Dr Karan Thapar (DPhil International Relations 1977) will be interviewed by Professor Faisal Devji (Professor of Indian History at St Antony’s College) after which the audience will be invited for a Q&A.

Karan Thapar is an Indian journalist, news presenter and interviewer. He is head of Infotainment Television (ITV), a television production house making programmes for BBC, Channel NewsAsia, CNBC, CNN-IBN and Doordarshan. He graduated from Pembroke College in Cambridge where he was also President of the Cambridge Union. After obtaining his doctorate from St Antony’s, Karan started at the London Times, The Economist and The Spectator. 

In 1991, Karan returned to India where he became producer of the programme Eyewitness, a window on current affairs for the Indian public.  After conducting path-breaking interviews with former Indian and Pakistani Presidents, he had become India’s best-known TV presenter and won numerous international and Indian awards. He is perhaps best known for his Hard Talk and Devil’s Advocate series.

Faisal Devji is Professor of Indian History at the University of Oxford and a Governing Body Fellow at St Antony’s. He is a Fellow at New York University’s Institute of Public Knowledge. Faisal completed his PhD in Intellectual History at the University of Chicago in 1994. He was then elected Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He has also held faculty positions at the New School in New York and Yale.

He is interested in the intellectual history and political thought of modern South Asia as well as in the emergence of Islam as a global category. In his research, he has focussed on the cultural and philosophical meanings of violence as much as the emergence of non-violence as a political project.

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