Profiles in Kipling Studies

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y

Aaron ACKERLEY	University of London, Queen Mary College amackerley1@sheffield.ac.uk	Aaron Ackerley is an early career historian who focuses on modern British and imperial history, with a particular interest in the intersections between politics and the media. He completed a Wolfson Founded-funded PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2020 entitled ‘Economic Ideas in the Interwar British Daily Press’ and he is currently working as a Teaching Associate at Queen Mary University of London. Aaron has recently had chapters published on the professional identities of journalists in twentieth-century Britain, the political economy of the Guardian, and the history of ‘free speech’ and the British press, and an article on radical politics in the interwar quality press. He is currently researching Lord Beaverbrook’s Empire Crusade campaign of 1929-31. Aaron is interested in the historical influence of Kipling on the media in Britain and its Empire, Kipling’s relationship with the popular press, and his more general influence over popular imperial cultures
Satish C AIKANT	HNB Garhwal University aikant.satish@gmail.com	Satish C. Aikant is former Professor and Chair of the Department of English H. N. B. Garhwal University and a former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He has been a Visiting Professor at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is a critic and a translator, and his writings on postcolonial literatures, literary theory and contemporary culture have appeared in a wide range of journals and books. His publications include Critical Spectrum: Essays on Literary Culture (2004) and Postcolonial Indian Literature: Toward a Critical Framework (2018). He contributed a chapter titled “Going Native, Cautiously: Colonial Ambivalence in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim” to the volume Kipling in India, India in Kipling (2021) edited by Harish Trivedi and Janet Montefiore. He was editor of the journal Summerhill: IIAS Review (2008- 2013). He has also served as the Chairperson on the jury of Book Awards for The Valley of Words International Festival of Literature and Arts.
Roger AYERS	roger295@ntlworld.com	Roger Ayers was given the run of his father’s red-leather pocket editions at an early age, which got him hooked on Rudyard Kipling as a story-teller during his schooldays. A chance purchase of Sea Warfare at a jumble sale 10 years later turned him into a collec- tor of everything to do with Kipling, which lead him to the Kipling Society. During some twenty years of Army staff appointments and Civil Service postings overseas he was unable to play an active part in the Kipling Society until he returned to England on final retirement. He became Membership Secretary in 1998, Chairman of Council in 2003 and 2004, and President of the Society from 2011 to 202o. He has run courses on the life and works of Rudyard Kipling for his local branch of the University of the Third Age (U3A) as well as introductory courses in his other active hobby, archaeology. He has made numerous contributions to the New Readers’ Guide, drawing on his knowledge of soldiers and soldiering, and of military history.
Rangana BANERJI	Calcutta University ranganaban@gmail.com	Rangana Banerji is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, University of Calcutta. Her interests include nineteenth century studies particularly related to the institutionalization of English studies in Bengal, and more recently, studies of the Bengal Partition. Her publications include an article in The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Vol. 12 [Ashgate].
Christopher BENFEY	Mount Holyoke College cbenfey@mtholyoke.edu	Christopher Benfey is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature and a well known scholar of Emily Dickinson, He has written four highly regarded books about the American Gilded Age. These include A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade, He is also an established essayist and critic who has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and TheTimes Literary Supplement. He has published If, the Untold Story of Kipling’s America (Penguin 2019) a new exploration of Kipling’s life and work in ‘Gilded Age’’ America.
Vinita Dhondiyal BHATNAGAR	UIT, RGPV,Bhopal vinita.dhondiyal@gmail.com	Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar is Professor and Dean at the Department of Humanities UIT, RGPV,Bhopal.Her association with Kipling dates back to the early nineties and the MPhil dayswith Professor Harish Trivedi as MPhil guide. She has now come to believe she has a Karmic connection with him.In the recent past she has written “Öpium, Empire and the Orient:Reading Kipling in the context of Narco Politics” and “Reading Kipling in Kipling’sOwn Country.” Professor Dhondiyal Bhatanagar lives in Madhya Pradesh which considers itself Mowgli country. I have also written an article for The Hindu on Kipling’s ghost in the land of Mowgli.
Elleke BOEHMER	Oxford University elleke.boehmer@ell.ox.ac.uk	Professor of World Literature in the English Faculty, Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College. Her own work on colonial and postcolonial literature has repeatedly had to confront the global currency of Kipling, whether his antipodean imitators in the late 19th century, or his resurfacing in Rushdie and Roy, among many others, in the late 20th. Elleke’s recent work includes Postcolonial Poetics (2018) and Indian Arrivals (2015), which won the biennial ESSE prize 2015-16. Boehmer’s recent fiction includes To the Volcano (2019) and The Shouting in the Dark (2015), winner of the EASA Olive Schreiner Prize for Prose, 2018.
Howard BOOTH	Manchester University howard.j.booth@manchester.ac.uk	Howard Booth is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. Among various research interests, his work on Kipling has included editing The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge UP, 2011), a chapter “Kipling, ‘beastliness’ and Soldatenliebe” in In Time’s Eye, edited by Janet Montefiore (Manchester UP, 2013), and Modernism and Empire, which he co-edited with Nigel Rigby (Manchester UP, 2000). He gave a keynote on “The War in the Mountains” at the 2016 ‘Kipling and Europe’ conference in Bologna, and a paper on “France at War” at the ‘Kipling in the News’ conference in London in September 2021. He has also contributed reviews to the Kipling Journal, for which he is on the referee panel.
Inger K. BROEGGER	ikbrog@yahoo.dk	Inger K. Broegger received her Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen in 2019. The title of her dissertation was ‘The Kipling That Everybody Read: Narrative Strategies in the Early Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling’. She also holds M.A. (Cand.mag.) degrees in classics, Latin and English Language and Literature from the University of Copenhagen, as well as an M.A. in English literature from Durham University. She has published articles in the Kipling Journal on Kipling’s ‘Friendly Brook and ‘The Manner of Men.’ She has presented papers at four Kipling conferences, on ‘Beyond the Pale’, ‘The Story of Muhammed Din’, ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ and the influence of Kipling upon the Danish Nobel prize winner Johannes V. Jensen. The latter, ‘An Intoxicating Spark: Kipling, Johannes V. Jensen and Vitalist Modernism,’ was published in an abridged version in The Kipling Journal in 2017. Inger Broegger is now an independent scholar (whenever time permits) and a Sixth Form College teacher in Denmark. She hopes soon to publish an article on Kipling’s Mowgli stories and one day maybe an edited version of her dissertation.
Julius BRYANT	Victoria and Albert Museum bryantbarbara1234@gmail.com	Julius Bryant is Keeper of Word and Image at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where the collections in his care include drawings, designs, architecture, photography, posters, watercolours, paintings, the art of the book and the National Art Library. He was previously Chief Curator and Director of Museums and Collections at English Heritage (1990–2005). Among the major exhibitions he has co-curated are James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, 1713-1788: The Rediscovery of Antiquity (V&A and Bard Graduate Center, New York, 2007); Art and Design for All: The Victoria and Albert Museum (Bonn and Budapest, 2011) and William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain (BGC and V&A, 2013). His publications include Kenwood: Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest (Yale, 2005), Art and Design for All: The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A, 2011) and Caro: Close Up (Yale, 2012). His current research is on John Lockwood Kipling.
Alex BUBB	London University, Roehampton alexander.bubb@roehampton.ac.uk	Alex Bubb is a Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University in London. He has written on Victorian literature and several aspects of Indian colonial history, including the business networks of early Indian railway contractors and the letters and diaries of Irish soldiers serving in India. In 2016 he published Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle, a comparative study of the two poets during the early phase 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 recent years Alex has been working on his second book, Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation.., published by OUP in April 2023.
Dominic DAVIES	London University, City dominic.davies@city.ac.uk	Senior Lecturer in English at City, University of London, where he is also director of the BA English programme. He holds a DPhil and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Oxford. He is the author of two books and more than twenty peer reviewed articles broadly in the field of colonial and postcolonial politics, literature, and culture. He is currently writing a cultural history of infrastructure development in modern Britain, provisionally entitled Levelling Up? British Infrastructure and the Politics of Empire, Nation, and Race (forthcoming with Lawrence & Wishart in 2022).
William DILLINGHAM	Emory University wdillin@emory.edu	William Dillingham is Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Emory University, where he taught English Literature for forty years. Among his many awards are a Guggernheiim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship. While writing books and articles on 19^th Century American literature, he has also become one of the best respected scholars in Kipling studies. His Rudyard Kipling, Hell and Heroism (Palgrave Macmillan 2005), and Being Kipling (Palgrave Macmillan 2008) were followed in 2013 by Rudyatd Kipling, Life Love, and Art (ELT Press) He has contributed a number of articles to the Kipling Journal since 1999, including discussion of “Way down the Ravi River”, “The Children of the Zodiac”, “Mary Postgate”, and “His Gift”.
Jill DIDUR	Concordia University jill.didur@concordia.ca	Dr. Jill Didur is an Associate Professor in English at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (UTP 2006), and co-editor of Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (Routledge 2015). She has recently published articles on the significance of the colonial hill station settings in novels by Anita Desai (Textual Practice 27.3 2013) and Kiran Desai (Postcolonial Ecologies, Oxford UP 2011), and she is completing a book about imperialism, Himalayan landscapes, and the environment in postcolonial literature. She is on the editorial boards for ARIEL, Postcolonial Text, and Topia, and the management committee of Environmental
Paolo D’INDINOSANTE	Sapienza University of Rome paolo.dindinosante@uniroma1.it	The title of Paolo’s PhD thesis is ‘Imperial Voices in Verse: British Poetry and the Empire, c. 1815–1914.’ Situated at the intersection of British imperial history and literary studies, his project aims to explore and map the highly uncharted territory of British imperial poetry approximately in the years 1815 to 1914. He has also been working on the Italian reception of Kipling (especially in the years 1890 to 1939) and on video game adaptations of Kipling’s literary works.
Edward J. ERICKSON	State University of New York ederickson100@gmail.com	Dr. Edward Erickson is an independent historian and a retired Professor of Military History from the Department of War Studies at the Marine Corps University. He is also a retired regular United States Army lieutenant colonel with multiple combat tours in the field artillery and additional experiences as a foreign area officer specializing in the Middle East. Dr. Erickson is recognized as an authority on the First World War in the Middle East and Turkish military policy. He has a PhD in history from the University of Leeds and he is one of the foremost authorities on the Ottoman army during the Great War. Among the many articles and books he has published are Ordered To Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War; Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans 1912-1913; Gallipoli: The Ottoman Campaign; Gallipoli: Command under Fire; and Palestine: The Ottoman Campaigns of 1914-1918. In 2018 he published A Soldiers’s Kipling, Poetry and the Profession of Arms. [Pen and Sword]
Angela EYRE	The Open University angela.eyre@gmail.com	Angela Eyre is an Associate Lecturer in English and Honorary Associate at the Open University, UK. She has written on Indian and postcolonial literature and is the author of ‘Mind the Gap: Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani words in Kipling’s Kim’ in Kipling in India: India in Kipling ed. by Trivedi and Montefiore (Routledge, 2021). Her interest in the representation of agrarian relations in India led to her giving a paper on Kipling’s treatment of land legislation in his short story ‘Tods’ Amendment’ at the ‘Kipling in the News’ conference in London in September 2021.
Neelum Sarah GOUR	nsgour@rediffmail.com	Neelum Saran Gour is an Indian English writer of fiction, based in the city of Prayagraj, formerly called Allahabad. She taught Kipling to post-graduate students at the Allahabad University and has worked on Kipling’s Allahabad phase at the Pioneer Press. She has been Writer-in-residence at the University of Kent and has been awarded the prestigious Hindu Prize for fiction in 2018.
Madhu GROVER	University of Delhi mgrover10@gmail.com	Madhu Grover, Associate Professor of English at Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi wrote her doctoral thesis on Rudyard Kipling, titled ‘Ideology and Form in Kipling’s Early Indian Narratives’ (University of Delhi, 2009). Her other areas of interest are Indian Writing in English, Colonial Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has reviewed contemporary fiction, published some of her own poetry, and done editorial work on John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (Worldview, 2001), as also on the poet Nissim Ezekiel for Modern Indian Literature (OUP, 1999) and the Routledge Online Encyclopedia of Modernism (2016). She has presented papers on Kipling at international conferences and has published on the writer in Bharat, M. and Grover, M. (2019), eds. Representing the Exotic and the Familiar: Politics and perception in literature (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2019); in Kipling and Yeats at 150: Retrospectives/Perspectives, eds. Promodini Varma and Anubhav Pradhan, (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).in Kipling in India: India in Kipling, eds. Harish Trivedi and Janet Montefiore, (Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2021). Her most recent published essay, “Border Crossings in Kipling’s Early Indian Narratives”, features in The Kipling Journal, Vol. 95. No. 388 (Dec. 2021).
Daniel HADAS	King’s College, London dhadas1979@gmail.com	Daniel Hadas studied Latin and Greek at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, and at King’s College London, where he now lectures in Medieval Latin. His published work is mostly on St Augustine of Hippo, but he is interested in Western literature from antiquity to the 20th century. He writes: ‘Kipling is the first grown-up poet I learned to love. A 1907 printing of The Five Nations, bought at a library sale, is a prized possession from my childhood. As an adult, I find his poems sometimes crass, with some experiments I wish he hadn’t made. But he continues to fascinate me through his vast variety of idiom, his interest in the material world, and his ability to ventriloquize the common man. Only Shakespeare and Pope are his equals in giving everlasting form to a thought worth remembering.’ In recent months Daniel Hadas has been reviewing our notes on Kipling’s verse in the New Readers’ Guide, making additions and clarifications, and identifying references to earlier English literature, to the Bible and to the classics. He has also added links to much Kipling-related material on the Internet, including early illustrated versions in magazines and musical recordings. This work continues.
Andrew HAGIIOANNU	andrewhagiioannu@talktal;k.net	Andrew is the author of The Man who would be Kipling: The Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). He has also published many articles on Kipling, imperialism and related topics in academic journals. Andrew was Visiting Fellow at Oxford University (St John’s College) in 2000. He currently teaches privately and is an examiner with Cambridge Assessment. Andrew’s book on Kipling was largely written during his years as a postgraduate student and part-time tutor (he received his PhD in 1998 for his research thesis on Kipling’s short stories). By 2005, he had been a part-time tutor for twelve years. Perhaps inevitably, that year he turned his hand to other pursuits and interests. These included private teaching and a parallel career as a composer of music for TV, film, and other media. He has a catalogue of several hundred compositions that feature on TV programmes and networks worldwide and, more recently, in healthcare videos used by the World Health Organisation and many other NGOs. Andrew retains an interest in all things literary, imperial and postcolonial, and hopes one day to write the second volume of The Man who would be Kipling – which he promised twenty years ago in the original book.
Mary HAMER	kiplingandtrix@gmail.com	Mary Hamer taught at Cambridge before taking up fellowships at Harvard. She is a cultural historian, publishing widely on representation as it intersects with politics and history. Topics include the image of Cleopatra and the understanding of incest and abuse. Her novel Kipling & Trix, the product of ten years of research, was awarded the Virginia Prize. She is a former Chair of the Kipling Society.
Stephen HANCOCK	Brigham Young University stephen.hancock@byuh.edu	Stephen Hancock is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University – Hawaii. He graduated from Purdue University with a PhD in Romantic and Victorian British literature. He is the author of The Romantic Sublime and Middle-class Subjectivity in the Victorian Novel (Routledge, 2005) and various articles on 19th century literature. He is currently working on a book project on hospitality, violence, and the feminine across the 19th century.
Evelyne HANQUART-TURNER	ehturner@hotmail.fr	Evelyne Hanquart-Turner is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Paris Est-Créteil and Member of Darwin College, Cambridge. She studied and taught at the Sorbonne and Cambridge before her election to a chair at the University of Paris Est-Créteil where she founded and directed the Research Institute IMAGER (E.A. 3958). She has contributed several papers on Kipling’s short stories to the Kipling Journal and to Kipling in India. India in Kipling (2021), as well as to various French journals. Her other literary interests are E.M. Forster, the British Raj, and contemporary Indian novelists such as Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, Amit Chaudhuri, Anita Nair, Shashi Tharoor , Anuradha Roy and Amitav Ghosh. Her last book, La voix anglophone du roman indien. De l’Empire à la Diaspora, on Indian fiction in English, came out in Paris in 2013. She is also a short-story writer.
Peter HAVHOLM	The College of Wooster phavholm@me.com	Peter Havholm is Professor of English Emeritus at The College of Wooster in Ohio, USA, where he taught English literature, literary theory, and new media. He has won the Sears Award for Innovation in Teaching. Hehas published in Critical Inquiry, Computers and theHumanities, Academic Computin9, The journal ef Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Children’s Literature, and The K.iplin9 Journal . He has received the EDUCOM/NCRIPTAL Award for Distinguished Curricular Innovation. He has published Politics and Awe in Kipling’s Fiction (Ashgate 2008) and has been an active member of the Project Group for the New Readers’ Guide.
Chris HILL	chrishill197@googlemail.com	I am a laser/optics scientist descended from the Hills of Carnmoney and Ballyboley near Belfast. My interest in S A (Alec) Hill of Ballyboley and Allahabad, Kipling’s friend and travel companion, is explained here. Alec died young and has had less attention than his widow Edmonia (Ted) Hill, née Taylor. The search for Kipling’s contacts and sources is endless, but Alec is worth a look: not just for Rikki-Tikki-Tavi in his Allahabad garden, and the “Professor” in From Sea to Sea, but for first-hand experience as a teenage schoolmaster, a well-regarded meteorologist, and a lecturer and commentator who visited his better-known uncle William Hill in Abbeville, SC. Alec’s newspaper writings about weather and American politics, his battles with fascinating but overcomplicated recording machines, his work with Ruchi Ram Sahni, and even his school primers published in India, may be relevant to Kipling studies. His travel photographs are often reproduced: whatever his artistic merits, he had optical expertise and a long professional interest in solar radiation. I and the North of Ireland Family History Society (NIFHS) will be grateful for comments, corrections, surviving copies of Alec’s writings, and suggestions on the usual number of baffling biographical points.
Daniel KARLIN	Bristol University daniel.karlin@bristol.ac.uk	Daniel Karlin is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol, where he was Winterstoke Professor from 2010 to 2020; he previously held appointments at University College London, Boston University, and the University of Sheffield. He began his career as a Kipling scholar with an (unexpected) invitation from Penguin to edit The Jungle Books in 1986. Since then he has written many articles and essays on Kipling’s work, and edited in 1999 an Oxford Authors volume of his stories and poems, republished in 2015 in the Oxford World’s Classics series. He is a regular contributor to the Kipling Journal, and has the honour to be one of the Kipling Society’s Vice-Presidents. Professor Karlin’s research on Kipling is wide-ranging: as well as the Jungle Books he has written on Plain Tales from the Hills, Captains Courageous, Actions and Reactions, Limits and Renewals, and Thy Servant a Dog, on Kipling’s war poetry and his use of French, on his view of Anglo-American relations and his use of the semi-colon. His current research involves looking at the French translations of Kipling in the Pléiade edition of his work, which have surprising things to tell us about Kipling’s English.
Sarvchetan KATOCH	University of Delhi chetan_katoch@yahoo.com	Dr. Sarvchetan Katoch is an Assistant Professor of English at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi. His academic interests include Modern Indian Literature, Literature of the Indian Diaspora, Literary Theory, Film and Cultural Studies and Translation Studies. He has published a number of scholarly articles Indian Literature and Cinema in various academic journals and edited volumes. He is currently working on a book titled The Spinning Reel: Reclaiming Swaraj Through Rachnatmak Hindi Cinema.
Chandrika KAUL	University of St Andrew’s ck24@st-andrews.ac.uk	Chandrika Kaul Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, U.K. ck24@st-andrews.ac.uk Her main research interests span the British Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries with a particular focus on the British Raj in India; Media and Communications, especially the British and Anglo-Indian press, the BBC and AIR; as well as the British Monarchy. From her childhood years, she has been fascinated by Rudyard Kipling’s unique storytelling, an interest that has evolved into studying Kipling’s engagement with the British empire and media within India, the UK, South Africa, and the USA. Her monographs include Reporting the Raj, the British Press and India (Studies in Imperialism series, Manchester UP 2003 & Indian edition 2017); and, Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Britain and India in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan 2014, 2017).
Sandra KEMP	University of Lancaster sandra.kemp@lancaster.ac.uk	Sandra Kemp is an academic and curator with a background in English literature. She is Director, The Ruskin Library Museum and Research Centre at the University of Lancaster and Visiting Professor in the Department of Materials at Imperial College London. She was previously Research Associate at IMAGES&CO, and has held leadership roles in the university and cultural sectors, most recently at the Victoria at the Albert Museum as Senior Research Felloe, at he London College of Communication, and at the Royal College of Art, where she has been Director of Research. She curated the Wellcome Trust-sponsored exhibition Future Face: Image, Identity, Innovation at the Science Museum, with a related programme at the National Portrait Gallery. She is an authority on Lockwood Kipling,and in 2014 curated a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum on his work. . She has taken a particular interest in Kiping as a practitioner of the craft of writing, and publshed Writings on Writing (Cambridge, 1996) with Lisa Lewis. She has served on the Council of the Kipling Society, and has contriuted a number of articles to the Kipling Journal.
Nadhra KHAN	Lahore University nadhra.khan@gmail.com	Nadhra Khan is Assistant Professor of Art History at Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan. She specializes in the history of art and architectural ornament of nineteenth century Punjab but her research and teaching interests also cover the earlier Mughal and later colonial visual culture of this region. She has held research fellowships at SOAS, London (Charles Wallace Fellowship, 2010-11), Paris (2015), Princeton (Fulbright, 2014-15), and Oxford (Barakat Trust, 2015). Her forthcoming publications include her monograph entitled Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Samadhi: Understanding Sikh Architectural Ornament, which will appear later in 2016, and an essay on John Lockwood Kipling’s pedagogy in the context of colonial art education in India.
George KIEFFER	georgekieffer@btinternet.com	George Kieffer is a businessman and banker who graduated in English Literature from the University of Exeter and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Essex. Although well beyond retirement age he continues active as chair and board member of a number of businesses and organisations. His interests include military and intelligence history on which he has published in journals and magazines. He has a passion for the Indian sub-continent, its history and its people and he has travelled extensively, including following Kim’s footsteps along the Great Trunk Road. A member of the Kipling Society he frequently revisits Kipling’s writings and wrote about the author’s Freemasonry in the Kipling Journal Vol 76, September 2002 “A Contrary Man and Mason”. He is an active contributor to the elucidation of Masonic references in Kipling’s writings for the New Readers Guide. A Freemason himself he lectures to Lodges on Rudyard Kipling and other Masonic literary figures and the influence of Masonic thought and ethos on their work. He is now introducing his grand-children to the joys of the Just So Stories and the Jungle Books among others.
Mike KIPLING	michaelrkipling@gmail.com	Mike Kipling is a retired actuary whose interests now lie in local and family history. He first wrote about Kipling’s ancestry in the September 2011 edition of the Kipling Journal and has written further articles about Kipling’s Vermont house Naulakha (2013), John Kipling’s fellow Irish Guards officers (2015), Kipling’s time in Southsea (2017) and Kipling’s first love Flo Garrard (also 2017). He has been a member of the Society’s Council since 2014 and is currently Secretary and Treasurer. He edits the Society’s electronic newsletter, for which he always welcomes short contributions from members. He is an occasional volunteer for the National Trust at Bateman’s, where in particular he is part of the team reading Kipling’s poetry in the garden for summer visitors, although has also been known to lead guided tours of the interior in winter too. Mike is always happy to speak about Kipling to external organisations, having in recent years spoken to a Horsham Probus group on ‘Rudyard Kipling’s Sussex’ and to a masonic lodge on ‘Rudyard Kipling: Man of India and Mason’.
Ulrich C. KNOEPFLMACHER	Princeton Universityf@princeton.ac	U. C. Knoepflmacher is the Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature Emeritus at Princeton University. He has published numerous books and articles on nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry, as well as British and American children’s literature. He spoke at the Vermont Symposium in 2013 on “Kipling’s American Berangements for the Young.” He writes: ‘Before our family fled annexed-Austria in 1938, my father presented me with “Das Djungelbuch,” a German translation of the first Jungle Book. As a teenager in South America, I devoured Spanish translations of British classics and learned enough English to master Silas Marner. But more than three decades passed before this English professor at Berkeley and Princeton was smitten again by the infinite variety of Kipling’s art.’ ‘Even after I had retired in 2006, Kipling’s Shakespearian ability to balance seeming opposites continued to fascinate me. I had first examined his “mixy” craft’s appeal to a dual audience of child and adult in a prize-winning 1983 essay on “Cross-writing” (in “The Just-So Stories”). That essay also contended that this book hid an homage to Effie, the dead daughter a grieving father covertly memorialized.’ ‘My co-edited 2010 Victorian Hybridities included an essay on the masterpiece Kim. My longer discussion of the novel appeared in the Handbook of the English Novel, 1830-1900 (DeGruyter 2020).’
Christopher KREUZER	crlk4@topmail.com	Christopher Kreuzer studied Modern History at the University of Kent (due to graduate MA in November 2023). His dissertation (completed November 2022) was on a set of cathedral war memorial tablets erected by the Imperial War Graves Commission in France and Belgium after the First World War. Kipling’s role in relation to those memorials does feature in the dissertation, but the main focus of his Kipling research has been on The King’s Pilgrimage of May 1922, giving a talk to the Kipling Society in November 2022 that looked at the role played by this event in bolstering the Entente between Britain and France. He is continuing to carry out research in relation to Kipling and war memorials, including those in Canada and elsewhere in the British Empire, along with a continuing interest in Kipling’s work with the Imperial War Graves Commission. ‘
John LEE	j.lee@bristol.ac.uk	John Lee is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. He has written various articles on Kipling (for Essays in Criticism, The Kipling Journal, Kipling and Yeats at 150, Media History, and Shakespeare Studies), and is the author of the Oxford Bibliographies Online entry for Kipling. Presently he is particularly interested in the original contexts for Kipling’s poems. His longer publications are in the fields of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature, and he does a significant amount of teaching in the field of medical humanities. He is a great fan of David Alan Richards’ Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography.
Sarah LEFANU	sarahlefanu@gmail.com	Sarah LeFanu is an independent scholar and writer. She is the author of Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War (Hurst, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. She has published books on feminism and science fiction, on the English writer Rose Macaulay, and on the liberation struggle in Mozambique and Mozambique’s first president Samora Machel. She has written biographical essays on subjects ranging from Majorie Blandy, who was one of the few female doctors working in France during the First World War, to the acclaimed Mozambican artist Malangatana. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the universities of Exeter and Bristol, and she blogs on films at www.filmwatchingwomen.wordpress.com. For many years Sarah has volunteered with her local Riding for the Disabled group. One of her favourite Kipling stories (not just because it’s about ponies) is ‘The Maltese Cat’.
Fred LERNER	fred@fredlerner.org	Fred Lerner is a librarian, bibliographer, and historian, who holds degrees in History and Library Science from Columbia University, where he received his doctorate. He is the author of The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age (Continuum, 1998, 2009). Fred has written extensively on science fiction. Modern Science Fiction and the American Literary Community (Scarecrow Press, 1985) explores science fiction’s changing reputation in 20^th-century America. “A Master of Our Art” describes Rudyard Kipling’s impact on the science fiction field. An ardent Sherlockian, Fred argues that Lurgan Sahib in Kim was actually Sherlock Holmes in disguise, a thesis advanced in “Sherlock in Simla” (Baker Street Journal, Sumer 2021).
Janice LINGLEY	jmlingley.lsj.cw@phonecoop.com	Janice Lingley, an independent scholar and researcher, obtained a first class honours degree with distinction, in English, followed by a masters in Medieval English, as a mature student at Bristol University, after a formative period working in children’s publishing as an assistant editor and freelance writer. Janice has had articles published on Arthur Ransome, Richard Jefferies, John Masefield, Edward Thomas, and Robert Frost. Her published work on Kipling focuses on his child-centred fiction. This ongoing research concerns the influence on his work of the extended forest-and-farm holiday which followed the dismal Southsea years. Her annotated presentation of a memoir of her brother by Trix Fleming, ‘Some Childhood Memories of Rudyard Kipling’ and ‘More Childhood Memories of Rudyard Kipling’, detailing the holiday, appeared in Nos 380 and 381 of The Kipling Journal. Her most recent articles include: ‘The Light That Failed and Beauty and the Beast’ (No 386), ‘The Kipling Children, ‘Uncle Topsy’ and ‘Student Tickets” (No 387), and ‘What the Winged Hat Amal Did’ (No 392). Kipling’s use of nomenclature is also of interest. Janice’s most recent research on this aspect of Kipling concerns the possible sources of the epithet ‘Gisborne of the Woods and Forests’ in ‘In the Rukh’.
Sarah LONSDALE	London University, City sarah.lonsdale.1@city.ac.u	Sarah Lonsdale is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at City, University of London. Her first book, The Journalist in British Fiction and Film (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) includes an analysis of Kipling’s attitudes to the mass press and the intersection between journalism, storytelling and propaganda in the short story. ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat’. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers was published by MUP in October 2020. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Literature and History, Media History and the Women‘s History Review and she has written two articles for the Kipling Journal on Kipling’s early journalism and his relationship with the mass media. A former reporter for the Observer newspaper, she still writes for the Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement. Her next book,Wildly Different: how 5 women reclaimed nature in a man’s world (2024) examines five historical women’s engagement with the wild outdoors, and how they challenged patriarchal obstacles against their access to it.
Arisa LOOMBA	Oxford University arisa.loomba@stx.ox.ac.uk	Arisa began her PhD in History at the University of Oxford in 2021. She is partnered with the National Trust and will be conducting research with the library and other artefacts at Bateman’s, with the aim of learning more about migration and mobility in the British Empire.
Erin LOUTTIT	erin.louttit@hotmail.com.	Erin Louttit wrote her doctoral thesis on Buddhism in Kipling’s works. She remains interested in cultural interpretations of Buddhism and Kipling and also researches other English-language writers of the British colonial period in India. She can be reached at
Tricia LOOTENS	University of Georgia tlootens@uga.edu	Tricia Lootens is Associate Professor and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia. She co-edited the Longman’s Cultural Edition of Kim with Paula M. Krebs. She specializes in Victorian poetry, and has published on Kipling in connection with the Indo-Anglian poet Toru Dutt (2005), as well as Victorian patriotic writing (Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, 2000). She is the author of Hemans and Home: Romanticism, Victorianism, and the Domestication of National Identity, and Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (University Press of Virginia, 1996). She followed this with a book project entitled Haunted Spheres: Poetess Performance, Anti-Slavery Patriotism, and the Dream of National Innocence.” At the 2013 Vermont Symposium on ‘Kipling in America’ she spoke on ‘Huckleberry Finn and Kim’, and in 2021 she gave a a paper to the Kipling Society on ‘Opening Kim: Kipling, Twain, Dutt.’’
Andrew LYCETT	alycett@btinternet.com	Andrew Lycett is a journalist and author who has written a number of biographies. His well-received life of Rudyard Kipling was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1999 and revised in 2015. He has also edited several collections of Kipling stories, poems and articles – amongst them Kipling Abroad (I.B. Tauris 2010). He is a Vice-President of the Kipling Society, having served on the Council and as Meetings Secretary. He is interested in all aspects of Kipling, particularly the author’s life and times, and his reception in the modern world. He talks, lectures and broadcasts on these topics. He can be contacted by email at alycett@btinternet.com He has a website https://andrewlycett.co.uk and his tweets can be found @alycett1.
Philip MALLETT	University of St Andrew’s pvm@st-andrews.ac.uk	After teaching in the University of St Andrews for 43 years I am now (nominally) retired, and an Honorary Senior Lecturer in St Andrews. I’ve written on authors from Shakespeare and Donne to Larkin and Heaney, but my primary interests have been in Hardy, Ruskin, and Kipling. My work on Kipling includes the Penguin edition of Limits and Renewals; an edited collection of essays (Kipling Considered, 1989); Rudyard Kipling: a Literary Life (2003) – a biography which (I hope) doubles as an introduction to his work and its contexts; and a number of essays, most recently ‘Kipling and the Ethics of Adventure’ in Jan Montefiore and Harish Trivedi’s Kipling in India (2020). I have closely related interests in Flora Annie Steel, and in Victorian accounts and memoirs of the ‘Indian Mutiny’. Broader interests include literature and science in the nineteenth century, Victorian writing about sex, gender, and masculinity, and the Victorians in Italy. Current work includes a new edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles for Norton, and a paper on ‘Hardy and the Anthropocene’.
John MCBRATNEY	John Carroll University jmcbratney@jcu.edu	John McBratney received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1987 and specializes in Victorian literature and British imperial literature. He is Emeritus Professor of John Carroll University, Ohio, where he taught English literature for 34 years and was Chair of the Department of English. His publications include Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction of the Native-Born (Ohio State 2002). He gave a paper to the Kipling Society in February 2021 that provided an overview of Kipling studies in the 21st century.
John McGIVERING		John McGivering (1930-2019) has been a major contributor to the New Readers’ Guide. He joined the Kipling Society in 1958, and was a highly active member, serving at various times as Librarian, Meetings Secretary, and Council member. He had an intimate knowledge of Kipling’s works, and published A Kipling Dictionary (Macmillan, London 1967) – an updated and greatly extended version of the work of similar title published by W. A. Young (Routledge 1911). In retirement, he quickly mastered computer skills and became an invaluable and tireless annotator for the New Readers’ Guide, sending in a steady stream of well-informed notes, and drawing on and updating the work of the ORG editors, most of whom he knew personally. He had served in the Royal Navy and was particularly interested in Kipling’s many stories of the sea. He left a generous bequest to the Society which has been used to support the recent writing competitions named after him.
Janet MONTEFIORE	University of Kent j.e.montefiore@kent.ac.uk	Janet Montefiore is Professor Emerita of the University of Kent, where she taught English Literature from 1978 to 2015. Her books Feminism and Poetry (1987, 1994), Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (1996) and Arguments of Heart and Mind (2002) may seem a long way from Rudyard Kipling; but her first published article was ‘Day and Night in Kipling’ (1978). Her essay ‘Latin, Arithmetic and Pedagogy’, on Kim and ‘Regulus’ appeared in Modernism and Empire, eds. Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby (2001), and her critical study Rudyard Kipling for ‘Writers and their Work’ appeared in 2007, when she became General Editor of Kipling titles for Penguin Classics, herself editing The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (2011). She has directed conferences and symposia on Kipling at the University of Kent (2007), at the Institute of Advanced Studies in London (2011), at Marlboro College in Vermont, USA (2013) and with Professor Harish Trivedi, at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla in 2016, from which came the book Kipling in India: India in Kipling (2020), co-edited by Professor Trivedi and herself. She has also edited the essay collection In Time’s Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling (2013). Since June 2013 she has edited the quarterly Kipling Journal, and is currently Chairman of the Kipling Society.
Naren MENON	narenkmenon@gmail.com k	Naren Menon lives in Sydney, Australia. His last brush with academia was when he completed his professional Accountancy examinations in 1967. What he brings to the table is ‘satiable curtiosity and a lifelong fascination for all things Rudyard Kipling. Naren grew up in Calcutta, the City of Dreadful Night. As a seven-year-old, he was introduced to Kipling’s stories when he joined the Cub pack at La Martiniere, Calcutta. Peter Hopkirk has concluded (what generations of Martinians knew) that the sister school in Lucknow was the model for Kim’s St Xavier in Paribus. Naren’s early interest in Kipling has continued. He is currently Editor of the Jungle Drum, the Newsletter of the Rudyard Kipling Society of Australia, which, regrettably, has been mostly dormant through the Covid era. He has recently completed a major review of the text of the 900 poems on this site.
Usha MUDIGANTI	Ambedkar University, Delhi usha@aud.ac.in	Dr. Usha Mudiganti is an Assistant Professor in the School of Lettersof Ambedkar University, Delhi. Her research interests include the construction of gender and childhood in India and its representation in literature, cinema and popular culture. She critically engages with the changing norms of childhood in a globalized world, while focusing on the impact of technology on childhood and children’s literature. She is also studying the notions that led to the creation of gender-specific school syllabi in 20th century.
Kaori NAGAI	University of Kent k.nagai@kent.ac.uk	Kaori Nagai BA, MA, Tokyo; MA, PhD, Kent. Dr Nagai specialises in colonial discourses of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and her recent research focuses on the intersections between animal studies and postcolonial studies. She is the author of two monographs: Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (2006), and more recently, Imperial Beast Fables: Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire (2020). She has also edited, with an introduction and notes, Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills and the Jungle Books for Penguin Classics, and co-edited Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism (2010). She is a founding member of the Kent Animal Humanities Network, and edited a collection of essays entitled Cosmopolitan Animals (2015, chief editor) with five animal studies colleagues at Kent. Her recent projects include the representation of animals on board ships. I recently held a Caird Short-Term Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum on the topic of sea-faring rats in the age of the British Empire, and organised a conference to be held there, entitled ‘Maritime Animals: Telling stories of animals at sea’ (April 26-27, 2019).
Amrita NARAYANAN	Ahoka University, New Delhi dramritanarayanan@gmail.com	Dr. Amrita Narayanan: A native of Chennai, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Amrita Narayanan lives and practises in Goa, India. Amrita read French and History at Middlebury College as an undergraduate, and earned her doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the Stanford University Psy.D. consortium, after which she trained as a psychoanalyst via the Indian Psychoanalytical Society. She is the author of a book of short fiction, A Pleasant Kind of Heavy and Other Erotic Stories (Aleph Books, 2013), and her short story Stolen, appears in the anthology A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces: Extraordinary Short Stories from the 19th Century to the Present (Aleph Books, 2015). She is editor of the anthology The Parrots of Desire: 3000 years of Erotica in India (Aleph Books, 2017) and contributor to the volume Psychoanalysis in the Indian Terroir (Lexington Books, 2018). She is contributor to the volume Pha(bu)llus: a cultural history (Harper Collins, 2021) and her most recent work In a Rapture of Distress: Women’s Sexuality and Modern India, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in Autumn 2022. Amrita is Visiting Professor in the department of English at Ashoka University, New Delhi, India for the year 2022-2023.
Leonee ORMOND	King’s College, University of London Leonee.ormong@kcl.ac.uk	Leonee Ormond is Professor Emerita of Victorian Studies at King’s College London, and is a former Chairman of the Council of the Kipling Society. Her books include George Du Maurier (1969), Lord Leighton (with Richard Ormond (1975) and Alfred Tennyson: a Literary Life (1993). She has edited A Book of Words for the New Readers’ Guide, and we have also been able to publish her notes on Captains Courageous, originally written for Oxford World’s Classics.
Mark PAFFARD	markpaffard@gmail.com	Mark Paffard is an independent scholar. He published Kipling’s Indian Fiction (Macmillan) in 1989 after completing a Phd. Most of his career was spent in Social Care. He now lives in Pembrokeshire. Since 2015 he has contributed a number of articles to the Kipling Journal, most recently ‘The Wish House and the Working Class’ (March 2019); ‘Pity and Imagination in Late Kipling Stories’ (June 2020), which discusses ‘The Janeites’, ‘The Wish House’, ‘Wireless’ and ‘Mary Postgate’; and ‘Kipling’s Holy Men’ (September 2020), on St Paul and the Lama. He is mainly interested in reading the stories against their broad social and historical context, and on the development of Kipling’s prose style.
Susue PASKINS	susiepaskins@gmail.com	I was awarded a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, in 2017 for my thesis entitled ‘Imagining Enlightenment: Buddhism and the Shaping of Kipling’s “Kim”‘. In my thesis I examined Kipling’s contact with Buddhist ideas and how they influenced his portrayal of the lama in ‘Kim’, and in particular his imagining of the lama as bodhisattva at the end of the novel.. I argued that the novel presents a sympathetic treatment of some key Buddhist ideas in a way that is unique in Victorian fiction. I also examined Kipling’s hostility to Theosophy and argued that this was, in part, because he believed that the Theosophists distorted Buddhist ideas. I am happy to discuss these ideas with anyone who may be interested
Thomas PINNEY	Pomona College tcp04747@pomona.edu	Thomas Pinney is Professor of English, emeritus, at Pomona College, California. He is the editor of the comprehensive Cambridge Edition of the poems of Rudyard Kipling (2013), of the six-volume collection of the letters of Rudyard Kipling (Macmillan 1990-2004), of Kipling’s autobiography, and of a number of volumes of his uncollected articles and speeches, including The Cause of Humanity and other stories (2019)
Judith PLOTZ	George Washington University jplotz@email.gwu.edu	Judith Plotz is Professor Emerita from George Washington University, she is a scholar of British Romanticism, Children’s Literature, and Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. As well as her books and articles on Romanticism, (especially Romanticism and Childhood), she has a dedicated interest in Kipling. Besides various articles published over the past thirty years, she has edited the Penguin Just So Stories and has written on Kipling as a children’s writer. In addition she has written a series of articles for the South Asian Review on Kipling’s colonial literary contemporaries; on A.C Lyall (‘High Roman Fashion’ and the End of British India”); and on H.S. Cunningham’s Chronicles of Dustypore. She reviews regularly for SAR and Children’s Literature. She spoke at the Society’s 2013 symposium on Kipling in America on “Engines that could. ‘“.007’” and the American Machine”
John RADCLIFFE	johnrad@btinternet.com	In his first career after Cambridge John Radcliffe was a BBC producer for some thirty years, in current affairs at the General Overseas Service, making historical documentaries for schools, running the BBC Computer Literacy project in the 1980s, and heading the BBC Production Centre at the Open University. In his second career he has been able to express his life-long devotion to Kipling’s works as On Line Editor for the Kipling Society, creating the Society’s website in 1999, building on the work in the 1960s of scholarly Kipling Society stalwarts led by Reginald Harbord and Roger Lancelyn Green, and working with colleagues all over the world to develop the New Readers’ Guide for the internet, a work of many hands. John has recently given the site a major face-lift with the help of Michael Wilcox. We hope Ruddy would approve of it.
Élodie RAIMBAULT	University of Grenoble-Alpes Elodie.Raimbault @ univ-grenoble-alpes	Élodie Raimbault is a senior lecturer at the University of Grenoble-Alpes (ILCEA4/LISCA) in France, and a member of the Kipling Society. Her latest publication analyses the aesthetics of Rudyard Kipling’s fiction through the spatial dynamics at play in his fiction: Le Géomètre et le vagabond. Espaces littéraires de Rudyard Kipling. (UGA Editions, 2021). Her current research concentrates on popular literature, detection and adventure in the works of Victorian and Edwardian authors such as Kipling, Rider Haggard, Conrad, Wells and Conan Doyle. She focuses on the cartographic, political and geopoetic representations of colonial territories in these authors’ texts, as well as on their scientific and technological scope. Her recent publications in English include articles on Kipling and technology: “Aerial Scapes and Technological Perspectives in the Science-Fiction of H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling” Polysèmes, Société des amis d’inter-textes (SAIT), 2019, ⟨10.4000/polysemes.5406⟩ and “Technology and the Cinematographic Writing of Trauma in Kipling’s Motoring Short Stories” (in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 89 Spring \| 2019, URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/5114
Christina RICHARD	christina.richard96@gmail.co	Christina Richard is an amateur local historian, interested in the people of the Wiltshire village of Tisbury. After retiring from working as a medical administrator she and her husband went to live for eleven years in SW France, and on returning home she took on the Chairmanship of Tisbury History Society, by now having been a member for forty years. Her interest in Rudyard Kipling’s parents Mr and Mrs Lockwood Kipling (Hobnob Press 2021) was stimulated by living about 50 metres from their graves in the churchyard of the medieval Anglican church of St John the Baptist in Ttsbury. Her first book, The Grotto Makers, concerns the lives and work of father and son stonemasons Joseph and Josiah Lane, who lived in Tisbury during the 18^th and early 19^th century and a..e responsible for creating many of the mysterious and enticing grottoes in the landscaped gardens of the period. She is at present writing about the Swing Riots, agricultural labourers who rioted throughout the South of England in 1830. Fifteen of them from Tisbury (the Pythouse Rioters\, were convicted and transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). She will be 83 this year (2022), and has found the research and writing of these boo.cs a joy and a challenge, and very good for the brain!
David Alan RICHARDS	darichards322@gmail.com	David Alan Richards is President of the Society. A graduate of Yale College, the University of Cambridge, and Yale Law School, he is now retired as a property lawyer in Manhattan. His 2010 bibliography of Rudyard Kipling, published by the British Library, is deemed the most definitive of its kind. It is based on examinations of Kipling collections throughout the world, including his own, the most comprehensive ever assembled, now available for study in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. That collection is depicted in the illustrated catalogue for its 2007 exhibition in the Beinecke, Rudyard Kipling: The Books I Leave Behind. He is also a frequent contributor of articles to the Kipling Journal. He was formerly an officer of New York City’s Grolier Club, America’s largest and oldest rare book collectors’ society, and currently serves as the president of the Yale Library Associates. Among his other published works are Skulls and Keys: The Hidden History of Yale’s Secret Societies (2017), and I Give These Books: The History of the Yale University Library, 1656-2016 (2022). His recorded talks about all these books may be found at darichardsbooks.com.
Harry RICKETTS	Victoria University, Wellington, NZ harry.ricketts@gmail.com	Harry Ricketts is an emeritus professor at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, Wellington, New Zealand. He has published around 30 books. These include literary biographies ‒ The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (1999) and Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War (2010); a selection of Kipling’s poems, The Long Trail (2004); personal essays; a cricket book; several anthologies of New Zealand poetry; and twelve collections of poems (most recently, Selected Poems (2021)). He has published many articles and chapters on Kipling. His more recent pieces on Kipling include: “Sister of the More Famous Rud: What Happened to Trix Kipling”, Kipling Journal (March 2020); “Kipling and Europe: Some Actions and Reactions”, Kipling Journal (July 2017); “What Rudyard Kipling Can Do for You”, Kipling Journal (March 2017); “The Persistence of Kim”, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol 9, The World Novel in English to 1950 (2016); “‘A Kipling-conditioned World’: Kipling among the War Poets”, In Time’s Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling (2013); and “‘Nine and sixty ways’: Kipling, Ventriloquist Poet”, The Cambridge Companion to Kipling (2011). He is currently working up presentations on Kipling and trauma and following Kipling’s footsteps in Rajasthan.
Anindyo ROY	University of Texas	Anindyo Roy is Associate Professor in English of Colby College, a college of liberal arts which is part of part of Texas University. He teaches critical and postcolonial theory, postcolonial African, Caribbean, and South Asian literatures as well as early twentieth-century British literature. His essays have appeared in journals such as Boundary 2, Criticism, ARIEL, Women: A Cultural Review, Colby Quarterly, Mediations and Journal X. His book entitled Civility and Empire (Routledge: London and New York, 2005) is a literary exploration of the culture of civility operating in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British colonial society.
Mohammad SALEEM	Indira Gandhi National University, New Delhi saleem@ignou.ac.in	Mohammad Saleem is an Assistant Professor of Arabic, School of Foreign Languages, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) New Delhi. He is the Coordinator of Arabic and Persian Programmes. He writes in Arabic, English and Urdu and has published more than 30 articles in national and international journals. He is deeply interested in Classical Arabic and Persian literary canons. Among his latest publications is Arabic commentary on literary canons of Abbasid period titles Al-jawahir Al-Fareedah min Manahil Al-Adab Al-Arabi (Unique Gems from the Ocean of Arabic Literature). He is equally interested in post-colonial English and Urdu literature. Presently he is working on understanding the role of Urdu, Persian and Arabic poetry during colonial period. In this context, Rudyard Kipling and his poems and writings have grabbed his attention. Now he is trying to understand how Indian literature in Urdu, Arabic and Persian served as counterforce to the idea of White Man’s Burden, of Kipling.
John SERIOT	johnseriot@hotmail.co.uk	John Seriot, lectures in English (history & culture, literature), at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Sogndal, now retired. My interest in Kipling started when my father recommended his works to me, together with those by Conan Doyle, Jack London, Hemingway, and Graham Greene. Even though my master’s degree is on the Orcadian identity, I later developed a more scholarly approach to Kipling’s works and life, not least when I started teaching English for undergraduates and teacher-trainees in Norway in 2002. I am particularly interested in the way Kipling’s texts (mostly fiction and poetry) are presented and used in English textbooks for Norwegian lower and upper secondary schools, as well as in their reception by pupils, students, teachers, and the general public (see my short article in The Kipling Journal, March 2022). As part of my still ongoing research on the representations of the two World Wars in English-speaking fiction, poetry, and film, I have also focused over the years on Kipling’s writings on soldiers and warfare, not least for a few lectures as a guest-lecturer in Poland.Since I am now retired, I can now devote more time to these two topics, also fopossible publications.
Sarah SHAW	Oxford University sarah99shaw@googlemail.com	Dr Sarah Shaw is a Member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, and an Honorary Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. In 2022 she has contributed two articles to the Kipling Journal: “How the writer found his voice: Kipling, The Just So Stories, and Kim” in March, and The Kiung’s Ankus and the Jatakas in June.
Gillian SHEEHAN	gillsheehan@gmail.com	Dr Gillian Sheehan has been a major contributor to the New Readers’ Guide on medical matters, which keenly interested Kipling. She qualified from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1978. After working as an hospital doctor in Dublin for a few years she returned to her native Co Kerry where she worked as a general practitioner. She is now retired. She can remember somebody reading “The Elephant’s Child”” when she was very young. She didn’t encounter Kipling’s works again until she went to see the film “The Man Who Would Be King” in Dublin in the 1970s. This kindled her interest in Kipling and she read as much of Kipling’s verse and prose as she could find in the second-hand bookshops in Dublin. She joined the Kipling Society in 1986 and made many friends, among them being John McGivering whose “A Kipling Dictionary” was an invaluable reference tool in those pre-computer days. She has given three talks to the Kipling Society: “Kipling in Ireland”, “Kipling and Gardening”, and “Kipling And Medicine”. She is interested in medical history in general, but also in gardening, patchwork quilting and embroidery. She still lives in Co Kerry and lead a busy life with her three dogs.
Linda SHIRES	shires@yu.edu	Linda M. Shires is the David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English, Emerita, Yeshiva University, New York. She also taught at Syracuse, Princeton, and N.Y.U. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Directorships. She has published many books and articles on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century British literature and culture. Her research areas include gender studies, narrative theory, cognitive theory, image and text, and Victorian poetry. She was introduced to Kipling by her father, who gave her a large, framed copy of “If” at age twelve (figuring she’d grasp that the values required to “be a man” could be adapted to be a woman). Reading more Kipling later, she remains fascinated by his representations of children and animals, as well as his work with artists/illustrators, including his father John Lockwood Kipling. Her studies have appeared in Children’s Literature and Victorian Review, while a chapter on multimodal art in Just So Stories appears in a book manuscript now with readers: “Image > < Text: Self-Illustrated Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century.”” Having lectured on Kipling at MLA, NAVSA, and Princeton conferences, she has also reviewed recent research for Victorian Studies and Victorian Institute Journal.
George SIMMERS	simmersgeorge@yahoo.co.uk	Dr George Simmers, after retiring from a career as a schoolteacher, researched a Ph.D. At Oxford Brookes University, on the fiction of the Great War. This led him into an exploration of Kipling’s complex response to the War. In the Kipling Journal he has published articles on ‘Kipling and Shell-Shock’, and on ‘The Church that was at Antioch.’ He has given conference papers on ‘The Army of a Dream’, on ‘Fairy-Kist’, and on the treatment of amnesia in ‘Captains Courageous’. The text of these papers, and other Kipling material, van be found on his blog, Great War Fiction (greatwarfiction.wordpress.com). For some time he has been obsessed by the puzzles and secrets of Kipling’s most intricate late story, ‘Dayspring Mishandled’, and hopes to publish a n article on them soon.
Zohreh T SULLIVAN	University of Illinois english@illinois.edu	Zohreh T. Sullivan is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling [Cambridge University Press 1993], and Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora, and many articles on British, colonial, and postcolonial literatures. Her courses include: Contemporary British Literature, Women Writers in British and American Fiction, Fiction and Imperialism, and Colonial and Post Colonial Narratives of Empire
Shameema THOTTATHIL	University of Calicut shameemashibu@gmail.com	Dr. Shameema Thottathil is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature, Amal College of Advanced Studies, Nilambur, Kerala, India. (Affiliated to the University of Calicut). She is currently the Chief Editor of Contemporary Literary Review India, an Indian based literary journal(https://literaryjournal.in/index.php/clri/about/editorialTeam). She has published articles and book chapters in both national and international journals and books. Her fields of research include cultural studies, gender studies, American literature, Jewish-American studies, minority studies, Indian-English Literature and Dalit literature. <
Harish TRIVEDI	University of Delhi harish.trivedi@gmail.com	Harish Trivedi has been Professor in the Department of English, Delhi University (1969-2012) and Visiting Professor at the Universities of Chicago (1999, 2011) and London (2002-2003). He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (Manchester 1995), and has a particular interest in postcolonial studies. He edited Kim for Penguin Classics in 2011, and in April 2016 was the joint Conference Director with Janet Montefiore of ‘Kipling in India: India in Kipling’ at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla. The book of the conference is now available.
Monica TURCI	University of Bologna momica.turci2@unibo.it	Monica Turci is Associate Professor in the Department of Modem Literatures, Languages and Cultures of the University of Bologna. She has contributed the chapter ‘Kipling and the Visual’ for the Cambridge Companion on Rudyard Kipling (2011), has written on Kipling and Gramsci (The Kipling Journal 2017) and on the illustrations in the first Italian translation of The Jungle Books (Multimodal Epistemologies. Toward an Integrated Framework Routledge 2014). In 2016, she organized the international conference Rudyard Kipling and Europe and co-edited its proceedings with Janet Montefiore for The Kipling Journal (2017).
Rufus VAUGHAN-SPRUCE	Roehampton University rufusvs@gmail.com	In 2021 Rufus began work on a thesis titled ‘Study of a Collection, In Indian Ink: The Journalistic Origins, Evolutionary Process and Literary Significance of Kipling’s Departmental Ditties’, which will offer a uniquely in-depth study of individual verses, precisely locating them within the contemporary journalistic context in which their author sought to make a social or political intervention. His contention is that an investigation of the origins and development of Kipling’s first book of poetry, which has been neglected by serious scholarship, has much to contribute not only to an understanding of Kipling, but to a re-evaluation both of colonialism and the role of the media in how writers and their messages are directed and interpreted.
Minna VUOHELAINEN	University of London, City minna.vuohelainen@city.ac.uk	Minna Vuohelainen is Reader in English at City, University of London. Her current research focuses on fin-de-siècle print culture, genre (particularly Gothic and crime fiction), London literatures, and spatial theory. Her publications include the monograph Richard Marsh (University of Wales Press, 2015), the coedited essay collections Interpreting Primo Levi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Palgrave, 2015, with Arthur Chapman) and Richard Marsh, Popular Fiction and Literary Culture, 1890–1915: Rereading the Fin de Siècle (Manchester University Press, 2018, with Victoria Margree and Daniel Orrells), and special issues of Victorian Periodicals Review on the Strand Magazine (coedited with Emma Liggins, 2019) and of Victorian Popular Fictions Journal on “Mapping Victorian Popular Fictions” (2019). Her articles have appeared in English Studies, Gothic Studies, Journal of Literature and Science, Crime Fiction Studies, Clues and Victorian Periodicals Review, and she has produced four critical editions of Richard Marsh’s fiction for Valancourt Books.
John WALKER	jwawalker@gmail.com	John Walker is a retired teacher and active tutor, who began collecting Kipling at the age of ten. The fact that he owned a set of the original Readers’ Guide to Kipling’s Work in loose-leaf form led to work on the New Readers’ Guide soon after he joined the Society, and thence he became Honorary Librarian. He has also served for two years as Chairman of the Society’s Council. He has been a member of the Project Group for the New Readers’ Guide since launch in the year 2000, with a special interest in the verse. He was instrumental in setting up A Diversity of Kipling in 2017, a 24-hour on-line session of readings. As Librarian he has managed the move of the Library from City University to Haileybury as a key resource for Kipling researchers. He edits the Society’s Facebook page and is planning other initiatives with social media. He is a motoring enthusiast and is highly knowledgeable about Kipling’s Cars. kip_cars3 He has been particularly active in supporting Kipling studies in Ukraine.
Alastair WILSON	ajwilson606@btinternet.com	Alastair Wilson came to Kipling at the age of one, when his father gave him a nearly complete set of the Macmillan Pocket Edition. They are still there on the shelves behind me, as I type this, 87 years later. The first tale I encountered was ‘The Maltese Cat’, read to all the school by the Headmaster after Sunday tea, round his study fire, in November 1945, when I was eleven: Just So Stories followed, and The Jungle Book followed by Stalky & Co. The latter came back to school with me every term for the rest of my school days. My enthusiasm for railways found me ‘007’, quickly followed by the rest of The Day’s Work. It was all downhill from there on. When we moved to Sussex, I found my first girl-friend lived a mile down the river from Bateman’s, so I came to know all the country round Burwash, and the setting of ‘An Habitation Enforced’ was instantly recognisable. I joined the Society in 1993 and have enjoyed my membership ever since. The transcription and editing of Carrie Kipling’s Diaries, and Kipling’s personal Motoring Diaries have revealed an enormous amount about Kipling himself, more than any biography.