The Indian Ocean: narratives in literature and law

‘The Indian Ocean: Narratives in Literature and Law’ is a project that was supported by an AHRC Landscape and Environment programme grant (1 July 2007 – 30 June 2010) that funded research, networking, seminars, workshops and publications that examine how the Indian Ocean is represented as a space of law and lawlessness across texts, histories and languages. 

While the core members of the project primarily research literary and legal texts, the work of the project has drawn together a network of scholars from law, literature, geography, history, maritime archaeology, anthropology, and art history. 

This network has momentum beyond the formal completion of the AHRC funded activities; and the work of the project continues to feed into other initiatives in research and teaching at the University of Southampton.  These include the interdisciplinary Research Initiative in Maritime Studies; the Law and Literature Reading Group; a new research project forming around theories and geographies ‘Offshore’; undergraduate teaching in English at the University of Southampton on ‘Literatures of Islands and Oceans’; and MA teaching on ‘Literature and Law’.