Christopher Bayly

Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Historiography (2012-2013)

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Historiography is an ambition initiative at the University of Oxford that explores the many ways in which history is made, recorded, and shared. The Visiting Professorship in Historiography is hosted by Trinity College, Oxford. It has been made possible by the generous support of the Blavatnik Family Foundation.

Christopher Bayly is Emeritus Professor of Imperial and Naval History and Director of the South Asian Studies Centre, University of Cambridge.

Christopher Bayly series began with a lecture, titled The challenge to Euro-centric history: The legacies of Marshall GS Hodgson. He discussed the European and North American historiography of Islam from the late nineteenth century up to and beyond the monumental work in the 1970s of Marshall Hodgson. Professor Bayly highlighted the relevance of this work to the intellectual history of European and American engagement with the broader Islamic world.

Professor Bayly’s second lecture, Albert Hourani revisited: Arabic and Indian thought in the liberal age, took Albert Hourani’s seminal work, Arabic thought in the Liberal Age (1962) as its point of departure for a consideration of transnational intellectual history as an emerging dimension of historical writing, particularly around themes of liberalism, religion, and community in the global south in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.