A huge congratulations to the 2024 winner of the Berger Prize, Dr Tom Young (Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art Histories at The Courtauld), for his book Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c.1813-1858, published by the Paul Mellon Centre.
The Berger Prize is the leading book prize for art history, celebrating brilliant writing and scholarship about the arts and architecture of the United Kingdom. Awarded since 2002, the prize is offered by The Walpole Society through the generosity and inspiration of the Berger Collection Educational Trust.
This revelatory book explores how the visual culture of members of the East India Company prompted significant structural change, nimbly traversing the complex world of post-colonial scholarship for a modern audience. It explores fresh material from a compelling new angle, charting the ways in which new artistic forms and practices presaged shifts in the governance of the Company and its relationship with the people it governed.
Dr Tom Young is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art Histories at The Courtauld Institute of Art, joining us in 2023 after holding posts as a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Warwick, the Project Curator of the British Museum’s exhibition Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution, a curator at Lakeland Arts, and a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. He has held fellowships at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Huntington Library, and the Yale Center for British Art. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2023, and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2024.
