Post:	Professor of Geography
Other posts:	Professor of Historical Geography (Geography)
	Professor of Historical Geography (Cultural Studies)
Location:	Arts C C125
Email:	A.J.Lester@sussex.ac.uk
Telephone numbers
Internal:	8473 or 7238
UK:	(01273) 678473 or (01273) 877238
International:	+44 1273 678473 or +44 1273 877238

Biography

Biography
Alan Lester's first degree was from the University of Cambridge and his PhD from the University of London. He has been at the University of Sussex since 2000.

Role

Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography and Co-Director of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.

Research

My research follows three broad, intersecting themes, each of which is prominent in the book that I am currently writing with Fae Dussart, Geographies of Colonization: Settlers, Humanitarians and Indigenous Peoples in the British Empire.

The first and broadest theme is the exploration of relational space in the colonial world. In particular I have examined the ways in which relationships between competing colonial discourses, projects and networks have shaped metropolitan-colony relations in the nineteenth century British Empire. This theme is most pronounced in the book Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (2001) (extracted in Routledge's New Imperial Histories Reader, 2009), and articles in The New Zealand Geographer with Fae Dussart (2008), Geographical Research (2006), History Compass (2005) and History Workshop Journal (2002). A grant from The Leverhulme Trust enabled the research which is culminating in the present book project.

The second theme is an interest in the people, ideas, discourses and practices of humanitarianism. The ways in which humanitarian projects were and are constructed in contestation with other transformative interventions has long been a preoccupation of mine, manifested especially in articles in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2002), Progress in Human Geography with David Lambert (2004) and Gender Place and Culture with Fae Dussart (2009). As a result of post-humanist critiques of humanism as a whole, I am now becoming more interested in the construction of new, cosmopolitan humanisms with which to defend some of the more positive aspects of universalism.

The third theme is the ways in which the life geographies of particular people can allow insight into agency, power, politics and practice in colonial spaces. This interest is most obviously represented in the book that David Lambert and I co-edited, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (2006). It is also traced through studies of George Augustus Robinson in Johnston and Rolls' Friendly Mission Companion Volume (2008) and of Thomas Fowell Buxton in Gilbert and Tiffin's Burden or Benefit: Imperial Benevolence and its Legacies (2008).

Proposals for doctoral research in these and associated areas are welcome.

Teaching

Alan teaches the second year course Globalization and Empire and the final year option Cultures of Colonialism. Alan's postgraduate teaching includes European Representations of Africa, as part of the MA in Globalisation, Ethnicity and Culture. Alan is currently supervising D.Phil students working on Black Consciousness and Christian thought in 1970s South Africa, and recreational landscape representation in colonial Australia and England.

Publications

Books

Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. with David Lambert, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006.

Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain, Routledge, London and New York, 2001.

South Africa Past, Present and Future, with E. Nel and T. Binns, Prentice Hall, London and New York, 2000.

Colonial Discourse and the Colonization of Queen Adelaide Province, South Africa, Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, Historical Geography Research Series, no. 34, London, 1998.

From Colonisation to Democracy: A New Historical Geography of South Africa, I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 1996.

Articles

 Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, ‘Masculinity ‘race', and family in the colonies: protecting Aborigines in the early nineteenth century', Gender, Place and Culture, 16, 1, 2009, 65-76.

 Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, ‘Protecting ‘Aborigines in Early Nineteenth Century Australia and New Zealand', with F. Dussart, The New Zealand Geographer, 64, 3, 2008, 205-20.

'Colonial Networks, Australian Humanitarianism and the History Wars', Geographical Research (formerly Australian Geographical Studies), 44, 3, 2006.

'Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire', History Compass, 2005.

'Geographies of Colonial Philanthropy', with D. Lambert, Progress in Human Geography, 28, 3, 2004.

'Geographies of Colonialism' contribution to roundtable discussion of C. Hall, 'Civilising Subjects', Journal of Victorian Culture, 9, 2, 2004.

'Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies', review article, Journal of Historical Geography, 29, 2, 2003

'Introduction: Historical Geographies of Southern Africa', Journal of Southern African Studies, 29, 3, 2003.

'British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire', History Workshop Journal, 54, 2002, 27-50.

'Obtaining the "Due Observance of Justice": The Geographies of Colonial Humanitarianism', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20, 3, 2002, 277 - 293.

'Colonial Settlers and the Metropole: Racial Discourse in the Early Nineteenth Century Cape Colony, Australia and New Zealand', Landscape Research, 27, 1, 2002, 39-50.

'Global Capitalism, Social Dislocation and Cultural Discourse in South African History', South African Historical Journal, 42, May 2000, 277-89.

'South Africa's Current Transition in Temporal and Spatial Context', with E. Nel and T. Binns: Antipode, 32, 2, 2000, 135-51.

'Reformulating Identities: British Settlers in Early Nineteenth Century South Africa', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 23, 4, 1998, 515-31.

'"Otherness" and the Frontiers of Empire: The Eastern Cape Colony, 1806-c1850', Journal of Historical Geography, 24, 1, 1998, 2-19.

'Settlers, the State and Colonial Power: The Colonization of Queen Adelaide Province, 1834-37', Journal of African History, 39, 1998, 221-46.

'Impressions of a New South Africa', Focus, 45, 2, 1998, 1-5.

'The Margins of Order: Strategies of Segregation on the Eastern Cape Frontier, 1806-c1880', Journal of Southern African Studies, 23, 4, 1997, 635-653.

'Cultural Construction and Spatial Strategy on the Eastern Cape Frontier, 1806-c1840', The South African Geographical Journal, 1996, 78, 2, 98-107.

Chapters in Books

‘Shrewsbury, William James’, with David Lambert, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, forthcoming.

'Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain’, in S. Howed (ed) The New Imperial Histories Reader, Routledge, London, 2009, 139-46.

 ‘Political Geography: Colonialism I' in R. Kitchen and N. Thrift (eds) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Elsevier, 2009, 175-81.

‘Empire', in M. Low, K. Cox and J. Robinson (eds) Handbook of Political Geography, Sage, 2008, 385-407.

 ‘George Augustus Robinson and the Humanitarian and Settler Networks of the early Nineteenth Century British Empire', in A. Johnston and M. Rolls (eds), Friendly Mission: the Tasmanian journals and papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-1834 companion volume, Quintus Publishing (University of Tasmania and Arts Tasmania), 2008, 27-44.

‘Thomas Fowell Buxton and the Networks of British Humanitarianism', in H. Gilbert and C. Tiffin (eds) Burden or Benefit: Imperial Benevolence and its Legacies, Indiana University Press, 2008, 31-48.

'Introduction: Geographies of Empire and Colonial Life Writing', in D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds.) Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

'Missionary Politics and the Captive Audience: William Shrewsbury in the caribbean and the Cape Colony', in D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds.) Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

'Humanitarians and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century', in N. Etherington (ed) Missions and Empire, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005.

'Historical Geographies of British Colonisation: New South Wales, New Zealand and the Cape in the Early Nineteenth Century', in S. Potter (ed) Imperial Communication: Australia and Britain, Menzies Centre, London, 2004.

'Constructing Colonial Discourse: Britain, South Africa and the Empire in the Nineteenth Century', in A. Blunt and C. McEwan (eds.) Postcolonial Geographies, Cassell, London, 2003.

'Historical Geography', in R. Fox and K. Rowntree (eds.) The Geography of South Africa in a Changing World, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 2000, 60-86.

'Historical Geographies of Imperialism', in B. Graham and C. Nash (eds.) Modern Historical Geographies, Addison Wesley Longman, London and New York, 2000, 100-120.