Professor Tony Ballantyne

Professor Tony Ballantyne is Pro-Vice-Chancellor Humanities at the University of Otago.

Tony Ballantyne is Head of the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago, where he is also Director of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture. Born and raised in Dunedin, Tony's PhD was completed at Cambridge under the supervision of the noted South Asianist C. A. Bayly.

He has published extensively on colonial Punjab and Sikhism, Punjabi migration in the British empire, and the development of colonial knowledge in British India. His work in these areas has been unified by a concern with the uneven ‘webs’ of exchange and connection that shaped the modern British empire, especially those that linked India and New Zealand.

His books include Orientalism and Race (2002), Between Colonialism and Diaspora (2006), and Webs of Empire (2012), and he has edited or co-edited several collections of essays. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

For more details, see Professor Ballantyne’s profile.