The Battle of Ideas 2009 will be a two-day festival of high-level, thought-provoking debate organised by the Institute of Ideas and hosted by the Royal College of Art.
Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at the universities of Oxford and Warwick; chair, Neuroscience Research Partnership, Singapore; chair, general advisory committee on science, Food Standards Agency
Frank Field, MP, Labour MP for Birkenhead; co-chair, Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration; author,
Neighbours from Hell: The Politics of Behaviour
Frank Furedi, professor, sociology, University of Kent, Canterbury; author,
Wasted, Politics of Fear and
Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?
Leela Gandhi, professor of English, University of Chicago; author
Affective Communities: anticolonial thought, fin-de-siècle radicalism, and the politics of friendship; founding co-editor,
Postcolonial Studies journal.
Susan Jacoby, author,
The Age of American Unreason; programme director, Centre for Inquiry - NYC; fellow, Centre for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library.
Bronwen Maddox, chief foreign commentator,
The Times; author
In Defence of America
Ashis Nandy, senior honorary fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi; recipient of Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize (2007); author, omnibus edition of writing,
Exiled at Home, Return from Exile, and
A Very Popular Exile.
Lionel Shriver, novelist,
We Need to Talk About Kevin and
The Post-Birthday World; commentator for the
Guardian, the
Telegraph, and the
Sunday Times.
Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator,
Financial Times; author,
Fixing Global Finance
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