Dongkyung Shin | Fung Public Seminar Series: Colonial Universities and Postimperial Power: Britain and the Making of Higher Education Networks in Africa and the Caribbean

Dongkyung "DK" Shin will discuss her research, which examines how Britain reinvented the governance of its empire through universities during the decades of decolonization. Focusing on the Inter-University Council for Higher Education in the Colonies and the University of London’s “Special Relations” scheme, the lecture shows how British imperial strategies produced transimperial academic orders that outlived formal political independence. Drawing on archival research conducted in eight countries — Barbados, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, and the United States — it argues that late colonial and early postcolonial universities became key infrastructures through which Britain sustained intellectual authority, professional standards, and scientific hierarchies. Rather than disappearing with decolonization, imperial power persisted within degree structures, training systems, and expert networks that shaped generations of African and Caribbean professionals. The lecture ultimately challenges conventional narratives of higher education as either a civilizing mission or a straightforward path to intellectual independence, revealing instead how late colonial universities functioned as carefully engineered systems of postimperial governance.

Photo credit: The Daily Gleaner, Thursday, January 15, 1953

Fung Global Fellows Program, PIIRS | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in African Studies, Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society

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