Over the Christmas-New Year period, colleagues in History - Sarah and Humayun Ansari - visited Pakistan where they delivered a number of academic talks.

Sarah gave the keynote lecture (entitled ‘The world turned upside down: why people’s history matters’) at a very well-attended conference in honour of Pakistan’s veteran ‘people’s historian’ Dr Mubarak Ali Khan, which was held in the National Arts Council in Karachi on 26-27 December. At the same conference, Humayun spoke on the subject of ‘The march of History: reflecting on changing landscapes of belief and disbelief’.

Then in early January 2020 both participated in a one-day symposium organised by the Pakistan Studies Centre at the University of Sindh near Hyderabad, and which again large numbers of people attended. Sarah, who is a historian of the province, was again the keynote speaker, discussing change and continuity in Sindh’s recent past from the perspective of the circulation of people, material goods and ideas. Humayun, meanwhile, took the opportunity to hammer home the importance of History as an academic discipline and why studying it is so crucial. This event, like the previous one, attracted media coverage in the local English and vernacular press, highlighting the South Asian historical expertise on offer at Royal Holloway. Indeed, at time of writing, Francis Robinson is on his way back from Karachi where he gave a keynote talk at the city’s Adab Literary Festival, a huge annual gathering of people interested in literature and the arts more generally.