Professor Stephen Legg

Mid-Career Fellow 2021-22

Mapping a Pre-Partition City: the Communal Geographies of Late-Colonial Delhi

This project establishes innovative dialogues, theoretical insights, and methodologies between human geography, colonial history and the political sciences through a path breaking use of historical-GIS to map the spatial dynamics of urban communities. It provides historical insight into two of the most pressing social and political challenges facing contemporary South Asia: ‘communal’ (Hindu-Muslim) violence; and understanding the ‘city’. It shows how divisions emerged in interwar, late-colonial (1927-47) Delhi between previously intertwined religious communities, pre-shadowing the partition of cities, regions and India itself in August 1947.

More information

Research outcomes

Legg, S, Gould, W and C Gupta (eds) (2026)

Communal Geographies: Before and Beyond Partition in South Asia Routledge, London

Legg, S. (2025).

Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities. University of Georgia Press.

Legg, S (2025)

“Mapping, Geography” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 50(1) e12707

Legg, S (2025)

Journal of the History of Ideas podcast interview regarding Spaces of Anticolonialism: https://www.jhiblog.org/2025/06/25/spaces-of-anticolonialism-disha-karnad-jani-interviews-stephen-legg/

Legg, S. (2023, February 28).

Cocktails, curry and afternoon tea: inside the 1930s London conference that brought Gandhi to Buckingham Palace. The Conversation.

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Areas of interest

Geography Colonialism India Southern Asia History

Cohort

MCF5

Biography

Stephen Legg undertook his degree, doctorate and Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge before joining the University of Nottingham in 2005. His research centres on the geographies of late-colonialism, with a particular focus on British-Indian relations in the interwar period. His projects return to core interests in space and scale. In terms of the former he has studied Delhi as the capital of the Raj, the end of tolerated Indian “red light” brothel zones in the interwar period, and London as conference city for Indian delegates in the early 1930s. In terms of scale he has explored Indian internationalism via the League of Nations, central-provincial relations in the Indian constitution, and the ways women in Delhi negotiated the boundary between public and private space. His past research has been funded by the ESRC, AHRC, Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy, and he is currently editor-in-chief of the Journal of Historical Geography. For more information see: https://stephenleggeog.wordpress.com/.

Biographical details correct as of 13.08.25