Realms of the political: Citizens and consumers in colonial South Asia

Wertheimlecture 2012 by Prof. Nira Wickramasinghe

Entrance free. Drinks afterwards.

Every year a public lecture named after Willem Frederik Wertheim, the founding father of Non-Western Sociology in Amsterdam, is delivered by a renowned scholar working on Asia. This year's lecture will be given by Prof. Nira Wickramasinghe (Leiden University). Nira Konjit Wickramasinghe is Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands and a well known international academic.

Nira Konjit Wickramasinghe is Professor/Chair of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She was a professor in the Department of History and International Relations, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka until 2009. She grew up in Paris and studied at the University of Paris IV - Sorbonne and at the University of Oxford from 1985 to 1989 where she earned her doctorate in Modern History. She joined the University of Colombo in 1990 and taught there until 2009. She has been a World Bank Robert McNamara fellow, a Fulbright senior scholar at New York University, a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, a British Academy Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford and more recently a fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University.

Her primary interests are identity politics, everyday life under colonialism and the relationship between state and society in modern South Asia. She has pursued these interests through investigation into such diverse themes as politics of dress, civil society, citizens and migrants, and objects of consumption. Trained as a historian, she has written on late colonial and modern Sri Lanka, using a variety of archives. In the last few years, her work has moved from a focus on national history albeit from a non-state perspective to an approach that contests the nation as a frame and attempts to capture other dimensions of belonging which might be best encapsulated in the term ‘‘postnational’’. She has just finished a book on ordinary peoples’ encounter with the ‘‘modern’’ using as a lens machines such as the sewing machine, gramophone, tram and bicycle.

The Wertheim Lecture is co-organized by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), the Moving Matters programme group of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) of the University of Amsterdam.