Our colleagues work to make their research relevant in a wide variety of ways, and we have listed some of their projects below.
Professor Robinson’s public-facing roles are wide-ranging. For over ten years, he has been Chair of the Sir Ernest Cassel Educational Trust, which focuses on women’s education and the Commonwealth. He is also a Trustee of the Surrey History Centre, which is the public face of the County Archives. He has always sought to forge strong links between the Archives and the History Department at Royal Holloway, and between academic research and policy (for instances, a series of conferences he organised with the research department of the Iranian Foreign Office). Professor Robinson has been involved with the Royal Asiatic Society for forty years (and counting). He has served as Member of Council, and two three-year stints as President. His particular area of focus at the Society has been publishing. The RAS now publishes approximately six books a year in collaboration with university presses such as Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Routledge.
‘Child of the Divide’
The Partition History Project, an educational pressure group established by interfaith Church of England clergy, drew on Professor Ansari’s historical expertise in their application for funding and subsequent re-staging of Sudha Bhuchar’s 2006 play ‘Child of the Divide’. This initiative centred on the loss, displacement, mass migration and trauma involved in Partition and its more contemporary parallels. The play, which undertook a national tour, was watched by audiences from different religious communities and was contextualised with historical resources.
Professor Ansari was also commissioned by Bhuchar to write the introduction to a new edition of ‘Child of the Divide’ (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017) with the aim of developing a greater sense of inclusion through enhancing the understanding that the play’s historical resonances provide. Read More.
Centre for Global South Asia 