Institutions: The Sugarcane Industry and Rice Improvement
in Colonial Indonesia, ca. 1920s
Harro Maat
December 15:
The Emergency Remembered: Tales of sterilisation, displacement and
betrayal from India's urban poor.
Dr Emma Tarlo, The Open University
November 17:
Terror and/of Empire: the colonial experience in the 20th
century.
Dibyesh Anand, Bath
November 3:
Third World Colonialism? Indonesian intervention in East
Timor.
Peter Carey, Trinity, Oxford
October 20:
Urban violence and colonial experience: Bulawayo, Rhodesia
in the twentieth century.
Terence Ranger, St-Antony’s, Oxford
South Asia Research
Day
Date: 17 February 2005
Location: CMR15, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes.
The idea of this workshop was to bring together researchers dispersed
through different departments of the OU who have an interest in
South Asia and related diaspora communities.
The aims of the day were:
- to raise the profile of research on South Asia within the OU
- to discover potential research links and areas of common interest
amongst OU researchers from different disciplines with a view to
exploring the potential for collaborative research initiatives in
the future
- to communicate the research work of The Ferguson Centre
- to consider the benefits of opening up Arts courses in the OU
to extra-European perspectives.
The day was informal, with each participant giving
a brief resume of their work to date and a short presentation of
their current and future research interests. The aim was to leave
plenty of time for discussion.
"Urban
generations: Post-colonial cities"
Date: 1-3 October 2004
Location: Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco
This international conference, which explored the
concept of the Post-colonial city, was jointly organised by The
Ferguson Centre, OU, GIPSC Project, OU, Faculte des Lettres et des
Sciences Humaines, Mohammed V University Rabat and the British Council
in Morocco.
Conference abstracts
Weblink
Photo's from conference
Weblink
Collaborators' website:
Mohammed
V University and GIPSC
Project
"Imperial
globalisation? Trade, technologies, and transnationalities within
the British Empire from the 18th to the 20th century"
Date: Friday 10 - Saturday 11th September 2004
Location: British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol
This interdisciplinary conference, which explored
for the first time the concept of globalisation in a historical
context, was organised by The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian
Studies at The Open University and the British Empire & Commonwealth
Museum.
Conference Abstracts Weblink
"The new orders
of difference: The Cultural Discourses & Texts of Economic Migration"
Date: 14-16 July 2004
Location: Roehampton University of Surrey, Froebel College
This International Conference was organised by the
Globalization, Identity Politics and Social Conflict (GIPSC) Project
in collaboration with The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian
Studies. Contributions to this workshop approached the theme of
economic migration with a particular focus on cultural texts and
discourses focusing on specific migrant groups in specific contexts
or on particular aspects of the migration process in specific contexts.
Sound bites and a summary of the conference will
be available here soon.
Conference Abstracts Weblink
"About the Ferguson
Centre" A presentation by the Director
Date: 15 June 2004, 2.30pm CMR15
This event was for OU staff only
The Ferguson Centre's Director, Dr David Richards,
did a presentation to OU staff on The Ferguson Centre. He spoke
on The Ferguson Centre's mission, ethos and goals.
If you would like to meet with the Director to discuss
Collaboration, please contact Heather Scott .
Powerpoint
Presentation Image file PDF (3,262 kb)
Text
only file PDF (63 kb)
"Classics
in Post-Colonial Worlds - an international, interdisciplinary conference"
Date: 19-20 May 2004
Location: The Open University, Harborne, Birmingham
This interdisciplinary conference was organised by
the Department of Classical Studies and The Ferguson Centre for
African and Asian Studies to mark the increasing importance of research
on the reception of classical texts and images in the varied histories
of colonial and post-colonial societies. The conference, through
its plenary and work-in-progress sessions, promoted debate on current
work and sought to advance further cross-disciplinary contacts and
collaborations in the study of relevant aspects of material or literary
culture: literary and theatre studies, art history, translation
studies, architectural history, cultural studies, and the history
of education.
Sound bites and a summary of the conference will be
available here soon.
Abstracts
Launch
of The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies
Date: 30 April 2004
The October Gallery, Bloomsbury, London
The Ferguson Centre was officially launched at a reception
held amidst the Victorian splendours of the October Gallery in Bloomsbury
on Friday 30th April. The gallery was a particularly apt location
for the Centre’s launch as it has been actively engaged in
the promotion and dissemination of African and Asian artworks in
the UK for over twenty-five years. The launch was attended by approximately
100 guests who were addressed by Mrs Elnora Ferguson, Dr Richard
Allen (Dean of Arts), and Dr David Richards (Director of the Ferguson
Centre), who offered three perspectives on the role of African and
Asian cultural studies in The Open University's history. The guest
list included writers, critics, academics from numerous universities,
and the Open University’s Pro-Vice Chancellors, Prof David
Vincent and Prof Linda Jones, and Professor Ian Steadman, Director
of Development Office. The launch was a resounding success and the
Centre hopes to maintain contact with all who attended and expressed
their good wishes for the Centre’s future development.
For photo's from the launch please go to our Online
Gallery
Article
on the Launch
Open Door Seminar series "Conquests,
commodities, and cultures" 2003/4
Date: October 2003 to June 2004
Location: British Empire & Commonwealth Museum, Clock Tower
Yard,
Temple Meads, Bristol, BS1 6QH
This seminar series was jointly organised by The Ferguson
Centre for African and Asian Studies and the British Empire and
Commonwealth Museum, Bristol. The theme for the first series was
'Conquests, Commodities, and Cultures' and the seminars were hosted
by the Museum from October 2003 to June 2004.
June 2, 2004:
"Colonial and Postcolonial Wales."
Dr Kirsti Bohata, University of Swansea.
May 19, 2004:
"Post-imperial legacies."
Dr Andrew Thompson, University of Leeds
May 5, 2004:
"Conquering health challenges: The Government of India,
International Health Organisations, and smallpox eradication in
India."
Dr Sanjoy Bhattacharya, University College London.
April 21, 2004:
"An Orchestra for China? Imperialism and Music in Shanghai's
International Settlement, 1879-1949."
Dr Robert Bickers, University of Bristol.
March 24, 2004:
"Humanitarians and Colonial Settlers: Contests and
Identities in New South Wales, New Zealand and the Cape Colony,
1830-1860."
Dr Alan Lester, University of Sussex.
March 10, 2004:
"Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian women and the
spatial politics of home."
Dr Alison Blunt, Queen Mary College, University of London.
February 25, 2004:
"A unitary field of knowledge: the construction of
London and India for the British reading public."
Dr John Marriott, Raphael Samuel History Centre, University of East
London.
February 11, 2004:
"From Glasgow to Bombay. Cotton, steamships, and the
identification of a new trade route."
Dr Sandip Hazareesingh, The Ferguson Research Centre, the Open University.
January 28, 2004:
"How imperialist were the British? Advertising and
popular culture in the era of empire."
Professor John MacKenzie, University of Lancaster.
January 14, 2004:
"The British Empire Museum as a centre for historical
research."
Dr Gareth Griffiths, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum.
December 10, 2003:
"Global commodity chains and economic development"
Professor William Gervase Clarence-Smith, School of Oriental and
African Studies
November 26, 2003:
"The cusp between conquest and culture: Southern Rhodesia
1890-1930"
Dr Diana Jeater, University of the West of England
November 12, 2003:
"Distance and Disturbance: Travel, Exploration, and
Knowledge in the 19th Century"
Professor Felix Driver, Royal Holloway College, University of London
October 27, 2003:
"Writing travels: Power, Knowledge, and Ritual on the
East India Company's early voyages"
Dr Miles Ogborn, Queen Mary College, University of London
October 15, 2003:
"New directions in research on Bristol and the slave
trade"
Dr Madge Dresser, University of the West of England.
Workshop: Globalisation, Identity Politics and Social Conflict:
Ethnic, Literary and Sociolinguistic Perspectives
GIPSC Workshop: Nigeria 14-16 April 2003
A GIPSC organised workshop, which took place in collaboration
with the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation, Lagos;
Director: Dr. Duro Oni. For more information please go to the GIPSC
website, "Workshops", "Lagos".
Workshop: Social Discourses and Cultural Texts (Identity
Politics, Globalisation, and Social Conflict: Social Discourses
and Cultural Texts
GIPSC Workshop: Delhi March 26-28, 2002
A GISPC organised workshop, held in collaboration with the
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; Director: Dr. O.P.Kejariwal.
For more information please go to the GIPSC
website, "Workshops", "Delhi".
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