John Stevens (University College London)
John Stevens is working towards completing his PhD in History at University College London, supervised by Professor Catherine Hall and Dr William Radice (SOAS). His thesis explores the construction of colonial subjectivity in the nineteenth-century from a transnational perspective, through a comparative analysis of two powerful Indian public figures who achieved considerable prominence in England: the Bengali Brahmo religious and social reformers Rammohan Roy (c.1774-1833) and Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-1884). John’s work utilizes sources in both English and Bengali, a language which he studied intensively during a year abroad in Kolkata. John frequently visits West Bengal and Bangladesh for the purposes of research, language-learning and conferences. His work explores the social construction of notions of ‘difference’ with particular reference to ideas of race, gender, class and nation. He is interested in contemporary theoretical and methodological debates about subjectivity, modernity and colonial encounter, and their consequences for the writing of history.
