Events Calendar

Current and Upcoming Events

Rosinka Chaudhuri – A New Category: The People of India, 4/25, 3pm

Rosinka Chaudhuri – A New Category: The People of India, 4/25, 3pm

Rosinka Chaudhuri A New Category: The People of India Thursday, 4/25, 3:00pm | Rosenwald 105 This paper will try to show that it was in the combined arenas of literature, culture, politics, petitions and associations in Calcutta in the late 1830s and early 1840s that...

Nicholson Faculty Lecture: Ulrike Stark, 4/24, 5pm

Nicholson Faculty Lecture: Ulrike Stark, 4/24, 5pm

The Nicholson Center for British Studies Nicholson Faculty Lecture (2023-24) Ulrike Stark Professor, South Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Chicago Majestic Patronage Muslim and Christian Printing at the Lucknow Royal Press, 1819-1849 Introduction by...

Past Events

Nicholson Faculty Lecture: Ulrike Stark, 4/24, 5pm

Nicholson Faculty Lecture: Ulrike Stark, 4/24, 5pm

The Nicholson Center for British Studies Nicholson Faculty Lecture (2023-24) Ulrike Stark Professor, South Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Chicago Majestic Patronage Muslim and Christian Printing at the Lucknow Royal Press, 1819-1849 Introduction by...

Community Event: Uncommon Wealth at Pilsen Community Books, 2/9

Community Event: Uncommon Wealth at Pilsen Community Books, 2/9

Consider joining Nicholson Center Faculty Affiliate Julian Go this Friday, February 9th, at Pilsen Community Books, where he will be in discussion with Dr. Kojo Koram regarding Dr. Koram's book Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire. The discussion will...

Watch now: Karuna Mantena – Gandhi and Late Victorian Radicalism

Watch now: Karuna Mantena – Gandhi and Late Victorian Radicalism

Professor Karuna Mantena's Alison Winter Lecture is now available for streaming on the Nicholson Center's Youtube page. Tune in to learn more about Gandhi's early political development and the literary and activist milieu in which he circulated. Professor Mantena's...

Postcolonial Print Cultures, 1/18-1/19, 2024

Postcolonial Print Cultures, 1/18-1/19, 2024

  Print Cultures before the Post-Colonial Era: The Miscellany Workshop of the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures (IRNPPC)  https://irn-postcolonial-print-cultures.org/ Venue: University of Chicago Paris Center, 6 Rue Thomas Man, Paris...

Karuna Mantena, “Gandhi and Late Victorian Radicalism,” Alison Winter Lecture

Karuna Mantena, “Gandhi and Late Victorian Radicalism,” Alison Winter Lecture

“Gandhi would have been Gandhi even without Thoreau and Tolstoy.” Albert Einstein’s quip succinctly captures a persistent dilemma about tracking the intellectual origins of Gandhi’s political ideas – especially the origins of satyagraha or nonviolent resistance. Scholars are not only divided on how to weigh the “Western” versus “Indian” provenance of Gandhi’s ideas, but the very question is saturated by assumptions about Gandhi’s intellectual sophistication and/or originality as a thinker (or lack thereof). This lecture revisits the formative role of late Victorian radicalism on Gandhi’s politics and political thought to track more precisely the influence and legacy of movements like vegetarianism and thinkers like Tolstoy and Thoreau. In so doing, I hope also to show that in Gandhi’s case especially, the origins/influence paradigm should give way to a mode of reconstruction that foregrounds formative conjunctures of theory and practice.

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