We are excited to announce that Dr. Michael Collins, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary British History at University College London, will be the Tagore Visiting Scholar for 2025. Dr. Collins’s work focuses on the historical development of political ideas in Britain since c. 1940, and the social and cultural history of migration and settlement in post-war Britain since c. 1940. As part of this latter research, he attends to the experiences of migrants and settlers themselves and how postwar social and cultural change has reconfigured the meanings of Britishness and Englishness.
Dr. Collins has a particular interest in migrations from the Anglophone Caribbean and from South Asia. He is currently finishing a book on the social and cultural history of cricket and Caribbean “Windrush” migration to Britain; Windrush Cricket: Caribbean Migration and the Remaking of Postwar England will be published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in 2024. His next book project is “After the Raj”, which looks at a wide spectrum of Indo-British relations – economic, political, military, cultural, and sporting – since 1947. His prior publications include Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World Rabindranath Tagore's Writings on History, Politics and Society (Routledge, 2012).
Dr. Collins will lead the Tagore Program’s fourth Spring Institute in 2025. Details forthcoming.