Location: IAS Seminar Room 20, first floor, South Wing, UCL
Black Tudors: Three Untold Stories
Dr. Miranda Kaufmann tells the intriguing tales of three Africans: a diver employed by Henry VIII to recover guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose, a Moroccan woman baptised in Elizabethan London, and a porter who whipped a fellow servant at their master’s Gloucestershire manor house.
Dr. Miranda Kaufmann tells the intriguing tales of three Africans: a diver employed by Henry VIII to recover guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose, a Moroccan woman baptised in Elizabethan London, and a porter who whipped a fellow servant at their master’s Gloucestershire manor house.
Dr. Miranda Kaufmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, part of the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She read History at Christ Church, Oxford, where she completed her doctoral thesis on 'Africans in Britain, 1500-1640' in 2011. As a freelance historian and journalist, she has worked for The Sunday Times, the BBC, the National Trust, English Heritage, the Oxford Companion series, Quercus publishing and the Rugby Football Foundation.
In 1615, Sir Thomas Roe arrived at the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, via a stop in Surat and an arduous journey across Gujarat and Rajasthan. His embassy would be filled with frustrations -- clashes with East India Company factors deeply protective of their own autonomy on the one hand, obstacles posed by Mughal court customs and officials on the other. He had not really achieved much when he left, and the EIC would not send another ambassador till 1699. Roe nevertheless earned a significant reputation for diplomacy in difficult terrain, and his Mughal embassy has emerged as a standard case study in theorisations of cross-cultural encounter with India, to the extent that it has begun to define our understanding of the nature of English first encounter with India.
This paper, by Prof Nandini Das, places the accounts of Roe’s very familiar Mughal embassy against the backdrop of his long career across four continents and four decades, to interrogate our understanding of the 'moment' of cross-cultural encounter. Ben Jonson makes an appearance.
Prof Nandini Das is a Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool and Director of the TIDE Project (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c. 1550-1700). She works on Renaissance romance, fiction and early travel and cross-cultural encounters. Other research interests include early modern cultural and intellectual history, editing theory and history of the book, Shakespeare, Renaissance theatre and popular culture, women’s writing (especially Renaissance women writers and female pseudo-autobiographies from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century), the development of early eighteenth century Orientalism, and digital humanities.
Sir Thomas Roe: Memory, transculturality, and the incorporated self
In 1615, Sir Thomas Roe arrived at the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, via a stop in Surat and an arduous journey across Gujarat and Rajasthan. His embassy would be filled with frustrations -- clashes with East India Company factors deeply protective of their own autonomy on the one hand, obstacles posed by Mughal court customs and officials on the other. He had not really achieved much when he left, and the EIC would not send another ambassador till 1699. Roe nevertheless earned a significant reputation for diplomacy in difficult terrain, and his Mughal embassy has emerged as a standard case study in theorisations of cross-cultural encounter with India, to the extent that it has begun to define our understanding of the nature of English first encounter with India.
This paper, by Prof Nandini Das, places the accounts of Roe’s very familiar Mughal embassy against the backdrop of his long career across four continents and four decades, to interrogate our understanding of the 'moment' of cross-cultural encounter. Ben Jonson makes an appearance.
Prof Nandini Das is a Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool and Director of the TIDE Project (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c. 1550-1700). She works on Renaissance romance, fiction and early travel and cross-cultural encounters. Other research interests include early modern cultural and intellectual history, editing theory and history of the book, Shakespeare, Renaissance theatre and popular culture, women’s writing (especially Renaissance women writers and female pseudo-autobiographies from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century), the development of early eighteenth century Orientalism, and digital humanities.
All welcome, and there will be drinks and discussion afterwards.
