The emblematic image featured in The Guardian’s ‘One hundred years of SOAS’ picture gallery shows Sir Cyril Philips, Director of SOAS from 1957 – 1976, looking at plans for the new building with a group of students. Fourth from the right (top) is Professor Philip Jaggar, Emeritus Professor of West African Linguistics (social anthropology and Hausa, 1968), who at the time was the President of the SOAS Students’ Union. Philip
The morning of 3 September 1945, as pictured, was the day after the formal surrender of Japan and, consequently, the end of World War II. The turning in of the rubber stamp and defense regulation books by the press censors also marked the end of the government’s need to ‘massage’ the news and public perception. An exemplary situation of the Senate House press team at work was during the battle
K A Subranamia Iyer was one of the SOAS’s first students, enrolling on the Sanskrit and Pali programme in 1917 at the then School of Oriental Studies. Born in 1896, he matriculated in 1912 and by the time he came to the School had already studied in Paris and London. He was the School’s first graduate, receiving in 1920 the Diploma in Sanskrit for ‘research in Indology.’ He returned to
Nearly 55 years after it happened, SOAS alumnus Brian Evans, a former Canadian diplomat and Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, recalls the discovery that fellow language student Gordon Lonsdale was actually Soviet intelligence officer Konon Molody. I entered SOAS in early October 1954, a raw young man from the Canadian Prairies. New to London, it took me several tours of Russell Square that foggy morning before a break
Dr Stacey Pierson, Senior Lecturer in the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology, remembers treasures, now housed in the British Museum, that drew collectors and specialists from around the world to SOAS. In 1952, a new museum opened at SOAS, showcasing one of the finest collections of Chinese ceramics in the world. The Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, at 53 Gordon Square, was named after its founder,
Remembering a diplomatic spat caused by Japanese lecturer William McGovern In 2015, few places in our world are inaccessible to the daring field academic or discerning traveller. Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet in the Himalayas, is one of the world’s highest and remotest cities; yet, if you charter a plane from London, it can be reached in approximately 17 hours. The story in the early 1920s, however, was very different.
by the first official member of the Department, Emeritus Professor Elizabeth H Moore, who retired in July 2015. My connections to SOAS began in 1981 as a doctoral student with the late Professor Anthony Christie. In 1986, after completing my PhD at the Institute of Archaeology under the wise supervision of Dr Ian Glover, I became a Research Associate with the Centre of South East Asian Studies (CSEAS). The late
Richard Rathbone, Professorial Research Associate, Department of History remembers the SOAS scholar who went on to be an internationally celebrated radical intellectual before his assassination in 1980. The revolutionary historian Walter Anthony Rodney studied for his PhD at SOAS between 1963 and 1966. Born in Guyana, Rodney achieved a first class degree in history at the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica before coming to London. At SOAS
Professor Göran Malmqvist recalls SOAS in the early ’50s with some of the world’s most influential European sinologists during this time. Professor Göran Malmqvist is a prominent scholar of Chinese language and literature and a highly prolific translator of Chinese literary works into Swedish. He is known worldwide for being the only Chinese speaker in the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize for Literature. He translated work by both
This week, Andy Davies talks about the distinctive home of the world-renowned SOAS Library and explains why the building should be given greater recognition. Denys Lasdun (1914-2001) was in the vanguard of modern British architecture. A product of the Architectural Association, his talents grew under Wells Coates and at Tecton in the 1930s. Perhaps most celebrated for his Royal College of Physicians (completed in 1964), his University of East Anglia