Upcoming Events in June
With the arrival of summer, our 2025/26 lecture series is now nearing its finale. But before we wrap up another year of thought-provoking events, we’ve planned a vibrant programme for June – packed with film, books and brilliant speakers. From life in the Bengali forest to the history of China’s wealthiest city, we hope there’s something on the calendar to encourage you to step in from the heat, enjoy a glass of wine, and settle in for lively discussion with fellow curious minds.
For those joining us online, we’ve upgraded our Zoom setup which we hope will make your experience smoother and more interactive. You can now visit the individual event pages (links below) and click the ‘register here’ link to register your online attendance.
Tuesday 2 June – A new fragment of the Blue Qur’an in the British Library’s collection? (details)
Curator Daniel Lowe and conservation scientist Lucia Noor Melita at the British Library join forces to explore the recent discovery of a blue parchment bearing Qur’anic text at the Library. Their talk compares the fragment with documented examples of the Blue Qur’an through an examination of its textual, palaeographic and material features, as well as its page layout, condition, provenance, and custodial history, with the aim of offering new insights into the fragment’s possible origins and significance.
Tuesday 9 June – Reception Room, Wing D (details)
Set in the waiting room of a large government office in New Delhi, India, Reception Room, Wing D follows the receptionists receiving the arriving public as they navigate the labyrinthian bureaucracy beyond. Written and directed by Dr Ikuno Naka and Dr Garima Jaju, the film received Special Mention at the 2025 Royal Anthropological Institute & Marsh Short Film Prize for its skilful transformation of ‘the claustrophobic landscape of Indian bureaucracy into a human stage filled with tenderness, irony and poetic surrealism’ (RAI Film Festival). Visit this page to see a trailer: https://raifilm.org.uk/films/reception-room-wing-d/
Thursday 11 June – Rules of the Jungle: Human and Nonhuman Sovereigns in the Bengal Delta (details)
Dr Megnaa Mehtta, Lecturer in Social Anthropology at UCL Social and Historical Sciences, invites us deep into the Sundarbans, one of the world’s largest mangrove forests located in the Bengal Delta. From watchful deities to bureaucratic laws, and from visible to invisible forces, various forms of sovereigns continue to shape everyday life in this extraordinary landscape. By examining the idea of the forest as a form of property and the means of relating to it, this lecture explores the diverse and complementary forces that govern life in a forest.
Wednesday 17 June – Beyond States-in-Waiting: Rights, Recognition, and Sovereignty in South Asia and the World (details)
Winner of the 2024 James J. Busuttil Medal for Human Rights, Dr Lydia Walker delivers a lecture in connection to her book States-in-Waiting: A Counternarrative of Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2024), an exploration of the complexities of decolonisation claims within postcolonial states. The lecture returns to the unresolved questions at the heart of the book’s conclusion – If recognition remains uneven, delayed, or denied, what alternative forms of political belonging emerge? If sovereignty can be suspended, fragmented, or deferred, how should we understand the temporalities of the international order itself?
Thursday 18 June – Shanghai: The Story of Chinas Most Dynamic City (details)
Author Michael Dillon will be joined by Professor Kerry Brown from King’s College London for a conversation about his latest book on Shanghai. Charting the city’s evolution from a small fishing village to a thriving cultural and financial hub, Shanghai: The Story of Chinas Most Dynamic City (Yale University Press, 2026) paints a fascinating portrait of China’s most dynamic metropolis and explores its future role in the country’s development.
Thursday 25 June – Epistemology of Roma Origins: India and the Question of Academic Authority (details)
Dr Avishek Ray of the National Institute of Technology Silchar, India, presents a critical examination of the widely circulated claim that European Roma populations originate from India. For this lecture, he asks how such narratives, once institutionalised, shape knowledge production, authority, and the politics of representation and how they may contribute to the continued reproduction of dominant academic voices within the academy.