Dr Deborah Sutton

PhD Supervision Interests

Dr Sutton would welcome proposals from students for research in modern Indian history, South Asian agrarian and environmental history and the Indian diaspora.

Current Teaching

HIST278: Sex and Violence in Imperial India

HIST279: Resistance and the End of Empire in India

HIST369: Indian Partition and the Post-Colonial Nation

HIST401: Research and Writing History

Research Interests

Current research

My new research explores the conservation of Hindu temples in modern India. How were the aesthetic codes of conservation, and the legislation which sought to order and enforce their introduction, compromised by religious claims and practices? This work combines an exploration of the principles of archaeological conservation, as they were formed in the European bourgeois imagination, with case studies of specific temples which underwent conservationist interventions before and after the passage of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1904.

I am also interested in the selection and physical definition of monuments in New Delhi, a project which emerged from my work at the Kalkaji Mandir in Okhla.

Past research

My work on the Nilgiri Hills of South India was concerned with the juridical interfaces that were formed between the incoming state, settlers and the indigenous communties in the nineteenth century. This research explored the cultures of property and landscape that allowed the reinterpretation and subdivision of the hills into different categories of resources.

Other recent research wasconcerned with the jurisdiction presumed by the Indian state over overseas populations of Indian origin after independence in 1947. This project interrogated the presumptions reflected in the influence Indian missions attempted to exercise over Indian politics and society in remnant British territories.

Some relevant Links for Students

• The History and Politics Section of Manas - an resource created and maintained by Dr. Vinay Lal at UCLA.
• The Digital South Asia library at Chicago University - an excellent resource for images and bibliographies.
• Sarai - South Asia Resource Access on the Internet.

• The Temple and Modernity

  01/08/2011 → 30/09/2013
  ... Read more»

• Architectural Heritage Workshop

  12/02/2013
  'Architectural history in India: piety, aesthetics and modernity', will be presented at the Architectural Heritage Workshop workshop at the Liverpool School of Architecture on 1 March 2013. The works ... Read more»

• Divine Artefacts: Stella Kramrisch and Art History in the Twentieth Century

  20/11/2012
  A two-day symposium will take place at the Courtauld Institute co-organised by Deborah Sutton, Department of History, Lancaster University, Sarah Turner, Department of Art History, University of York ... Read more»

• Leverhulme Fellowship for Lancaster Historian

  07/04/2011
  The History Department is delighted to announce that Dr Deborah Sutton has been awarded a £26,196 Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on a project entitled "The Hindu Temple and Modernity: Devot ... Read more»

• British Academy Small Grants Scheme awarded

  11/12/2007
  Dr Deborah Sutton and Dr James Taylor were both successful in the British Academy Small Grants Scheme for 2007. Deborah was awarded £2,805 for her research on 'Colonial Antiquity in British India ... Read more»