April 17, 2006 Christopher Bayly Appointed to Kluge Center Chair of Countries and Cultures of the South

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed Christopher Bayly, professor of history at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, to the Chair of the Countries and Cultures of the South in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at Cambridge, where his primary interests are the history of India since circa 1700, British imperial history and global history.

During his three-month appointment at the Kluge Center, Bayly will research the emergence and transformation of liberal ideas among the intelligentsia of India. Bayly is participating in a joint project with other scholars in the United States, India and Great Britain to reassess the history of ideas in colonial India.

Born in Kent, Bayly attended the Skinners’ School, followed by Balliol and St. Anthony’s colleges at Oxford. He has been a Fellow of St. Catharine’s College at Cambridge since 1970 and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1990.

Among his many publications are “The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (2004); “Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-45,” with Tim Harper (2004); and “The Origins of Nationality in South Asia” (1997).

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate, energize and distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information on fellowships, grants and programs offered by the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge.