Alexander Lecture: On Belonging (In-Person)

Belonging is commonly understood as a matter of identity, attachment, or legal recognition. This lecture approaches it instead as a precarious public condition: the capacity to appear, act, and be judged within a shared world. Drawing on sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England, a society simultaneously obsessed with borders and shaped by movement, it argues that belonging was neither natural nor secure, and examines literature as a site where it was tested under pressure. The figures and texts at its center reveal belonging as a reversible position, shaped by language, faith, usefulness, and narrative continuity, and always vulnerable to withdrawal. Belonging, in this account, is inseparable from a form of resilience that is neither private endurance nor adaptive survival, but denotes instead a capacity to remain in relation to a common world without dissolving into either withdrawal or violence when that world becomes hostile or unstable. Where such resilience is sustained, common worlds remain possible, though never stable. By tracing these dynamics historically, the lecture offers an unsentimental account of belonging that foregrounds its fragility, its political costs, and its enduring consequences.

Nandini Das is Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture and Fellow of Exeter College at the University of Oxford. She is a scholar of literature, travel, migration, and cross-cultural encounters, and has published widely on these topics, from their appearance in the writings of major sixteenth and seventeenth century authors like Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and Cervantes, to the fleeting presence of three Japanese boys in Portuguese-held Goa, India. Among her books are Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570-1620 (2011) and The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019), co-edited with Tim Youngs, and as project director for the European Research Council funded ‘Travel, Transculturality and Identity in Early Modern England’ (ERC-TIDE) project, she has co-written and edited Keywords of Identity and Lives in Transit, about early modern English concepts around identity and race and the lives they touched. She is volume editor of Elizabethan Levant Trade and South Asia in the forthcoming Oxford edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598-1600) and editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Travel, Race and Identity in Early Modern England. Her most recent book on the first English embassy to India 1614-1619, Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire, was the Spectator, Prospect, and History Today Book of the Year in 2023, longlisted for the Cundhill Prize, shortlisted for the Duff Cooper and Wolfson History Prizes, and received the 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. Her next book, This Little World, a new history of Tudor and Stuart England from the perspective of those moving in and out of the country, will be published by Bloomsbury in May 2026. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly presents television and radio programs on her research.

The Alexander Lectures were founded in 1928 in memory of Professor W.J. Alexander, Head of the Department of English at University College from 1889 to 1926. Learn more about our Endowed Public Lectures.

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Host or Publisher University College (University of Toronto)