Date: Thursday 5 October
Location: D12 Monica Partridge, University Park
Time: 2-3.30pm
As part of this event there will be refreshments provided.
Stephen Legg, Professor of Historical Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences, UoN will be joined by discussant Dr Arun Kumar, Assistant Professor in Modern British Imperial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial History, Faculty of Arts, UoN. Chaired by Dr Carole Spary, UoNARI Director and Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, UoN.
Book description
Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s–60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled the competing demands of liberal and Indian National Congress politicians, of Hindus and Muslims, and of British versus Princely India.
This book argues that the conference's three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city, and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space.
Professor Stephen Legg's biography
Prof Stephen Legg undertook undergraduate degree, ESRC-funded doctorate and Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. Since moving to Nottingham his research has been funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and an AHRC Research Grant. He has taken up visiting research fellowships at Queen Mary, London, the State University of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study at JNU, New Delhi