Biographies Rehana Ahmed Meena Alexander Humayun Ansari Mithu Banerji

Transcription

1 Biographies Rehana Ahmed is currently a postdoctoral research associate on the Making Britain project and based in the English Department at the Open University. Her research interests are in contemporary and 20th-century British Asian and South Asian writing, with a particular focus on class and Muslim cultures and identities. She has published articles on writers Monica Ali, Moniza Alvi, Hanif Kureishi and Kamila Shamsie and on the film Yasmin, and is the editor of Walking a Tightrope: New Writing from Asian Britain (Macmillan 2004) and co-editor (with Sumita Mukherjee) of South Asians in Britain, : Interactions and Modes of Resistance (Continuum, forthcoming 2011). Meena Alexander has published six volumes of poetry including Illiterate Heart, which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk and Quickly Changing River. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems and author of the volume of poems and short prose pieces The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. Her memoir Fault Lines was picked as one of Publishers Weekly s Best Books. Poetics of Dislocation appeared in 2009 in the Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press. Her prose includes two novels and two academic studies on early English Romanticism. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Fulbright and Rockefeller foundations as well as the Arts Council of England. She received the 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award in Literature from the South Asian Literary Association (an organisation allied to the MLA) for contributions to American literature. She is University Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York, teaching at Hunter College and the Graduate Center. A book of essays Passage to Manhattan: Essays on Meena Alexander (eds Lopamudra Basu and Cynthia Leenerts) has appeared from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK. Humayun Ansari is Professor of Islam and Cultural Diversity and Director of the Centre for Minority Studies, Department of History, at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests include radical Islamic thought, ethnicity, identity, migration and multiculturalism. He has advised and addressed a wide spectrum of organisations, and provided consultancy and training in the field of ethnicity and equal opportunities for organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors, including government departments and agencies, further and higher education, and within industry and commerce. Professor Ansari has provided briefings to senior policy-makers and contributed extensively to local, national and international print and broadcast media. He has written extensively on the subject of Muslims in western society, South Asia, ethnic diversity and cross-cultural issues. He is author of The Emergence of Socialist Thought Among North Indian Muslims, , Pan Islam and the Making of Early Muslim Socialists, Islam in the West: 1800 to the Present, Attitudes to Jihad, Martyrdom and Terrorism among British Muslims, The Infidel Within, Muslims in Britain Since 1800 and Managing Cultural Diversity at Work. At present he is preparing a scholarly edition of the Minutes of the London Mosque Fund and the East London Mosque Trust: Professor Ansari was awarded an OBE in 2002 for his services to higher education and race relations in the community. Mithu Banerji is a writer and researcher. Her specific field of interest is 19th-century Indian women writers. She has written and reviewed for well-known international

2 newspapers and journals. As well as working on a novel, she is putting together her first collection of stories. She lives in London. Elleke Boehmer is the Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of the world best-seller Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005), the monographs Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, (2002) and Stories of Women (2005), and the creative biography Nelson Mandela (2008). She has also produced the acclaimed edition of Robert Baden-Powell s Scouting for Boys (2004), and the Oxford University Press collection Empire Writing (1998). Her co-edited J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory and Terror and the Postcolonial both appeared in She has published four novels, Screens against the Sky (short-listed for the David Higham Prize, 1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines (short-listed for the Sanlam Prize, 2000), and Nile Baby (2008), and a collection of short stories, Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010). The Indian Postcolonial: A Critical Reader, co-edited with Rosinka Chaudhuri, is forthcoming in Alex Bubb read English at Christ Church, Oxford, before taking a Masters course in South Asian History. He researched the stereotypical representation of Irish soldiers in India and its ideological underpinnings, and analysed how Irishmen negotiated their identity within colonial regimental culture. His dissertation is awaiting publication in Modern Asian Studies. He has now returned to the English Faculty to pursue the DPhil and is at Exeter College, Oxford. His doctoral project is a comparative study of Rudyard Kipling and W. B. Yeats as parallel literary lives. The research is being supervised by Prof. Elleke Boehmer and the working title is The Last Romantics. His real ambition, however, is to speak Hindi well enough to drive a Bombay taxi. Antoinette Burton is Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches empire and world histories. Trained as a Victorianist, she has written on feminism, politics, and empire; Indians in 19th-century Britain; 20th-century Indian women writers; archives and fiction; bodies in world history; postcolonial questions; and gender, sexuality, and colonial modernities. She has a developing interest in postwar/cold War Afro-Asian histories as well. In she is a John Simon Guggenheim fellow. Her current project, Empire from Below: Resistance to British Imperialism from the Opium Wars to Mau Mau, aims to reorient the rise-and-fall narrative of British imperial power toward the quotidian failures of hegemony on the ground. Mukti Jain Campion is founder of the independent production company Culture Wise. She trained as a filmmaker at the BBC and has been making television and radio documentaries for nearly 30 years. Mukti has made many documentaries about the diverse history of Britain. These include a ten-part oral history series Chinese in Britain and many other acclaimed Radio 4 documentaries about the contribution of Asians to British history, e.g., Like Another Mahabharata Indian Soldiers in the Great War, An Indian in Bloomsbury (about novelist Mulk Raj Anand) and Crossing the Black Waters (about the English East India Company). Earlier this year she produced and presented the Radio 4 series The New Global Indians about the new professional middle-class Indians that are coming and making their mark on British economic and cultural life. For more programme information visit the website

3 Michael Collins is Lecturer in Twentieth Century British History at University College London. His current research and teaching focus on historical and theoretical problems relating to the British experience of empire. The points at which the history of empire intersect with domestic politics, culture, social history and intellectual history generate the underlying themes. He is the author of Empire, Nationalism and Inter-Cultural Dialogue: Rabindranath Tagore s Writings on History, Politics and Society (London: Routledge, forthcoming). Santanu Das is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London, and has held research fellowships at St John s College, Cambridge, and at the British Academy, London. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2006; pbk 2008) and the editor of Race, Empire and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). He is currently working towards a monograph on India, empire and First World War writing. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2009, and he will give the British Academy Chatterton lecture on poetry in Ann R. David is Principal Lecturer in Dance Studies at Roehampton University where she is Convener of the BA Dance Studies Programme. She is currently completing work as a Research Fellow on a major international project examining the religious lives of immigrant groups in London, funded by the Ford Foundation, USA. Her own research work focuses on dance practices and ritual worship amongst British Hindu communities, examining issues of diasporic disjuncture and cultural and religious identities. She has given papers at many international conferences in India, Malaysia, North America and Europe, and she has published widely in cross-disciplinary and dance journals. Ann has trained in the Indian classical styles of Bharatanatyam and Kathak as well as in ballet, folk and contemporary dance styles. She has published for many years in the South Asian dance journal, Pulse, and was commissioned to write the Arts Council report on Akademi s 2007 Bharatanatyam Conference, Negotiating Natyam, and their 2009 conference on Bollywood dance, Frame by Frame. She has also appeared on several BBC radio programmes discussing Indian dance, and has given public lectures at the National Portrait Gallery on the work of Indian dancer Ram Gopal. Dominiek Dendooven was born in Bruges, Belgium, in 1971, and lives with his wife and four children in Ieper (Ypres). He completed an MA in History (1994) and a Master-after- Master in Archival Science (1995) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Brussels Free University). Having worked as a journalist ( ) and for a press agency ( ) in Brussels, Dominiek Dendooven joined the staff of In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres at the end of Currently he holds the post of researcher/ assistant curator, and as such he has worked on the exhibitions Strangers in a Strange Land. Belgian Refugees in World War 1 (2004) and The Last Witness. The Landscape of the Ypres Salient (2006), and coordinated the exhibitions Man-Culture-War. Multicultural Aspects of World War 1 (2008) and Toiling for War. Chinese Labourers in World War 1 (2010). Apart from numerous publications in Dutch, his publications in English are (with Jan Dewilde) The Reconstruction of Ieper (2000), Menin Gate & Last Post. Ypres as Holy Ground (2001), and (with Piet Chielens) World War 1. Five Continents in Flanders (2008). Ceri-Anne Fidler is currently finishing her PhD entitled Lascars, c : The Lives and Identities of Indian Seafarers in Imperial Britain at the School of History and Archaeology at Cardiff University under the supervision of Dr Padma Anagol. Her thesis explores the lives of Indian seafarers on shipboard and ashore. Their working and living

4 conditions are explored as well as their lives and identities in Britain and family lives in India and Britain. She plans to build upon these topics in her postdoctoral research through comparing Indian seafarers lives on shipboard and in Britain with those of other non-european seafarers. Bashabi Fraser is a poet, editor, children s writer and translator. She received the AIO (Scotland) Prize for Literary Services in Bashabi has been published widely in journals, anthologies, magazines and newspapers. Her publications include From the Ganga to the Tay (epic poem, 2009), Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter (2006, 2008), A Meting of Two Minds: The Geddes-Tagore Letters (2005), and Tartan & Turban (poetry collection, 2004). Bashabi is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. Ron Geaves holds a Chair in the Comparative Study of Religion at Liverpool Hope University. His research interests are the study of South Asians in Britain with a particular focus on religion and migration. He has written monographs and articles on Sikh and Hindu diasporas but is much more well known for his work on Muslims in Britain. He is currently Chair of the Muslims in Research Network and Director of the Centre of Transcultural Studies and Global Cultures. He is the author of Sectarian Influences in British Islam (1996), Sufis of Britain (2000), Islam and the West post 9/11 (2004), Sufis in Western Society (2009), and most recently Islam in Victorian Britain: The Life and Times of Abdullah Quilliam (2010). Jackie Gold is a PhD candidate in Modern European History at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her dissertation, Moving Images: India on British Screens, , reexamines Britain s attitudes towards its most important colony through its most popular cultural medium. As national film industries began to market films to international audiences in the interwar period, Americans, continental Europeans, British expatriates, and Indians were instrumental in creating images of empire over which the British had little control. Her dissertation argues that by 1947 these competing visions had created an environment in which Britons already conceived of India beyond the binary division of coloniser and colonised. Her paper, Civilising Sabu of India?: Redefining the White Man s Burden in Interwar Britain, explores contemporary biographies of Sabu, the first Indian film star in British and Hollywood film industries, arguing that his star text suggests a shift away from the civilising mission as something directed at inhabitants of the empire to a process that promised to create new Britons capable of contributing to Britain itself. Vivian Ibrahim is a researcher examining European-Muslim identities at University College Cork, Ireland. She holds a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where she taught Middle Eastern History. She has published in The Arab Reform Bulletin (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) and is an Executive Board member of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism and a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal for Arab Studies. Vivian Ibrahim is the author of The Copts of Egypt: Challenges of Modernisation and Identity (I.B. Tauris, 2010). Jamil Iqbal studied for an MBA at Dhaka University and then an MSc in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. His professional career includes working as consultant for World Bank projects and NGOs in Bangladesh. He worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester and as a researcher at the University of

5 Liverpool. Jamil collaborated with the Swadhinata Trust, a British Bangladeshi heritage group, on an oral history project, Tales of Three Generations of Bengalis in Britain (2006), of which he is co-author. This work was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Jamil s research interests include the sociology of ethnicities, transnational communities, nationalisms, globalisation and social exclusion. He is a prolific writer on global and social issues and regularly writes for the website Sonal Khullar is Assistant Professor of South Asian art at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her PhD in the History of Art with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley, in Her research interests include the art of India (with a focus on the period from the 18th century until the present), transnational histories of modern and contemporary art, the anthropology of art, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies. Her current book project Worldly Affiliations traces a distinct trajectory of modernism in the visual arts in 20th century India. Analysing continuities and change in artistic production from the late colonial to the postcolonial period, it shows how artists in India conceived their modernism in relation to practices in Euro-American centers and to the visual traditions of the subcontinent. Other ongoing projects examine the institutionalisation of the postcolonial woman artist in museum exhibitions; globalisation and contemporary art in South Asia; and the critical historiography of Indian miniature painting in the West. Madhumita Lahiri is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her fields of interest include postcolonial theory, multilingual modernisms, and 20th-century South Asia. She received her PhD from Duke University in 2010, and her dissertation examined the politics of literary internationalism as they manifest in and around late colonial India. She is currently working on Gandhi s career in South Africa and the engagement of his political philosophy with questions of multilingualism, translation and race. Her scholarship has appeared in the journal Callaloo. Shompa Lahiri is Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London. She has published widely on the history of the colonial Indian presence in Britain and is author of Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, (London: Frank Cass, 2000), and co-author, with M. Fisher and S. Thandi, of A South Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of People from the Indian Sub-Continent (London: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007). Her latest research monograph Indian Mobilities in the West, : Gender, Performance, Embodiment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) articulates new perspectives on transnational geographies of mobility, gender, performance and embodiment through a study of diverse Indian mobilities in the West. The study shows how and why Indian, and not just European, identities were permeable and unstable in a variety of locations in the West, and how transcontinental Indian travellers and migrants negotiated these permeabilities in different contexts in the first half of the 20th century. Siobhan Lambert-Hurley is Lecturer in Modern History at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on women, gender and Islam in South Asia with a particular emphasis on education, social and political organisation, the culture of travel, missionaries, and autobiographical writing. Currently, she is leading an AHRC research network on Women s Autobiography in Islamic Societies. Her publications include Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal (2007), A Princess s Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begum s A Pilgrimage to Mecca

6 (2007) and Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia (coedited with Avril A. Powell) (2006). Her paper for this conference relates to a book project with Sunil Sharma due out this autumn: Atiya s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (2010). Chandani Lokugé is the author or editor of nine books. Her book publications as Editor of the scholarly Oxford Classics Reissues series of pioneering Indian women s writing in English include The Collected Prose and Poetry of Toru Dutt, India Calling: The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji, India s First Woman Barrister and Saguna: The First Autobiographical Novel Written in English by an Indian Woman. Her new research project is on the aesthetics of South Asian diasporic literature and she is currently coediting a special issue of Moving Worlds dedicated to Michael Ondaatje s writing. She has also published the novels If the moon smiled and Turtle Nest, and Moth and Other Stories. She is the Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Writing and Head of the Creative Writing programme at Monash University, Australia. Ruksana Majid is a PhD candidate in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield. Her doctoral thesis is a study of the life and works of South Asian author G. V. Desani ( ). Shane Malhotra is a PhD student with the Open University. Her thesis, Reading between the Lines, : Popular Narratives of the Afghan Frontier, examines British literary responses to the conflicts on India s North West Frontier through the writings of Florentia Sale, Kaye, Kipling, Henty, Ganpat and Alice Sorabji Pennell. Relishing archival research, she has contributed to both the Making Britain and the Reading Experience Databases. Avanthi Meduri is a Reader in the Department of Dance and Overall Convener of the Cluster MAs at Roehampton University, London. She obtained her PhD from the Tisch School of Arts, New York University, and has taught in the Department of Performance Studies, Evanston Chicago and at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has carried out archival and ethnographic fieldwork in India, the US and the UK, examining South Asian dance theatre and cultural production from a postcolonial, multicultural, globalization, and diaspora perspective. Recipient of several national and international research and performance awards, she has published in many academic journals and regularly contributes to international conferences. In 2004, Meduri curated Rukmini Devi Arundale s photo archive and presented it in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Japan and the UK as part of her Ford Foundation postdoctoral research. In 2005, Meduri joined Roehampton University and helped create a global arts pedagogy for South Asian dance/theatre and popular forms including Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Bollywood and Bangra. Trained in Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi, two classical forms of India, Meduri s creative work explores the intersections between academic theory and practice and what is known as 'practice as research' in higher education. Savithri Preetha Nair received her doctorate in 2003 from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, for her dissertation on the museum and the shaping of the sciences in colonial India. As a historian of science, Nair s research interests include science, modernity and enlightenment at the turn of the 19th century, the public museum, the history and politics of collecting for science, sociology of knowledge, history of natural history, environmental history and women and science in colonial and postcolonial India. Amongst her most recent publications is the co-authored

7 Science and the Changing Environment in India: A Guide to Sources in the India Office Records, (British Library, 2010), the outcome of a three year postdoctoral project. She is at present a New India Foundation Fellow, engaged in writing a history of plant genetics in India, with specific reference to the life and science of Indian woman cytobotanist E. K. Janaki Ammal, Susheila Nasta is Professor of Modern Literature at the Open University and Editor of Wasafiri, the internationally renowned magazine of contemporary writing, which she founded in Well known as a literary activist, she has also published several books on Sam Selvon as well as a collection of essays on women s writing, Motherlands (Women s Press; Rutgers University Press, 1991). Since then, she has continued to publish widely on Caribbean, South Asian, Black British and contemporary writing. Recent publications include: Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Palgrave, 2002) and Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk (Routledge, 2004). She is completing a book on Jamaica Kincaid, Writing a Life, and research for a monograph entitled Across the Tracks: India in Bloomsbury. She is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded research project, Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, Complicating the common perception that a homogeneous British culture only began to diversify after the Second World War, Making Britain explores how the early presence of South Asians in Britain impacted on Britain s literary, cultural and political life, See: for more information on this project; and for details of Wasafiri which celebrated its 25th birthday in Shyama Perera is a writer and broadcaster and Chair of the South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive (SALIDAA), a partner in the Making Britain project. Born to Sri Lankan parents, Shyama came to the UK when she was 4 years old. She is the author of three novels and a history of contraception, held for a brief moment of time the crown for being the Guardian s youngest ever reporter, and went on to present TV programmes including Eastern Eye, The Six O Clock Show, Talk of the Eighties, The Erogenous Zone, London Tonight and Capital Woman. She also presents and appears on radio. She is a member of the Olivier theatre panel and sits on the boards of Westminster Kingsway College and The Voice of the Listener and Viewer. As Chair of SALIDAA her role is to promote the artistic heritage of South Asian writers, painters and performers. The SALIDAA archive is housed at Brunel University and currently being prepared for relaunch in 2011 with a series of academic and social events. Nayantara Sahgal is an acclaimed novelist and political commentator. Born in Allahabad, India, in 1927, she was educated at Woodstock School in Mussoorie, India, and at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA, and received Distinguished Alumna Awards from both. She has had Fellowships in the US, at the Bunting Institute, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the National Humanities Center, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1997 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Leeds. She has served on the jury (Chair Eurasia) of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and as Vice President of the People s Union for Civil Liberties. She is the daughter of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and niece of Jawaharlal Nehru. India s fight for freedom shaped her early life and Nehru s idea of India has influenced much of her writing. Her first published work was the 1954 memoir Prison and Chocolate Cake. This was followed by nine novels of which Rich Like Us (1985) received the Sinclair Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award, and Plans for Departure (1986) the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her latest novel (2003) is Lesser

8 Breeds. Her six non-fiction works include autobiography, essays on politics and literature, and a political study of Indira Gandhi. Her most recent work Jawaharlal Nehru: Civilizing a Savage World will be published in November this year. Julian Simpson is currently researching a PhD on Doctors from the Indian Subcontinent and the Development of General Practice in the UK, c c.1978 at the University of Manchester. Using archival evidence and oral history interviews with the first generation of South Asian doctors to work as GPs in the National Health Service, this work explores the nature of their impact on the development of healthcare in the UK. After initially graduating from Sciences Po in Paris and training as a journalist in Lille, Julian taught journalism at the University of Bucharest and worked as a journalist and broadcaster for Ouest France, Radio France Internationale, and the BBC World Service, before joining the Scottish Refugee Council and subsequently helping to run the L Afrique, a Newcastle arts festival in the north-east of England. His wider research interests include the history of migration, empire and the NHS. His MA dissertation at the University of Northumbria looked at Victorian representations of Africa through the prism of David Livingstone s travels in the continent. Anna Snaith is Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at King s College London. She has published a monograph, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (Palgrave 2000), and edited the letters Woolf received in response to Three Guineas (Woolf Studies Annual, 2000) and two volumes on Woolf: Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies (2007) and Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (co-edited with Michael Whitworth, 2007). She is presently editing The Years for the Cambridge University Press Edition of Virginia Woolf. She is working on a monograph entitled Colonial London: Nation, Gender, Modernity (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Florian Stadtler completed his PhD on Bollywood cinema and Rushdie s fiction at the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research at the University of Kent in He is currently working at the Open University as a postdoctoral research associate on the AHRC-funded, cross-institutional project Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, His main research interests are in South Asian literature in English, British Asian history and literature, and Indian popular cinema. He has written on Vikram Chandra, Salman Rushdie, and Hindi cinema. His publications include Cultural Connections: Lagaan and its Audience Responses, Third World Quarterly 26.3 (2005); Nargis and Aurora Zogoiby Imaging Mother and Nation in Mehboob Khan s Mother India and Salman Rushdie s The Moor s Last Sigh, in Once Upon a Time in Bollywood: The Global Swing in Hindi Cinema, eds Gurbir Jolly et al. (Toronto: TSAR, 2007); and Terror, Globalisation and the Individual in Salman Rushdie s Shalimar the Clown, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45.2 (June 2009). He is reviews editor of the magazine of contemporary international writing Wasafiri. John Stevens is working towards completing his PhD in History at University College London, supervised by Professor Catherine Hall and Dr William Radice (SOAS). His thesis explores the construction of colonial subjectivity in the 19th century from a transnational perspective, through a comparative analysis of two powerful Indian public figures who achieved considerable prominence in England: the Bengali Brahmo religious and social reformers Rammohan Roy (c ) and Keshab Chandra Sen ( ). John s work utilises sources in both English and Bengali, a language which he studied intensively during a year abroad in Kolkata. John frequently visits West Bengal

9 and Bangladesh for the purposes of research, language-learning and conferences. His work explores the social construction of notions of difference with particular reference to ideas of race, gender, class and nation. He is interested in contemporary theoretical and methodological debates about subjectivity, modernity and colonial encounter, and their consequences for the writing of history. Meera Syal (to follow) Sarah Turner is currently Teaching Fellow in the History of Art Department at the University of York and has been appointed to a lectureship there from October Sarah works on the networks of artistic and cultural exchange within the British Empire, c She has written articles and catalogue essays on the impact of Indian sculpture in Britain, transcultural modernism, and the representation on race in Victorian painting. She is working on a book on the India Society and intercolonial modernisms at the beginning of the 20th century. Ansar Ahmed Ullah is a community activist who has lived and worked in the East End of London since the 1980s. He has worked as a youth, social and community worker, and has been an active anti-racist campaigner. He is involved with the Swadhinata Trust, set up in 2000 to promote secular Bengali culture, history and heritage amongst young people. Rozina Visram (BA Hons, London; M.Litt, Edinburgh) was for many years teacher and Head of History at a London comprehensive school and later Advisory Teacher for History and multi-ethnic education. After 1990 she lectured part-time at the Institute of Education, London University, and the University of North London (now London Met). Her major publications include Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, (1986) and Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (2002). She has also written several books for schools and contributed to many publications, including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Visram co-authored a pioneering report for the Geoffrye Museum on presenting histories in a diverse society, has helped with several exhibitions, and was adviser and researcher to the Peopling of London exhibition at the Museum of London. In 2006 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Open University. Currently she is a consultant to the Making Britain project. A. Martin Wainwright was raised in Britain and the United States. He received his BA in History from Emory University (1982) and his PhD in History (with concentrations in Britain and India) and South Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1989). Since 1989 he has served on the faculty of the University of Akron (Ohio) where he is currently Professor of History and Director of the World Civilizations program. He teaches 19th and 20th century British history as well as the history of the Indian subcontinent since the Mughals. He has published two books: Inheritance of Empire: Britain, India, and the Balance of Power in Asia, (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994) and The Better Class of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). He is currently working on a third book, tentatively entitled Royalty, Race, and Empire: How the Imperial Commonwealth Saved the British Monarchy. Georgie Wemyss is a visiting fellow at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, London, and a lecturer at Tower Hamlets College, where she teaches social anthropology and South Asian studies. She worked as a youth worker in Brick Lane in

10 the 1980s and has lived in the East End of London since then. Throughout the period she has spent time in Bangladesh which has greatly enhanced her understanding of the shared histories and political economies of Britain and South Asia. Her recent book The Invisible Empire: White Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging (Ashgate 2009) grew out of her doctorate which was an ethnographic study of political events following the election of a British National Party councillor in Tower Hamlets. The Invisible Empire refers to the histories of violence and oppression that are omitted from narratives about Britain s past: