Signature events

The ICPS is primarily associated with four annual signature events. Details of forthcoming and previous events are included below.

International Postgraduate/Early Career Conference

One of the main aims of the ICPS is to support postgraduate research, both nationally and internationally, in the colonial/postcolonial area. The ICPS international postgraduate/early-career scholar conference, first established in 2008-9, regularly attracts up to 80 delegates worldwide and a number of distinguished and internationally recognised keynote speakers.

Research Salon

The ICPS has run an annual in-house research salon every year since its inception. Salons, which typically reflect the Institute's disciplinary range, run in a flexible format allowing delegates to fit the event around their other University activities, and are specifically designed with an eye on stimulating cross-Faculty encounters and collaborations.

International Lecture

The Institute's inaugural International Lecture in 2010-11 was given by distinguished American-based imperial historian Dane Kennedy. This prestigious event is an integral facet of the ICPS, and helps to maintain the Institute's reputation as the leading research centre of its kind in the UK.

The 2012 Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies Annual Lecture was given by Catherine Hall, Professor of Social and Cultural history at University College, London. The title of Professor Hall's lecture was 'Whose histories? Slave owners' stories of the slave trade and slavery'. Based on the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project currently underway at UCL, the paper addressed the long-neglected question of the place of slavery in British social, political and cultural life. Using the census of British slave-owners that was compiled at abolition (owners were entitled to compensation as their erstwhile 'property' were emancipated), the Legacies project promises to unearth in full and complex detail, the varied after-lives of slavery in Britain. Alongside colleagues Nick Draper (working on economic legacies) and Keith McClelland (researching political legacies), Professor Hall has been focusing on the cultural lives of slave owners before and after abolition. In her ICPS lecture, she focused on three literary-minded slave owners, Theodora Lynch, Frederick Marryat and Charles Kingsley, all of whom played a major part in shaping popular attitudes towards race, empire and the Caribbean. Taking each in turn, Professor Hall outlined the discursive significance of their fictional and non-fictional work. In the writings of Lynch, for example, the pernicious, degrading nature of slavery was displaced by a nostalgic, halcyon vision that placed benevolent whites alongside loyal, contented blacks. Frederick Marryat and Charles Kingsley wrote in another register altogether, steeped in a masculine adventurism that served to reinstate the authority and justice of an archetypal white man in command.

For more information on the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project, see: www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs

Local / Regional Community Day

Postgraduate members of the ICPS organise annual local/regional community days, featuring a range of activities and with the direct involvement of the communities concerned. Previous events have focused on Guyana in 2009-10 and Mauritius in 2010-11.

Forthcoming Events

Previous Events

2010/11

2009/10

2008/09