Speaker: Stephen Legg, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Nottingham
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, January 30, 2026
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
All are welcome. Registration is required.
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=104784
In this presentation, I will reflect on my past, recent, and future work exploring the geographies of colonialism and anticolonialism. I will open with a summary of my 2007 book, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities, which explored three landscapes of ordering which united New and Old Delhi as the capital of British rule in colonial India. I will also reflect on the intellectual moment from which this work emerged (geographer’s engagement with the latter-Foucault, postcolonial theory, and urban studies). Second, I will summarise my 2025 book, Spaces of Anticolonialism, which complements and supplements the first work, by exploring spaces of anticolonial struggle in Delhi in periods of protest mass-movement but also in everyday spaces of political mobilisation. Here, I reflect on ongoing debates regarding geographies of “resistance,” the decolonial, and the nature of the city. Finally, I will share ongoing research regarding the synergies between global urban history and global urban studies, and ask what “anticolonial urbanism” might be, what it could contribute, and how we might explore it comparatively between South, Southeast and East Asia.
Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham. His research centres on the geographies of late-colonialism, with a particular focus on British-Indian relations in the interwar period. His monographs include Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2007); Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India (2014); Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (2023); and Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2025). He is currently editor-in-chief of the Journal of Historical Geography.
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