Keynote Speakers

Corinne Fowler is Professor of Colonialism and Heritage at the University of Leicester. She specialises in colonial history, decolonisation and the British countryside’s relationship to Empire. Her most recent book is Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections (2020). Her forthcoming books are Our Island Stories: Country Walks through Colonial Britain (2024) and The Countryside: Ten Rural Walks through Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire (2024). Professor Fowler directed a child-led history and writing project called Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted (2018-2022, Heritage Lottery and Arts Council). In 2020 she co-authored an audit of peer-reviewed research about National Trust properties’ connections to empire, Colonialism and Historic Slavery Report. The report won the Museums and Heritage Judges’ Special Recognition Award in 2022.

Pablo Mukherjee is Professor of Anglophone World-Literature at the University of Oxford. His research involves four inter-related fields – colonial & postcolonial literatures, environmental humanities, world-literary studies and Victorian studies. Professor Mukherjee is the author of five monographs – Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime (2003), Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2010), Natural Disasters and Victorian Imperial Culture: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia (2013), (with WReC) Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (2015) and Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India (2020; Winner of Science Fiction Research Association’s Book Award 2021).