Rudyard Kipling had a wide and multifarious acquaintanceship. This page, which is Work in Progress. lists many of the people that he knew, many of whom stayed at Bateman’s, the house in the Weals of Sussex, where he lived from 1902 to the end of his days in 1936.
| Aaron ACKERLEY | University of London, Queen Mary Collegeamackerley1@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 Universityaikant.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. |