Research Meeting Event: Carolien Stolte, Leiden University — Buchanan Penthouse
We welcomed Carolien Stolte from Leiden University for our first visiting speaker event on "Unlikely Allies: Asian anticolonial activists and European pacifists in interwar France."
Carolien Stolte is Associate Professor of History and her research and teaching focuses modern global history with a concentration on South Asia. She is the co-director of the Afro-Asian Networks Project with Su Lin Lewis and the editor-in-chief of the book series Global Connections: Routes and Routes with Leiden University Press.
The talk took place at the light-filled Buchanan Penthouse on 25th November 2025.
Research talks as part of our ongoing research meetings facilitate interdisciplinary exchange and debates regarding key concepts many of which were addressed in Carolien Stolte's presentation.
The talk highlighted the intersections of ongoing peace work with decolonial efforts relevant to the cluster's focus on the anticolonial. To illuminate how pacifist and anticolonial movements pursued shared goals with different methods, the presentation contextualized the role of five Asian student-activists in the congrès démocratique international pour la paix in Bierville, France in 1926 and its aftermath.
The event generated robust dialogue in the Q&A session. Participants left with important implications of the changing identifications and legibility of Asia, role of spiritualism, and politics of language, mobility, and intra-regional solidarities in the interwar period and beyond.
Stay tuned for our Term 2 events and save the dates for the Anticolonial Ideas of the Global Symposium taking place on April 10-11, 2025.