Beyond the Frame: Indian British Connections

Current project team

Principal Investigator and Director Professor Susheila Nasta holds a Chair in Modern Literature at The Open University and is Fellow of the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies. She is founder and editor of Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, and author of numerous articles and books in the field of postcolonial literature. Her publications include Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Palgrave, 2002) and Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk (Routledge, 2004). Her most recent collection of essays Only Connect: India in Britain was published by Palgrave in 2012. Current projects include a monograph on Asian Bloomsbury. She was awarded an MBE in 2011 for her services to Black and Asian literature. She initiated and directed the first phase of the project from 2007 to 2010.

Research Fellow Dr Florian Stadtler was based in the English Department at The Open University and a member of the Postcolonial Literatures Research Group and the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies. He has published articles and essays on South Asian and British Asian history and literature, and Indian popular cinema. His monograph Fiction Film and Indian Popular Cinema: Rushdie’s Novels and the Cinematic Imagination is published by Routledge in Autumn 2013. He is reviews editor of Wasafiri magazine. He has been research fellow on the project from 2008-2013 and is now lecturer in Global Literature at the University of Exeter.

Project Consultant Rozina Visram is a distinguished historian and educationalist. Her major publications include Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700-1947 (Pluto, 1986) and Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (Pluto, 2002). She has also written several books for schools and has contributed to many publications, including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. She co-authored a pioneering report for the Geoffrye Museum on presenting histories in a diverse society and was advisor and researcher to the Museum of London’s ‘Peopling of London’ exhibition. In 2006 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Open University. She was advisor to the ‘Making Britain’ project from 2007-2010.

Co-curator Penny Brook has been Lead Curator of India Office Records at the British Library since 1996. She is committed to opening up the archives to a wide range of audiences and has worked towards this by putting the catalogues online, travelling facsimile exhibitions and a range of outreach activities. She is especially interested in raising awareness of archival resources for less well-known histories. She has previously worked on this through the Moving Here project. She was British Library partner and advisor to the ‘Making Britain’ project from 2007 to 2010.

Exhibition consultant Dr Rupert Richard Arrowsmith is a Research Associate at University College London. His is the author of Modernism and the Museum - Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant Garde (OUP, 2011). He is currently editing William Empson's The Face of the Buddha for its first ever publication.

Project Coordinator Heather Scott is Research Centre Secretary at the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, Open University

Beyond the Frame is currently working in partnership with:

• The British Library
• The British Council
• The British Museum
• The National Archives of India
• The Southbank Centre and
• The Victoria and Albert Museum.