Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
Historian, scholar, and writer Fara Dabhoiwala teaches social, cultural, and intellectual history at Princeton University. His new book, What is Free Speech?, traces how free speech, once viewed as both hazardous and unnatural, was reinvented 300 years ago as an unalloyed good, resulting in enormous consequences for our society today. In conversation with author, and festival co-director William Dalrymple, Dabhoiwala discusses the unsettling history of an ideal as cherished as it is misunderstood, leaving no ideological position on free speech undisturbed.
Fara Dabhoiwala is Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University, and author of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution. Formerly on faculty at the University of Oxford, he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, All Souls College, and Exeter College.
William Dalrymple is the author of White Mughals, The Last Mughal, and Return of a King. His book, The Anarchy, won the 2020 Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. Dalrymple has held visiting lectureships at Princeton, Brown, and Oxford, where he is currently a Visiting Fellow at All Souls. His latest book is The Golden Road : How Ancient India Transformed the World. He was presented with the President’s Medal by the British Academy and was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect Magazine. He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.
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#historian #freespeech #socialculture
Historian, scholar, and writer Fara Dabhoiwala teaches social, cultural, and intellectual history at Princeton University. His new book, What is Free Speech?, traces how free speech, once viewed as both hazardous and unnatural, was reinvented 300 years ago as an unalloyed good, resulting in enormous consequences for our society today. In conversation with author, and festival co-director William Dalrymple, Dabhoiwala discusses the unsettling history of an ideal as cherished as it is misunderstood, leaving no ideological position on free speech undisturbed.
Fara Dabhoiwala is Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University, and author of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution. Formerly on faculty at the University of Oxford, he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, All Souls College, and Exeter College.
William Dalrymple is the author of White Mughals, The Last Mughal, and Return of a King. His book, The Anarchy, won the 2020 Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. Dalrymple has held visiting lectureships at Princeton, Brown, and Oxford, where he is currently a Visiting Fellow at All Souls. His latest book is The Golden Road : How Ancient India Transformed the World. He was presented with the President’s Medal by the British Academy and was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect Magazine. He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.
Follow us on –
Website - jlflitfest.org
Facebook - facebook.com/JLFInternational
YouTube - youtube.com/@JLFInternational
Instagram - instagram.com/jlfinternational
Twitter - twitter.com/JLFLitfest
#historian #freespeech #socialculture
