Dr Mishka Sinha is a Research Associate at St. John’s College, Oxford, and co-director of the project on St. John’s and the Colonial Past with Professor William Whyte. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of the modern period. Her research interests focus on the history of orientalism and the transcultural history of knowledge in the context of colonialism and empire, in particular, the transfer of knowledge from Asia to Europe.

Manu Samnotra is an Associate Professor in political theory at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Worldly Shame: Ethos in Action. Worldly Shame examines shame’s worldly possibilities through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s political writings. Samnotra makes a case both for shame’s capacity to orient us towards a shared political world, and for reading Arendt as an anti-colonial thinker. Operating broadly within the frame of Comparative Political Theory, his next project brings Gandhian thought into conversation with liberal and republican conceptions of political dignity.

The modern concept of ‘dynasty’ is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty.

This talk will discuss salient features of authoritarian rule in Pakistan. First, the permanent state of emergency that shapes political life in the country fuels arbitrary and whimsical forms of governance. The perpetual violation of the constitution by the ruling classes tells us that rather than viewing the Pakistani state as theocratic, it might be better to suggest that the country's crisis results from the fact that it lacks any political theology or sacred document.

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Within British imperial thought, the transfer of sovereign power to India and subsequently other former colonies was not perceived as the final end of British imperialism, but simply its latest, evolved iteration in the form of the Commonwealth of Nations, which absorbed the sources of and arguments for British imperial power, both real and imagined, in the postwar decades. This talk explores the relationships between British imperial thought and British nationality after 1947.

‘I have some Garos as my tenants. Though otherwise very obedient and docile, they refused to tell me their dreams.’ Tarun Chandra Sinha, ‘Dreams of the Garos’

‘When you have cut down all the trees and mined all the mountains, when you have analysed all your dreams, there will be nothing left for you to break. The Earth then will be a rubbish dump, a vast trans body dismembered and devoured. The bodies of the colonists and your bodies, esteemed psychoanalysts, will be buried with the trans organs you have taken from us.’ Paul Preciado, ‘Can the Monster Speak’

Rohit De is an Associate Professor of History at Yale University and an Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. A lawyer and a historian of South Asia and the common law world, he is the author of A People’s Constitution: Law and Everyday Life in the Indian Republic (Princeton University Press, 2018). He is currently working on two book projects.

This lecture returns to themes in the history of British imperial finance via approaches from the new interdisciplinary history of capitalism. Informed by attention to historical processes of economization as well as to theorizing contemporary modes of financial profit and their social imaginaries, recent approaches have begun to examine infrastructures—legal, governmental, digital, material—of securitization and speculation, arguably the dominant mode of financial capitalism today.

The churning that was happening in Indian historiography in the 1980s-90s came from multiple directions, including a new and reinvigorated feminist historiography. The latter’s ambition was never just to draw attention to women and gender, but what this attention did to the field as a whole: raising new questions and reframing existing ones. Looking back at several decades of feminist historiographical interventions, I believe their results have been mixed. My talk will attempt to take stock of this trajectory with special attention to histories of politics and the political.