 If I could ask Dr. Werchner Bujpae, he has a particular interest in political force. Thanks David. Thanks very much for inviting me to speak. It's a great honour and privilege to speak in this distinguished panel. Thank you all also for coming on a Friday evening and taking time out to celebrate with us. We are very proud to be here. Maen nhw'n mynd i'w chael ei wneud i mi wneud, ond rydyn ni'n gwneud. Roeddwn i'n i chi'n meddwl, oed yn 2006, rydyn ni'n mynd i'w prifau cyfraffodol sy'n gynghysledig. Roeddwn ni'n mynd i chi'n meddwl. Roeddwn ni'n mynd i chi'n meddwl. Roeddwn ni'n meddwl. Roeddwn ni'n meddwl ar y cyflwyno, ond rydyn ni'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl. Roeddwn ni'n meddwl 10 o'r rydyn ni'n meddwl y cyfnodd o'r oxfordd oeddiol. Yw yw'r cyfnodd gwirionedd yn cyfweld yn y gweithio, ac mae wedi'u gynnig ar y small dynnu. Felly, rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r gymryd yma, ychydig i'w ddweud yw'r gwirionedd yn rhan o'r cyfnodd o'r cynllun o'r ysgolwyr yma o'r africau a'r Llyfr. Felly, rydyn ni'n ffawr o'r gweithio'r gweithio oherwydd sy'n gyfnodd o'r gymryd o'r cyfnodd, Ffigures like Hugh Tinker, like Sriram Mehrotra, like Dennis Dalton, as David reminded me, David himself and Sudipta Kaviraj were very well known figures even in small town India and for South Asianists more generally. This has been a pioneering department for the study for the historically grounded study of political thought, which is a broad area within which my own work is located. And there were many, many who had inspired me to pursue this line in my own work, Dennis Dalton's groundbreaking work comparing aspects of Western anarchist thought and Indian thinking on politics and power comes to mind. Also Sudipta Kaviraj's formulations of multiple modernities which have of course been influential outside of South Asia. Now while I was well acquainted with the work of the department, I had little previous exposure to the ethos, to the distinctive ethos of the department or the people. But a few things were clear to me then as now. First, Swaz's insistence on a serious contemplation of the particular was its greatest strength and needed to be preserved and celebrated in a discipline in which cases particularly from Asia Africa and the Middle East are often treated in a cavalier fashion. Speaking truth to power has often meant, has often come from very deep commitment to our knowledge of the particular here and that was something which I felt very strongly committed to. It's been deployed very effectively to challenge general theories within political science, to challenge general theories either from the standpoint of the contingency and the density. That's been a prominent strand of work within the department or from the standpoint of the layered performances of resistance or consent which is another prominent strand of work in the department. Or indeed from the standpoint of alternative trajectories of modernity or democratisation that are traced in the experience of Asia Africa and the Middle East. A second point that I felt very strongly about and that Charles has also alluded to was the unique pluralism of the department with regard to its approach to theory and method. There were, if you like, many different theories and different methods, different approaches to the particular, different ways perhaps of speaking truth to power. The dominant position in the department might be described as the critical deconstructive perspective which is expertly practised by many of my colleagues. Mark was just describing it very well. This has sought to unmask power to deflate its claims to universality or generality and various other grand narratives from the standpoint of the particular. So, for instance, grand narratives of liberalism or human rights have been expertly deconstructed as vehicles of western power or state power as repressive of social difference or individual freedom. This is a really important strand of work that continues to inspire a lot of us. But there are also perhaps other ways of speaking truth to power, ways which are distinct both from the seamless universalism of liberal narratives as well as assertions of incommensurability that characterise various postcolonial perspectives. One promising avenue that I explore in my own work is offered by what the Pakistani theorist Amir Mufti calls vernacular modernities. And in my recent book I try to give substance to conceptions of secularism or social justice or democracy which are familiar from western experience. But to give substance to these concepts in the context of Indian constitutional and parliamentary debates on minority rights and affirmative action and to compare some of these meanings with some of their western connotations. And I argue that liberal ideas have significantly informed public reasoning on group rights in India, even as these are inevitably inflected by indigenous cultural and historical idioms. So Indian conceptions of secularism might be described in relation to say equal respect for all religions. But this isn't a wholly alien concept or one that is completely distinct from western notions of secularism. It involves many notions of separation between state and religion. Similarly vernacular conceptions of social justice have drawn upon egalitarian liberal ideas of equality of opportunity. In other words, liberalism doesn't have to be seen and liberal categories don't have to be seen as necessarily oppressive imperialist culturally alien in non-European contexts. Nor can they be limited any longer to their western European or North American provenance. There's a rich potential for cross-cultural comparison of liberal and other normative concepts which is some of what I try to do in my work. Also, whereas scholars of ideas have typically tended to focus on the great individuals and the great books of political thought, as Charles and David and Mark have mentioned, one of the strengths of SOAS has been to look at ideas in practice, ideas as emerging out of concrete political engagement. And this is something that I try to pursue in my own work. So, for instance, whereas traditionally Indian political thought has been studied in terms of figures like Tagore or Gandhi or Nehru or Ambedkar more recently, I try to argue that political norms have been forged in India also through the interactive processes of discussion and debate through which reasons are discussed and debated and renegotiated and recast through processes of discussion and debate. This brings me to the last point that I want to make today. Together with colleagues in the department, including Charles, Matt and Rahul, I'm involved in setting up a new initiative on comparative political thought. We believe that our department has a distinctive contribution to giving new direction to this emerging subfield within politics. And it's one which moves the focus away from regions and traditions which have traditionally been favoured as the units of comparison towards political concepts such as justice or rights or equality, secularism, and compares the different ways in which these are framed in practices as well as texts. We seek to highlight everyday political thinking forged in the cut and thrust of political engagement as an important realm of political thought which is worthy of sustained attention alongside more canonical texts. And we're in the middle of putting together a new master's programme on comparative political thought which, among other things, will highlight the thematic and conceptual contiguities across regions that have so far been the main unit of teaching and research within the department. In doing so, we are motivated by the conviction that in a period in which economic power is moving away from the North Atlantic world and the straightforward efficacy of military instruments has weakened, speaking truth to power requires more than ever so as a unique contribution to building knowledge about ideas, values and norms across the regional divisions of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Thank you very much. And finally, if I could finally ask Toby Dodge, another PhD student who's gone on to great things. Thank you. That's a matter of opinion. I'm painfully aware that I stand between you and what's behind those doors which is hopefully a baccalaurean feast of wine and a few peanuts if we're lucky. So I'll try and be brief. I was resident at SOAS in various different capacities for over a decade as the grey hair of my supervisor next to me will indicate. From October 1991 until July 2002, as a master's student working and then working in what was once called the Middle East Centre, then a very long year from my perspective at least attempting to learn Arabic and then finally a much longer period of time writing a PhD and then temporarily teaching both international relations in Middle East politics. Now, as Dave was saying, we left and tried to forge our way outside the rather comforting walls of this institution. And I didn't quite realise how much of a SOAS product I was until I came across the YouTube cartoon you'll all be familiar with so you want to study at SOAS. Now, this certainly brought a wave of recognition but also, and I think much more importantly, a strong feeling of affinity with the school, its project which I'm fairly sure is not and shouldn't be speaking truth to power but could be speaking truth about power and I'll get to that more later and then most importantly about the department which was my very tolerant home for the best part of a decade. So against that background and with the wine writing outside, it's left for me in the seven minutes that David allotted me. I just want to say two intertwined things I think about the nature of the politics department I was associated with for that decade and secondly about the nature of what Dave has mentioned which we could call the international political conjuncture during that time and I think how each powerfully interacted with each other. Now when I arrived at SOAS in the autumn of 1991 I joined a master's degree in the politics of African Asia which had seven students on it. The entire postgraduate intake for the department that year if I'm not mistaken. Now the bespoke nature of its postgraduate teaching may well have been swept aside but what I remember to have been the dominant department lethoss at the time has had a much greater and I think long lasting influence on me and Dave I think everyone who was in that year in the years that followed and it's purely academic and I think I would sum up the ethos as being centred on a kind of intellectual duality. Firstly there was a deep commitment by a core group of staff to what Quinton Skinner labelled grand theory. Now this is clearly Charles but also Tom Young in the audience, Catherine Dean and Siddipto Cavarage. Now the last three at least in the 1990s and you can check with them in the bar afterwards represented various hues of Marxism or post Marxism. Both the influence of Althazair but also the powerfully evocative shadow of the Sardinian. When Siddipto joined the department he also brought with him his work with the Subalton School with its commitment both to detailed historical research and the application of grand theory. So the second guiding ethos that shaped this department and its intellectual influence on me was not only this commitment to the study of grand theory but also its application to kind of rigorous empirical research, research about things as Marx said about people. This is the major intellectual heritage that I've carried away and continue to operate under from this department. Now historically I arrived in the department to study the politics of the Middle East at the start of what we could call if we were being bowled the long 1990s in the aftermath of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the US led war to eject the Iraqi army from the country. Beyond this event the collapse of the Soviet Union and George Bush seniors rather notional talk of a new world order were making the interface between international relations and the comparative study of the developing world a very exciting place to work in. For good reason it is now hard to capture I think the optimism of the early 1990s where the undoubted bombastic triumphalism of neoliberal public intellectuals I think then was counterbalanced by a strong sense of the possibilities of a new mass politics, possibly comparable to the aftermath of the Arab Spring today unfettered by the old rigidities of the Cold War. My strongest memories of the department in the early 1990s were a series of possibly optimistic but rather confused meetings that tried to explain this upsurge in democratic mobilisation that had touched the mass majority of states across Africa. However it soon became clear as the Washington consensus solidified into a project with clear hegemonic aspirations that the newly configured international community without the Soviet Union led by the international financial institutions were using the end of the Cold War to impose a systematic programme of political transformation on the developing world. And this is the rise of what David I think very aptly has described as kinetic neoliberalism and in my work at least it led directly to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the carnage of the aftermath that we're still more importantly the Iraqi population are still living with. And I think it's during this period of post Cold War history that the department's dual commitment to both grand theory and the empirically rigorous study of the developing world came into its own. And this approach I think is personified by I think Tom Young's work and indeed David Williams innovative work on what they've termed the liberal project tracing certainly the ideational roots but also the material ambitions. And most importantly I think for us at SOAS the devastating effect of what we could call a new or at least a revived neoliberal imperialism. It's this type of work that has deeply influenced my own research and writing since I left SOAS and my work is now primarily focused on US foreign policy, the kind of legacies of neoconservatism and as I said before the bloody aftermath of an attempt to rework state society relations in Iraq after 2003. So it's the exact in combination of a detailed empirical research project and a commitment I think to philosophical complexity and sophistication that is lasting influence this department gave to me and that I've carried out into the wider academic world. So against this background I think talking truth to power would be a dangerous waste of time to be bold and I know I'm after a cheap t-shirt after I leave so that I declare an intro. Primarily because power almost certainly would not be listening. And in order to gain power in this with the capital P's attention, co-optation would be the central danger. Instead I would celebrate and have clearly been deeply influenced by the department's continued commitment to telling the truth to a wider audience about power's effects on the non-European world. And I think that's much longer, more complex, not as punchy a slogan, but that's certainly what I carried out of this department and long may it rain. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. First of all there will be a vote of thanks at the end, but could I just say personally thank you very much to all the panellists who I think have given us each their insights into what it is that makes the distinctive SOAS approach to the Saudi politics both in the past and the present. So we have about 20, just a little bit over 20 minutes till we can indeed go and have a drink and talk more informally. As I say, it's not just questions, we would like people to make comments. The only restraint of course is time so I will try and just trick people to just a minute or two. And when you speak, could you just say who you are in terms of your association with the department, that would help as well. Okay, I've got several hands. I think you had yours up first. Is there a microphone? As I say, do please keep your remarks brief. Just two short questions. First question. How has the problem of the power of institutional racism, which is the same as white supremacy, impacted politics at SOAS over the last 50 years? Second question. How could the problem of the power of institutional racism, which is the same as white supremacy, impact politics at SOAS in the future? There's a question. Anybody like to respond? Okay, it's a suggestion as we take a few questions and then we'll take them together. Ahmed Sheibani, a cyber rebel from Libya and the founder of the first political party post Gaddafi dictatorial era, the Democratic Party. I would just would like to add to the chairman's list of prestigious academics who have been serving the intellectual discourse from this platform, SOAS. I would like to say from the perspective of Libyan intelligentsia, we regard his excellency Mr Anthony Allen as a very trusted reference and a Libyan specialist. Across the spectrum, we despise the former student of SOAS, Luis Bernard, who is very anti the Arab Spring uprising and has written very critical articles. I have no associations with SOAS apart from a family spat that goes back 20 years ago, which I shall skip it is to do with money coming first. My sister was blocked from final exams a week before on tuition fee technicalities. The question I would like to pose to the panel is I gave a lecture a few weeks ago here about that the Arab Spring has made a big opening for us to capture this historical moment to make a separation between the mosque and the state. I was astonished while I was deliberating the lecture that British Muslim students from SOAS who are studying at SOAS openly threatened to kill me while I was deliberating the lecture. What educational capsule do you feed your students to make them so radical? Thank you. There's somebody there in the middle. I'm Stephen Haggard. I was a child of SOAS in the 80s and a student of David's then and unlike many of the distinguished panellists here I didn't go on to any further academic study in the area of politics but it was very inspired by what I learnt under David. I'd just like to talk about the effect of SOAS politics just for a second for people who haven't remained in the academic field. I went on to be a journalist, I ran Newsnight for a bit and then been a filmmaker since then. I think the voices that I've been hearing from the panel today about paying attention to detail, being critical of all the theories and discourses that you hear which carry the weight of governments and big machines behind them and learning to listen to the voices of people in the street. These are things that were given to me by my study of SOAS and I've carried on working in all my life both in people I know as well and what I do privately as well as professionally very much inspired by that. I'd like to just say that that's a legacy which is active not just in the work that you've been doing in your research but also I think in the lives of the many people who've left SOAS and have gone on, not within academia but just to be ordinary people in the world inspired by this legacy and I think it's a great one. Thank you. If you'd like to pass the mic. Thank you. Nasir Qalawun, a student of SOAS. I wouldn't say much about Professor Charles Tripp because it's been a long time and I wait 25 years to say any word about this. From this point I want to see if you can focus on the relationship between the professor and the students because when I came here I thought it's a kind of a Sufi relationship students are supposed to be yes men and it didn't work this way. However, for two occasions I want to see that first instance was Professor Vaticuitis on Professor Charles Tripp pay tribute to the late Professor Vaticuitis. I would say relationship was not easy during the course. However it built up after the whatever so to denote that you can build up whatever did interview with him when I called first after a few years of graduation I thought he would tell me no and then he said no you are welcome. I went up to review books and whatever so relationship is not restricted only to coursework it can be built up the opposite way afterwards as a Sufi or sort of Sufi. The other one the dangers bit of it I did in politics interview with some people but also Professor Tony Allen who is here anyway about water in the Middle East assuming this is a neutral subject that the sensor and newspapers wouldn't spot it. However, there were two passages about Libya power structure in Libya and the sensor took them out and exactly depicts the situation as exactly happened last year. So thank you for Professor Allen and Professor Tripp for being through us into dangerous water. Thank you. Thank you very much. Is anybody else just at the moment? We can just yes. Professor Taylor. I'm Bob Taylor I used to teach here a long time ago. I just want to make two quick comments. One is that nothing in this department would ever have happened that had been for David Taylor. I came here in 1980 and the department was these guys make and the lady make it sound all well organized and intellectually coherent. They've left out all the chaos. When PJ particularly was the head of the department he had not a clue what was going on. The first meeting I attended of the faculty David is hard to explain everything to us because PJ didn't have a clue. And finally he turned to David and said how many students do we have now? And David said I think it's 33. Is as many as that. And then he just shot up and David took over and ran the meeting. I'm glad to see this tradition is continuing. The other thing is our speakers left out the fact of contingency in all the work in the department over the years. I came in 1980 as I said expecting to teach Southeast Asian politics with Ruth McVey. I think was the first woman in the faculty if I'm not mistaken. Ruth left about six months later being made redundant under Mrs Thatcher's first university cuts. So I had to teach all the Southeast Asian politics rather than only a little bit. And we had referenced this international politics in the department. Of course when I was coming the undergraduate degree was being introduced by David, organized by David, run by David. And PJ particularly Otis came and knocked on my door. He said do you know anything about international relations? I said no. He says well David says we have to have a course for undergraduates in international relations. You're going to teach it. So I ran down to the library and started reading up on international relations. Which is why ten years later I invented the international relations program so I could get out of teaching this course I knew nothing about. So anyway don't forget contingency in the history of the department. So we've had a couple of comments, a couple of observations, some somewhat partial interpretations of the past from the last speaker of it. And I should say that it was always a team effort and Charles in particular who was there at that time was also part of that team that got the undergraduate program off the ground. But one speaker raised the question of racism and I think this is as Mark Laffey said at the beginning. This has been part of SARS's history. I think we've all recognized in different ways that SARS has come a long way. That sometimes it was quite painful and I think people in the department were also part of that painful thinking. First of all I suppose it's an ongoing process really. But you only have to look at where we were, where the school was in the 1920s, where it was again in the 1940s just at the time of independence of India and then later on as African countries throughout the colonial yoke. That SARS took its time to respond in many cases. But I think if one looks at the way in which many different strands of theory have been brought together to look at these sorts of issues, I think a lot of progress has been made. The law department has put a great deal of effort into thinking about similar issues. The anthropologists have also had a lot to say. So obviously it may look different from a student perspective but certainly in my 40 odd years associated with the department one has seen that painful process of introspection take place. I don't know if anybody want to add to that. And then somebody was talking about the student staff, the student lecture relationship which is certainly in those early days when the relationships were so close because there were so few of us whether it was students or faculty. It was a quite distinctive feature of the institution. And I'd like to think that today in the era when we have just a small fraction of the department here that nevertheless some of that closeness persists. But I think the question was the best to you in the first instance. Well, I don't know. I'd take up a point that NASA made that in a sense it goes back to something that our colleague from Libya mentions as well. In the sense that we don't give people a magic pill. What we do of course is instruct them in the ways that they should question power and they should question ourselves as the teachers of power. And I remember I felt I had done my job well when at the stage when the Egyptian Foreign Office was still sending students to do master's degrees at SOAS. One of them came to me at the end and said we were talking about how he'd enjoyed the year and what he'd got out of it. And he said well the great thing I got out of it is I'm never going to believe anything that anyone ever says to me again. Knowing where he worked you wondered what kind of future. In fact I know what kind of future he had. He's been a good dissembler in a sense in that way. But I think that there's a serious point there which is that as I think NASA again alluded to is that people come to SOAS from often particularly in the postgraduate field with very different educational backgrounds with a very different tradition of how you approach the text, how you approach the teacher. And I think one of the, I find still, you have to ask the students this, but one of the things that I find so gratifying is the ways in which the space for debate, the space for questioning, the notion of a critical approach in politics itself as well as criticising ourselves has been so much part of the ethos of our teaching and of the department. And so you do get this transition visible often within the first term or so of people who have felt timid about approaching a text critically because they feel that who am I to stress it. I remember that myself as a student. Who am I to take on these figures, not only the people standing in front of me, but the people whose books I was reading. And I think that if anything that I try to impart and I hope I do is this sense of criticise us, criticise what we're reading and try to persuade students that the books we put on the reading list are not there because we approve of them in some kind of sensorial way. In fact, they may be there because they're extremely bad books, but I want students to make the point of that. But of course, you can't ask me about this because I have another ex-students sitting next to me, so you'd have to ask them about the relationship between the Sufi master and the Sufi follower. I have something to say about that. It's Catherine Dean not talking about Sufi masters, but supervisors and supervisors who said that they rebel and transform themselves to the opposite of their supervisors. And anyone who had the privilege of meeting Vatican knows why Charles is so calm and grounded and very rarely raises his voice, which means I'm going to revert to kind of generation before and be the passionate arguing declaratory supervisor that Vatican, I suspect, probably was. On Bob Taylor and Contingency in the summer of 1991, I was called in to his office, a very nice office in the Phillips building. I don't think they build them that size anymore. To be interviewed for my master's place, which shows you, I suspect, how things have changed today. I'm sure it's all done remotely. To try and narrow the contingency of not getting a negative result, I desperately tried to find someone who was on the degree and said, no, no, it's all right. He really loves Max Weber. He always asked the same question. He said, what do you think of Max Weber? So I scuttled away and buried myself in Max Weber and was ushered in with Charles and Bob. He looked at me from what then seemed to be a huge height and said, what do you think of Weber? And I paused and piped up. Well, sir, funny you should say that. I've just been reading it. I was very impressed. And my entrance to the department was assured. I was actually going to tell a similar interview story. I was also interviewed at around about the same time. We both started a program together alongside Tom Young. My aim was going to do with Hobbes's Leviathan, where we had a similar conversation, but I won't. On the students and professors, I mean, certainly I remember learning a huge amount outside of the classroom, talking often in the Soas Bar, I must confess. And it seems to me, you know, that there is a kind of, I experienced a tremendous openness amongst academic staff to talking to students, drinking with students, hanging out with students, you know, and you know, in some senses those kinds of moments stick with me. Sometimes much more than the stuff we did actually in the classrooms, certainly when I was first here. And on continuous in chaos, yes, I sort of feel like I was probably various points kind of contributed to both chaos as a teaching assistant. It seemed perhaps that was just me rather chaos at times. Yeah, no, I just wanted to go back to the point about institutions where there is racism. I can't claim to know very much of that from personal experience, but one of the good things about Soas is that it's a place which allows for such things to be talked about and discussed. And it's really one of the very few places where so many different types of people rub up against each other. Of course, you know, racism in general continues to exist. And it needs to be talked about. But Soas is one of the few places where it can be discussed and should be more openly discussed. And that's why it's a place to be celebrated, I think. So that's my take on it. Thank you. Well, I'm not quite sure I have to add to that. Okay. I do want to add one small thing to it. Thanks a lot. For me, I think one of the most appealing things about Soas, ever since I've been here, it has always been the students. And in fact, several years ago I was offered a post at another university. And I sat down and I thought about I don't live in London. And so I have a commute. It's actually quite a long commute by train to get into London. It's two hours by train. And the other university was in my hometown, and it would have been much easier and all that kind of stuff. It's a really prestigious university and what have you. And at the end of the day, I sort of walked around the campus and I thought, well, you know, it's a very... Well, it's Bristol, actually. And the students there didn't look like Soas students. I mean that in the nicest possible way. But Soas students to me, they look like the world. Bristol students don't. Something else. Anyway, so it's always been for me one of the most attractive features of being at Soas is engaging with Soas students. I try to honour that in the way in which I engage with them in my teaching. I'm sure like other colleagues, it's about trying to open up spaces to enable them to say things that perhaps they are not sure that they can say or to discover ideas that they're at sort of enjoy and they've not really sort of work them through to make spaces where they can feel comfortable and able to express points of view that maybe they don't hear outside or that are not projected to them through the media or which seem to them like sort of foolish and so forth. And I think it's precisely out of that interaction with the students that makes them the people that they eventually become and which sort of produces not necessarily precisely what you've described but a certain sort of fierceness, which I think is a wonderful thing. Well, the time is nearly eight o'clock and there'll be more opportunity. There will be a microphone upstairs in case anybody feels inclined to tell some of the more scourless stories about the department. I've got one or two myself that I'd be prepared to share. But before we move out, if I could ask Dr Fiona Adamson, head of the department to bring the formal part of the proceedings to a close. Well, thank you very much and thanks to everyone for coming. My name is Fiona Adamson and I'm the current head of the department and I have to say I'm a relative newcomer to the department. I arrived in 2007, but in some senses I'm typical of the department because I think about 50% of the department has only been in the department for the past decade or so. So when David Taylor pointed out that this year was the 50th anniversary of the department, most of us were very happy to celebrate this but realized that we couldn't really speak to the history of the department beyond the past perhaps five to seven years. So we wondered how best to celebrate or mark this anniversary and we decided we wanted to do two things. To have a panel that would reflect on this history, on the accomplishments of the department and also reflect on the evolution and the changes over time in the department. And if there's one correction I would make, it would be that actually the department is not almost 50% female but I think we're more than 50% female. And some of you may notice the subtle subtext in the poster for the event that also reflects that. I want to thank the panelists and I think they've given a great overview of the history of the department but I also want us to celebrate current initiatives in the department and also current staff and students as well as past staff and students and we thought that having a party that would bring the different generations together, current staff, past staff, current student, past students would be the most appropriate way to celebrate this department that obviously means so much to so many people. It's a testament to the influence of the department to see so many people here on a Friday evening. And I thought I'd just ask, since it is a diverse group with many different relationships to the department, if maybe I could ask anyone who is a current staff member of the department to stand now and be recognized. A current staff member. Great. So you can see the current staff. Anyone who is a past staff member who has come out this evening to join us. I know there's a few because there are past students and alumni if you could stand so we can. Thanks. Thanks for coming out. And all the current students in the department if you can stand. Okay, it just remains, I do want to thank a few people in addition to the panelists who did a great job. I'd also like to thank external relations and events who have both supported this celebration financially but also spent incredible amounts of time to organize the party and to advertise it. I'd like to thank alumni relations and I would like to thank the various publishers that are here to display and also to sell many books by department members. Hearst, Zedd, Cambridge University Press, Rutledge, Ivy Taurus, Oxford University Press. Many of them have also generously supported this evening's reception. I'd like to thank the student volunteers who are out selling t-shirts and of course we encourage you to buy a t-shirt from the evening because they're only 10 pounds. Most of all though I would like to thank one person who has spent an incredible amount of time today. I just want to thank everyone and it's just been a real pleasure to reconnect with people I've known over the years and to see the good turnout. Thank you all. Okay, well the second half of the evening is about to begin. There is their drinks, food, music, an open mic, good company, upstairs so I'd just like to thank you all for coming and please do join us for the party upstairs.