Post by oldmike on Oct 30, 2007 15:55:56 GMT 7
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
National University of Singapore
presents
THE RAFFLES LECTURE
by
Professor Barbara Andaya
Raffles Visiting Professor in History
on
In the Shadow of Olivia and Sophia: “Temporary Wives” in Premodern Southeast Asia
DATE/ TIME
Wednesday, 14 November 2007 – 6.15 to 7.30 pm
VENUE
Lecture Theatre 12, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
The marriages of Stamford Raffles, first with Olivia Devenish and following her death, with Sophia Hull, are often depicted as ideal partnerships, with each wife supporting Raffles in his work and sharing many of his interests. However, at the time such relationships must be considered exceptional. All too often the women who became partners of European traders and administrators were never acknowledged as legitimate wives, and historical sources reveal little about an existence that was not legally marital. This lecture taps some of the available material to present some alternative views of women whose experience of “marriage” was very different from those of either Mrs. Raffles.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Barbara Watson Andaya (Raffles Visiting Professor, Department of History, NUS) is Professor of Asian Studies, specializing in Southeast Asian history and Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mânoa. Her specific area of expertise is the western Malay-Indonesia archipelago, on which she has published extensively, including Perak, The Abode of Grace: A Study of an Eighteenth Century Malay State (1979), To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1993) and (with Leonard Andaya) A History of Malaya (1982, revised 2000). Of late, her research interests have shifted to questions of gender, and she has published widely on the position of women in Southeast Asia. Professor Andaya received a Guggenheim Fellowship Award to work on her recently published book, The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia. She is currently working on a history of early modern Southeast Asia
ALL ARE WELCOME
(Refreshments will be served after the lecture)