Inaugural Lecture Series: Professors Scott Newton and Eddie Bruce-Jones
Key information
- Date
- Time
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6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Gallery
- Room
- Gallery Lecture Theatre
- Event type
- Lecture & Event highlights
About this event
Professor Scott Newton and Professor Eddie Bruce-Jones from the College of Law deliver their inaugural lectures on two different and distinctive themes.
Professor Newton's inaugural lecture, Double Exposure: Post‑Soviet Imperiality, Archipelagic Blackness, takes the form of a brace of mini-lectures, the latest stations of a roving intellectual itinerary that has crossed disciplines, geographies, and thematics. In the one case, the persistence or resurgence of imperial prerogatives and framings and their refractoriness to received international legal norms and forms. In the other, Caribbean terraqueous, serial spatiality, separation-in-communication, as the hemispheric matrix and mould of a transversal Black ontology, manifest in proliferating archipelagoes of sociality, discourse, (counter)politics and expression.
Professor Bruce‑Jones’ inaugural lecture, Indenture Post Mortem, offers an account of the British colonial system of indentureship that transported South Asians and others to the Caribbean and various regions across the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this lecture, he interrogates three intertwined approaches to engaging with this era: critical legal history, speculative literary analysis, and the examination of colonial frameworks that continue to shape contemporary institutions.
About the speakers
Professor Scott Newton
Professor Scott Newton has occupied the post of Laws of Central Asia since 1999. He has taught and studied inter alia Soviet and post-Soviet legal institutional dynamics, law and development, trade and investment law, slavery and post-slavery, colonialism and commodities, human rights, comparative constitutionalism, international law, conflict and justice, and post-slavery, legal geographies, and law in radical thought and praxis. He has served as Chair of the SOAS Centre for Contemporary Central Asia and the Caucasus and is the author of the monographs Law and the making of the Soviet world: the red demiurge (Routledge 2014), and The constitutions of the Central Asian States: a comparative and contextual analysis (Hart, 2016).
Professor Eddie Bruce-Jones
Professor Eddie Bruce-Jones is the Dean of the College of Law at SOAS. Prior to SOAS, he spent 13 years as an academic at Birkbeck, University of London, where he most recently served as Executive Dean of the School of Law. Bruce-Jones is author of Race in the Shadow of Law: State Violence in Contemporary Europe (2016) and has published in the areas of racial equality, migration law, and law and the humanities.
He was Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded research grant titled 'Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive: Humanities, Law and British Indentureship.' He was the 2020 Kleh Visiting Professor of International Law at Boston University School of Law and has held visiting roles at the Central European University, King's College London, Humboldt University of Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt.
He has served on expert consultation panels for the United Nations OHCHR and the Equality Committee of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly. He has taught general education and writing courses in prisons in Boston and New York.
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.
