Professor Clem Seecharan

Qualifications

BA Social Anthropology (Mc Master University, Canada)
MA Social Anthropology (Mc Master University, Canada)
PhD History (University of Warwick)

Role

Professor of Caribbean History
Head of Caribbean Studies, London Metropolitan University (1993 to present)
Faculty’s Co-ordinator of Post-Graduate Research

Clem taught Caribbean history at the University of Guyana and the University of Warwick before he became the Head of Caribbean Studies at London Metropolitan University. He was a member of the Humanities and Education Faculty Board; a member of the school’s management group; a member of the advisory board, the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick. He is now a member of the Taught Provision Committee, Co-ordinator of post-graduate research in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Languages and Education, a member of the Research Students Progress Group and the Research Ethics Review Panel. Clem also initiated the annual Sir Frank Worrell Lecture on Cricket and Society in 2005. He lectures regularly in the Caribbean communities in London, New York and Toronto.

He is the first person to teach courses in the UK on Indo-Caribbean History and History of West Indies Cricket, 1865-1968. He comments regularly on Caribbean issues on BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, BBC World and Channel 4 TV. He contributed to a three-part series on cricket broadcast on BBC2 during the Ashes series in 2009.

His research interests are diverse: Indo-Caribbean History; India and Indian Thought and their impact on the Caribbean; Intellectual History of the Caribbean: From Blyden to Rodney; Cricket and the British West Indies, 1860s-1960s; Marxism and anti-communism in the Caribbean; Fabian Socialism and the Sugar Industry in Guyana, 1930s-60s; Ethnicity and Politics in the Caribbean.

The author of several acclaimed books he is a prolific pioneer of Indo-Caribbean History. His book, Sweetening ‘Bitter Sugar’: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934-66 (2005) won the prestigious Elsa Goveia Prize for 2005, awarded by the Association of Caribbean Historians. In November 2007 he delivered the Walter Rodney Lecture at the University of Warwick. In April 2009 he gave a keynote address to the conference on ‘India and the Indian Diasporic Imagination’ at Universite Paul Valery, Montpellier, France. He will be delivering the keynote address to GOPIO (Global Organisation, People of Indian Ancestry, New York) in May 2011