News

Novelist Kunal Basu to give 3rd Ustinov Prejudice Lecture at Durham

(19 May 2006)

The third Ustinov Prejudice Lecture at Durham University will be given by the novelist and academic Kunal Basu, author of the recently-published and acclaimed work Racists, on 30 May.

The lecture, on Tuesday 30th May at Ustinov College, is the latest in a series that began when the late Sir Peter Ustinov was Chancellor of Durham University, and its theme reflects his own encouragement of the study of prejudice around the world as a means to defeating it. Racists (published by Orion Books in January 2006) is the latest novel by Kunal Basu, a Fellow in Marketing at Templeton College, Oxford. An account of a fictional nineteenth century racial experiment, it was described in The Guardian as ‘a panorama of 19th-century ideas about race, but … also a sly, penetrating commentary on their contemporary survival, highlighting the cross-fertilisation between social science, politics and philanthropy’. His lecture, "Science and Race: Solving the Puzzle of Human Variation", will take place at 6 p.m. in Ustinov College, Howlands Farm, South Road, Durham. Sir Peter Ustinov, for whom Ustinov College was named in 2003, had a strong interest in the study of prejudice, which he saw as the root cause of misunderstanding between religions and nations, characterising it as ‘a mole in the midst of communities’, ‘a kind of chloroform to the growing mind’. Sir Peter founded a chair for research into prejudice at the University of Vienna, and the Sir Peter Ustinov Centre at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The Ustinov Prejudice lectures were established by Professor Sue Scott, former Principal of Ustinov College, in recognition of Sir Peter Ustinov’s contribution to the subject. The two previous lectures were given by Professor Tony Platt of California State University and Professor Haleh Afshar of the University of York. Ustinov College also established a Ustinov Studentship in 2003, to be awarded every 3 years to an outstanding student whose PhD research includes prejudice as a central theme. The current Ustinov College Prejudice Scholar, Shari Daya, is now coming to the end of her third year, and the second Studentship has just been advertised.

• www.dur.ac.uk/ustinov.college/awards/