9.30 - 10.30

Registration

10.30 - 10.35

Welcome and Introduction

Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge)
Alan Strathern (Cambridge)

10.35 - 11.30

Opening Lecture

John Rogers (AISLS)
Sri Lanka's Historiography: Juggling Time, Space and Nation

11.30 - 11.45

Tea and coffee

11.45 - 12.45

Early Lanka

Chair: Tilman Frasch (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Robin Coningham (Durham)
Theocratic landscapes: re-interpreting the archaeology of Anuradhapura and its hinterland

Rebecca Day (Birmingham)
The use of Late Roman coins in India and Sri Lanka

12.45 - 14.00

Lunch

14.00 - 15.30

Lanka and Early Modern Imperialism

Chair: Chandra R de Silva (Old Dominion)

Zoltán Biedermann (Birkbeck)
What is imperial in the Portuguese presence in Sri Lanka?

Alan Strathern (Cambridge)
What is an empire, and what is a kingdom? The case of Sri Lanka in comparative perspective

Anna Winterbottom (Sussex)
Trading knowledge of seventeenth-century Kandy: circulating Robert Knox's Historical Relation of Ceylon

15.30 - 16.00

Tea and coffee

16.00 - 17.30

Lanka and the Dutch world

Chair: C A Bayly (Cambridge)

Nadeera Seneviratne (Leiden)
'As truly as I lay my hand on the head of my child: Colonial Administrations of the Testimonial Oath'

Nirmal Dewasiri (Colombo)
Early colonial forms of extraction of peasant’s surplus: a comparative study of Indonesia and Sri Lanka under the administration of the Dutch East India Company

Alicia Schrikker (Leiden)
The limited manipulability of Sri Lanka’s geography: changing discourses on the function and place of Sri Lanka in the Dutch and British empires

17.30

Reception at CRASSH

9.45 - 11.15

Indian Ocean histories of Lanka in the nineteenth century

Chair: Tim Harper (Cambridge)

Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge)
Conflicting and connected narratives of the British in Ceylon, Burma and Mysore

Andrew Jarvis (Cambridge)
Photographic traffic: Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean, c.1850-1880

Jonathan Spencer (Edinburgh)
tbc

11.15 - 11.30

Tea and coffee

11.30 - 13.00

Transnational histories of the ‘nation’

Chair: Joya Chatterji (Cambridge)

Su Lin Lewis (Cambridge)
Shared print worlds: newspapers and the modern girl from Colombo to Penang, 1910-1940

Nira Wickramasinghe (Leiden)
Japan in the making of Sinhalese Nationalism

Sandagomi Coperahewa (Colombo)
Gandhi and Lanka: Some thoughts on the language issue

13.00 - 14.15

Lunch 

14.15 - 15.15

Contemporary History

Chair: Jonathan Spencer (Edinburgh)

Laavanyan M. Ratnapalan (CSAS, Cambridge)
An Historical Approach to Understanding the Sri Lankan Diaspora

Harshana Rambukwella (Hong Kong)
Postcolonial nativism? Exploring post-secularism and its implications for history and historiography in Sri Lanka and Israel

15.30 - 16.30 

Concluding discussion