The event will be structured into two sessions, with one session to be held at Harvard University in October 2005 dealing with the nineteenth century, and the second at Heidelberg University in October 2006 on the twentieth century. All nineteen participants will attend each session, and half will present at each.
A two-session conference is necessary in order to bring together both nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics. Considering both epochs as part of a single conference will allow for important comparisons of intellectual and cultural relations over the course of imperialism’s full life. Such a joint event is also vital for the encouragement of collaboration and intellectual exchange between scholarly communities working on similar problems in often distant academic cultures. In addition, such an event will make a strong gesture towards opening up avenues for the study of the global exchange of ideas in both Anglo-American and Continental scholarship.
Approximately half the conference papers are on nineteenth-century topics and half on the twentieth century. There are an equal number of papers considering encounter between Central Europe and South Asia from the European perspective and from the perspective of South Asians.