Prof. Timothy Allender

Sydney School of Education and Social Work
Sydney, Australia

Short Bio: Professor Tim Allender’s principal research over the past 30 years concerns Indian education. His last monograph with Manchester University Press (Studies in Imperialism series) develops key gender, feminist and knowledge transfer themes concerning India. This book was the winner of the Anne Bloomfield book prize awarded by the HES (UK) for best history of education book published between 2014 and 2017. He is working on two co-edited books on the image and empire with scholars in Mexico, Birmingham and Belgium. He is about to publish a new monograph with Manchester University Press (Studies in Imperialism series) entitled: Empire Religiosity: convent habits in colonial and postcolonial India.

Keynote Topic: Yes, they knew: the colonial shaping of the female body, 1820 -1950

This paper looks and examines colonial policy making in this long period as it related to Indian females, attempting to commodity them according to Western moral, aesthetic and educational norms. The paper also looks at how this commodification was transmitted to receptive colonial audiences through semiotic and visual mediums. At the end of the colonial period, it analyses how the female Indian body was negotiated in different ways by former colonial religious institutions to justify their ‘staying on’ after Partition in 1947.