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Projects funded by the External Engagement Fund.
SALon - Jagjeet Lally
October 2023 - March 2024
Thanks to funding from the EE Committee and support from the IAS, UCL’s Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World has been able to continue collaborating with our colleagues at the QMUL South Asia Forum and thereby continue to act as an important hub for arts, humanities, and social science scholars of South Asia across London (SALon). We held four work-in-progress seminars where historians, anthropologists, and geographers shared their work and received feedback from our community, who range from first-year PhD students to professors. We also held four writing group sessions with roughly ten participants per session, where we sat down each time to work on a particular knotty aspect of our writing, breaking to receive encouragement and advice from one another. We hope to continue both SALon initiatives in Term 3 and in AY2024-25.
Republicanism in the Age of Imperialism (c.1838-1931) - Jon Chandler
15-16 February 2024
This was the second in a series of three workshops that bring together an international community of historians, political theorists and philosophers to examine how the concept and language of republican liberty has informed anti-colonial movements in the British Empire. The second workshop was hosted by SOAS in Bloomsbury and explored how republicanism shaped political discourse in Britain and its empire during the ‘Age of Imperialism’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with around 40 attendees. The workshop provided an opportunity for postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, independent scholars, and academics to come together to share our research and debate ideas.
Big Dig Energy – Yağmur Heffron
January 2024 - This year’s British Association of Near Eastern Archaeology (BANEA) conference, held in Glasgow in January 2024, featured a workshop dedicated to gendered practices in archaeological fieldwork in West Asia. The workshop topic directly responded to the BANEA conference theme of “equitable futures” in archaeology and heritage. Speakers took up a wide range of issues from the disproportionate impact of parenting responsibilities on women in the field; queer perspectives; invisible labour; qualitative and quantitative data for assessing challenges; unconscious biases. The workshop also offered a platform to representatives from research collectives in sister disciplines: Steppe Sisters Network for Central Asia; and South Asia: Women in the Field (SAWIF). This generated a great deal of exchange of ideas and inspiration, as well as building new connections as participants swapped stories and shared jokes. The session was very well-attended by a reasonably balanced distribution of gender, age, and academic status. It was through the EE Committee’s funds that the participation of SAWIF members could be guaranteed. The funds were also used for student and ECR participation, ensuring the event incorporated diverse voices.
Book Launch: 'The Letters of the Duchesse d’Elbeuf: Hostile Witness to the French Revolution' - Simon Macdonald
28 November 2023 - The UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and the History Department co-sponsored the book launch on 28 November for The Letters of the Duchesse d’Elbeuf: Hostile Witness to the French Revolution (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2023). The recently-discovered letters of the wealthy counter-revolutionary aristocrat, Innocente-Catherine de Rougé, dowager Duchesse d’Elbeuf (1707–94), offer a vivid and exciting new eye-witness perspective on the French Revolution and the Terror. Hostile witness to everything about the Revolution, the duchess’s letters, dating from 1788 to early 1794, to an unknown friend offer an unparalleled real-time narrative by an aristocratic woman struggling to understand radical change. Though tempted by emigration to the Low Countries, the duchess was unusual among her contemporary fellow-aristocrats in remaining in France down to her death in 1794, based in her homes in Picardy and at the heart of Paris. The letters constitute a remarkable example of female life-writing in the Age of Revolutions from a unique perspective. The volume includes a lengthy introduction and extensive scholarly apparatus. The book launch involved the book's co-editors, Colin Jones (QMUL), Simon Macdonald (UCL History) and Alex Fairfax-Chomleley (Exeter), with further contributions from Sanja Perovic (King's College London) and Catriona Seth (Oxford).
‘Narrating China and the Health Humanities’ - Vivienne Lo
10th November, 2023
Narrating China and the Health Humanities was a huge success and an event that celebrated ten years of the China Health and Humanities project, both Centre and MA programme. We had around 80 attendees who came in person, and fifty online. The Provost opened the event with a presentation on the importance of UCL’s connections with China. All-in-all the day was a great celebration and, intellectually, great testimony to the creative interdisciplinary initiatives of the last decade, with great promise for the on- going impact of our graduates.