Lecture

At the turn of the twentieth century, radical utopian communities were built all around the world. They served as retreats, but they simultaneously constituted hubs for activists, reformers, and revolutionaries to meet, share, and develop new ideas and practices of community and human existence. The talk deliberately builds on different and seemingly unrelated case studies […]

In the early twentieth century Richard Outcault's American comic strip Buster Brown appeared in different forms in countries such as Brazil, Britain, Denmark, France, Italy, and Spain. This article discussed those appearances in light of Outcault’s attempts to preserve his intellectual property rights and his shift of the strip from the New York Herald to […]

Soft power requires hardware.  Radio can carry cultural content, news, and overt propaganda across national borders, seemingly effortlessly, but this requires substantial investment in infrastructure. Often, finding a place where that infrastructure can be built raises significant geopolitical complications. From the eve of the Second World War, British plans to project UK influence around the […]

Building on my monograph, Reporting the Raj, the British Press and India, the focus here is on radio and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) over the climactic decades 1920s-1940s. It is based on extensive research undertaken for a forthcoming book, Broadcasting the Raj: The BBC and India (OUP 2026). The talk will examine the ways […]