Light and Darkness: Imaging the Night in the British EmpireOxford Brookes University, Oxford, 26–27 June 2025

Deadline: 15 February 2025 “The sun never sets on the British Empire” was more than a celebratory assertion of the vastness of colonial dominion; it embodied the ideological underpinnings of the British imperial project. Central to this ideology was the interplay between the symbolic and material constructs of 'light' and 'darkness,' through which the empire represented itself as an 'empire of light.' This framing, grounded in epistemological and symbolic discourses, positioned the British a...