Lectures and Events
| Title | Date & Time | Location | Description | Sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lecture 'The Search for Balthazar Solvyns and an Indian Past: The Anatomy of a Research Project' Robert Hardgrave UT - Government | February 1, 2008 3:00 PM | Tom Lea Rooms, HRC 3.206 | Every book has its own story. Every research project has a genesis and evolution. Robert Hardgrave's A Portrait of the Hindus: Balthazar Solvyns and the European Image of India, 1760-1824, published three years ago, completed a project that had its inception in a chance encounter in 1966. The search for Solvyns combined detective work, the serendipity of hours in libraries and archives, and discovery. How did the parts of the project come together? What was involved in telling a complex and engaging story of a little known Flemish artist and his portrayal of the people and culture of Calcutta more than 200 years ago? Robert Hardgrave is the Temple Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Departments of Government and Asian Studies, at the University of Texas. His publications include The Nadars of Tamilnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change (1969, 2006), India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation (7th ed., 2008), various articles and books on Solvyns, and, as a founding member of the British Studies Seminar, an autobiographical essay in Burnt Orange Britannia. He taught at UT from 1967 until his retirement in 2001. Hardgrave Recording  | |
| Lecture 'Zionists, Indian Nationalism, and British Schizophrenia in Palestine' Lucy Chester University of Colorado - Boulder | February 8, 2008 3:00 PM | Tom Lea Rooms, HRC 3.206 | The last decade of British rule in Palestine was characterized by Britain reorienting from Zionist to Arab interests. Britain feared Indian protests against anything that might be viewed as infringing on the rights of Arab Palestinians. Indian Muslims supported Palestinian Muslims; Indian non-Muslims identified with Arabs through a common bond of anti-colonialism. One contentious issue was the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish States. The Zionists who would create the State of Israel in 1948 therefore took a keen interest in India in the 1930s and 1940s, seeking to win support of the Indian National Congress and hoping at least to neutralize Indian sympathy with the Arabs. British rule in Palestine was schizophrenic in the sense of contradictory promises and responses, almost as if the colonial state was disintegrating into loss of touch with reality. This is a subject rich in irony in view of the British aim to avert partition; but partition was what they got in both India and Palestine. Lucy Chester is Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she teaches courses on British imperialism and on contemporary South Asia. She is presently completing a book on the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan and the creation of the Indo-Pakistani boundary. Chester Recording | |
| Lecture 'Strategic and Cultural Triangulation: Britain, the United States, and Europe' Michael Brenner University of Pittsburgh | February 15, 2008 3:00 PM | Tom Lea Rooms, HRC 3.206 | The quest for a common 'Western' identity to orient the global policies of the western democracies is a hallmark of our time, revealing both a heightened sense of common 'civilizational' traits and an awareness that resemblances can be deceiving. Strategic tensions are evident from clashes over Iraq, the frustrated process of 'building Europe' in the European Union, and Britain's irresolute attempts to serve as a hinge between the two sides of the Atlantic. Equally significant, if less prominent, is the cultural manifestation of this quest for common identity, in the form of the permeation of institutions across Europe by American mores and philosophies. It is instructive to consider these strategic and cultural phenomena together. Michael Brenner is Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. His books include Terms Of Engagement and Toward A More Independent Europe. He has held that most glorious of all academic appointments, Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution. And he has been Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the National Defense University. Brenner Recording | |
| Lecture 'The British ''Establishment'' and the Chatham House Version of World Affairs' Roger Morgan EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY, FLORENCE | February 22, 2008 3:00 PM | Tom Lea Rooms, HRC 3.206 | Founded in 1920, and closely connected with the Council on Foreign Relations, London's Royal Institute of International Affairs (based at Chatham House), is widely regarded as part of what has been described by Henry Fairlie, A.J.P. Taylor and others as the British 'Establishment'. The late Professor Elie Kedourie accused it of promoting a 'Chatham House Version' of events, notably of Middle Eastern history. What is the overall assessment of Chatham House's record? Is there an element of conspiracy, or at least of a closed elite as a quasi-learned society, as a provider of intelligence on world affairs, and as a think-tank locked on foreign policy? Roger Morgan studied at the Universities of Cambridge, Paris and Hamburg, and obtained his Ph.D. at Cambridge with a thesis on nineteenth-century German history. From 1968 to 1974 he was one of the directors of the research programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and he was later a Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He has held visiting appointments at several universities, including Columbia, Harvard and UCLA, and is the author or editor of several books on German, European, and international subjects, including (as editor) The Study of International Affairs (1972). Morgan Recording | |
| Lecture 'Wilson's Curse: Self-Determination, the Cold War, and the Challenge of Modernity in the ''Third World''' Jason Parker Texas AandM | February 29, 2008 3:00 PM | Tom Lea Rooms, HRC 3.206 | The dissolution of the British Empire and its European counterparts coincided with the main events of the Cold War. Yet the relationship between the superpower conflict and the independence of the Third World should not be taken for granted. Fundamental questions of modernity, identity, and nationhood-questions that defined decolonization and are associated with the Cold War-in fact long predated it. The Cold War would superimpose a strategic and ideological struggle onto the Third World's battle to be free from European domination in the 1950s and 1960s. But this process began much earlier. The widespread failure of post-colonial federations demonstrates the extent to which peoples under colonial rule had developed their own visions of self-determination from the time of Wilson and the aftermath of the First World War. Jason Parker is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas AandM University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida. He is the author of Brother's Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937-1962, forthcoming, Oxford University Press, as well as articles in the Journal of African American History, and the International History Review. He is currently at work on a history of the United States and the Cold War in the Third World, and on a comparative study of postwar Third World federations. Parker Recording |
