Professor Stephen Legg

Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham and Chair of the 2024 Annual International Conference.

His research focuses on colonial India in the context of British imperialism and interwar internationalism. At the scale of the city, Delhi as the capital of the Raj (1911-1947) provides the focus, as a site of colonialism, anti-colonialism, and communalism. At the national scale Stephen has been interested in how cities networked to provide governmental solutions to social ‘problems’ (notably prostitution) and how constitutional reform sought to remake political geographies (notably through ‘dyarchy’). At the imperial and international scale, he has explored how the League of Nations influenced Indian policy and society, and how the British used particular spaces (such as the Round Table Conference in London) to craft the future constitution of India. His publications include Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities (2007); Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India (2014); and Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (2023).

Steve undertook his undergraduate degree, ESRC-funded doctorate and Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. At Nottingham his research has been funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and an AHRC Research Grant. He has taken up visiting research fellowships at Queen Mary, London, the State University of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study at JNU, New Delhi.