Dr Alex Bubb

Dr Alex Bubb

Visiting Fellow

Department of International History

Languages
English
Key Expertise
Translation, migration, multilingualism, cosmopolitanism in 19th century

About me

Alex Bubb is a Senior Lecturer at Roehampton University. He studies translation, migration, multilingualism and cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth-century world, and how these phenomena were shaped by Britain’s prolonged colonial entanglement with India. Particular interests for him have been transnational writers active in 1880s and 1890s London, and the circulation of books and translations throughout the British Empire. While his interests are mainly literary, he originally trained as a historian and has written on several aspects of modern Indian history – including a Scandinavian railway contractor who made his fortune in 1860s Bombay, and the diaries of Irish soldiers serving in India.

In 2016 he published Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle (Oxford University Press), a comparative study of the two poets at the start of their careers in 1890s London. It won the 2017 University English Book Prize, and was shortlisted for one of the ESSE Book Awards. John Batchelor, writing in Modern Language Review, described it as ‘concise, ingenious, scholarly, dense, and illuminating’.

In 2023 his second book, Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation, came out with OUP. It seeks to make a contribution in two areas: translation studies and the history of reading. The appetite of Victorian readers for classical literature from Asia has been greatly underestimated. The popularity of the Arabian Nights and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is well known. But this was also an era in which freethinkers consulted the Quran, in which schoolchildren were given abridgements of the Ramayana to read, in which names like ‘Kalidasa’ and ‘Firdusi’ were carved on the façades of public libraries, and in which women’s book clubs discussed Japanese poetry. Asian Classics explores the numerous popular translations that were created to make these texts accessible to the Victorian and Edwardian general readership.

In 2021, Alex was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to undertake his third major research project, Polyglot Century: Victorian Cultures of Multilingualism. The 19th Century saw the arrival of mass literacy in Britain, and the emergence of a thriving autodidact culture whereby people with limited formal education acquired knowledge using digests, encyclopaedias and ‘how to’ guides. One aspect of this self-education revolution that remains understudied is foreign language acquisition, accomplished using cheap primers like A Stepping Stone to the French Language (1851) and Elementary Lessons in Chinese (1887), as well as periodicals like The Polyglot Magazine and The Linguist. Alex is undertaking the first thorough study of these materials, which form a significant but little-known subset within the huge body of Victorian self-help and self-improvement literature. A particular focus is the novelist Thomas Hardy, who taught himself French and German using a variety of grammars, readers, dictionaries and phrasebooks.

Expertise Details

Translation; migration; multilingualism; cosmopolitanism in 19th century

Teaching

Previously, Tom has taught the following course in the department:

HY113 - From Empire to Independence: The Extra-European World in the Twentieth Century

HY120 - Historical Approaches to the Modern World

HY329 - Independent India: Myths of Freedom and Development

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• “Student Politics in British India and Beyond: The Rise and Fragmentation of the All India Student Federation (AISF), 1936-1949”, SAMAJ, 22, 2019.

Articles

• "Boris Johnson Wants a Trade Deal with India. But Will the UK Accept Looser Immigration Rules?", The Wire, 24 January 2022.

• "Are we heading for a golden era in British-Indian relations?", The Spectator, 26 January 2020.

• "Digital politics is here to stay", Left Foot Forward, April 2020.

• "The Trump and Modi bromance that is bad news for Boris Johnson", The New European, 27 February 2020.

Blogs

• "Tommy Robinson Claims to Take Political Refuge in Marbella. But His Brand of Right-Wing Extremism Could Still Thrive in the Covid-19 Economic Crisis", August 10th 2020, published on Young Fabians blog.

• “The government’s mishandling of the lockdown easing is creating new resentments and divisions: The Brexit wounds are resurfacing", June 1st 2020, published on Progress Online.

• “JLF 2019 Interview: Sven Beckert ‘Empire of Cotton’”, October 18th, 2019, published on South Asia @ LSE

• “Coronation Park and the Forgotten Statues of the British Raj”, June 20th, 2019, published on LSE International History Blog

• “India 2019: Catching the Clickbait Generation”, May 8th, 2019, published on South Asia @ LSE

• “South Asia: Walls and Bridges”, February 1st, 2019, published on South Asia @ LSE

Presentations

• June 2020: “The Youth Hostel Association of Indian, the Politics of Leisure, and the Shaping of Indian Youth During the Long 1950s", Conference of Society for the History of Children and Youth, Galway, Ireland

• January 2020: “The Labour Camp and the Shaping of the Indian Youth After Independence, circa 1954-1965", Conference on Childhood, Youth and Identity in South Asia, Shiv Nadar University and Ambedkar University Delhi, New Delhi

• May 2019: “Indian Youth and the Defense of the Nation: Youth (De) Mobilisations, Youth Physicality, and the Birth of the National Cadet Core, 1940-1962”, India and Pakistan: The Formative Phase, 1947-1960, British Academy and Royal Holloway, London

• November 2018: “Student Politics in British India and Beyond: The Rise and Fragmentation of the All India Student Federation (AISF), 1936-1949”, South Asia from the Lens of Student Politics, Sciences Po, Paris

• June 2018: “Indian Prison Policy in the 1950s: Everyday Violence, The United Nations and Human Rights”, Retrieving the 1950s as a transitional moment in India’s foreign and domestic policy, Asia Association Studies Conference, New Delhi

• May, 2018: “Growing up a Dalit Youth in India, 1920- 1965”, Narration and ImaginationUCL South Asia ECR Conference, University College London, London

Honours and awards

• 2019 Spring term: Visiting Research Scholar at Columbia University in New York

• 2018 Winter term: Visiting Research Scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 

• 2019: Royal Historical Society Postgraduate Research Support Grant 

• 2018: Partnership PhD Mobility Scheme Bursary, LSE. Read his Q&A for LSE Academic Partnerships about his time at Columbia University, New York (Spring, 2019).

• 2018: Fellow at the Royal Asiatic Society

• 2017: LSE PhD studentship

• 2015-16: 120th Anniversary LSE Masters Scholarship

Teaching 

• IR211 America as a Global Power: FDR to Trump, Teaching assistant, Teaching Score 4.5/5