An accomplished work of historical scholarship on the disputed Boden Chair election of 1860 and what it meant for the subsequent course of Indology at Oxford and further afield. What the panel found most striking was the reframing at the heart of the thesis: the question is not who prevailed, but how the account of a practical English Indology triumphing over an abstract continental one came to be narrated, and what intellectual and political purposes that narrative served. Reading the division as a rhetorical fiction, rather than a fact awaiting explanation, supplies the dissertation with a firm analytical backbone and points towards further lines of enquiry. The method is thoughtfully built and evenly sustained: published Indological writing sits alongside institutional archives and more unexpected sources — election pamphlets, testimonials, catechisms, grammar prefaces, private correspondence — allowing institutional, intellectual and personal registers to be read as one discursive field across local, national and imperial scales. Scholarship is woven in rather than reviewed at arm’s length, and the Frost and Eliot framings that open and close the thesis are strikingly well judged. Exceptionally well written and presented, and a pleasure to read.

The two runners-up are:

• Shreya Kaul, ‘Intimacy on Trial: A Socio-Legal Analysis of ‘Transgressive’ Intimacies in India’
• Ishita Chakma, ‘Negotiating (M)other Tongue in Classrooms: Tribal Teachers and the Politics of Medium of Instruction in Tripura, Northeast India’