Inaugural Lecture Series: Professors Catherine Dolan and Michael Charney
Key information
- Date
- Time
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6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Gallery
- Room
- SOAS Gallery Lecture Theatre
- Event type
- Lecture & Event highlights
About this event
Professor Catherine Dolan from the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and Professor Michael Charney from the Department of History deliver their inaugural lectures on two different and distinctive themes.
Professor Dolan's inaugural lecture is titled 'When Ethical Capitalism Travels: Socialities, Subjectivities, and Material Lives in East Africa'.
In recent decades, ethical capitalism, from sustainability certifications to inclusive markets, has emerged as a powerful moral injunction, promising to reconcile profit and principles in global supply chains. But what happens when ethical regimes travel across contexts and scales? Drawing on ethnographic research in East Africa, this lecture traces how diverse forms of ethical capitalism are translated, negotiated, and contested in practice, both reshaping and at times disrupting the social relations and material lives of those they seek to benefit.
Professor Charney's inaugural lecture will be on 'The Rise, Decline, and Reimagining of Area Studies and "Southeast Asia"'.
The epistemic boundaries of area studies have always been porous, shaped by colonial encounters, missionary linguistics, and the transnational circulation of scholars and texts. What has changed, and the direction of that circulation, is the subject of this talk. Where once the flow of knowledge moved overwhelmingly from metropolitan universities outward, today it increasingly moves in multiple directions – South to South, East to West, periphery to centre and back again. Scholars from Asia, Africa, and Latin America are not only generating new knowledge about their own regions; they are also reframing universal questions – about modernity, development, identity, and power – in ways that provincialise the assumptions of Western social science.
About the speakers
Professor Catherine Dolan
Catherine Dolan is Professor of Anthropology at SOAS University of London, and a Research Fellow at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. Her research examines the intersections of market and moral economies in corporate social responsibility and international development interventions, and their implications for everyday life in East Africa.
Over the past 15 years, she has led interdisciplinary research programmes on ethical capitalism, with a focus on food systems, labour, inequality, and gender across more than ten African countries, with particular emphasis on eastern Africa. She has published widely in anthropology and critical development studies. Her books include The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility, Digital Food Activism, and Ethical Sourcing in the Global Food Chain.
Professor Michael Charney
Professor Michael Charney is a military historian specialising in Asia. He has published monographs on warfare in the premodern South East Asian region (Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300-1900, 2004), the rise of monastic, military, and ministerial elites and their impact on the religious and intellectual life of the precolonial Burmese kingdom (Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma's Last Dynasty, 1752-1885, 2006), a history of the 20th century in Burma before and during the lengthy period of military rule (A History of Modern Burma, 2009), and the impact of Royal Engineers on military transportation in Asia during the Second World War (Imperial Military Transportation in British Asia: Burma 1941–1942, 2019). He has also co-edited numerous volumes, most recently Warring Societies of Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia (2017) with Kathy Wellen and the Global History of Warfare with Kaushik Roy.
SOAS Inaugural Lecture Series
The SOAS Inaugural Lecture Series recognises that research is an integral part of university life and offers a platform for newly appointed and promoted professors to share their significant contributions to their field while also showcasing the overall strength, depth, and vitality of research at SOAS.
