EVENT: CONAN DOYLE’S ORIENT

Friday 2nd October 2026 at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London

Arthur Conan Doyle never visited Asia, but he had many and various dealings with the Orient in fact and in imagination, as an author of fiction (including the Sherlock Holmes stories), a traveller, an imperialist, a war correspondent, an amateur Egyptologist, and an investigator of the occult. These papers map that fascinating and surprising region, Conan Doyle’s Orient.

Conan Doyle is best known for his Sherlock Holmes tales, and in the minds of many people he is associated with a fog-bound London of hansom cabs and plodding policemen. Of course there was much more to Conan Doyle than this familiar landscape. He was an indefatigable traveller across four continents, and had been a doctor on a whaling ship, an occasional war correspondent, an army doctor (in South Africa), and a popular lecturer on literary and spiritual subjects. As an enthusiastic though not uncritical imperialist (his lifetime, 1859 to 1930, coinciding with the zenith of the British Empire), and in later life a vigorous campaigner for Spiritualism from Toronto to Sydney, he thought globally. In his imagination he had visited Ancient Egypt, the mysterious temples of the Oriental occult, and battlegrounds from the wars of Napoleon to the Boxer Rebellion.

This symposium has its eye on deprovincializing Conan Doyle, examining the scope of his interest and work (fiction and non-fiction) in Oriental subjects. The Orient for our purposes is not just Asia but, in George Orwell’s useful phrase, ‘anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez’. We have invited our speakers to investigate Conan Doyle’s representations of and ideas about Asia and Africa, both historical and contemporary, and dealing with themes and issues such as empire, race, the exotic and the spiritual, Orientalism including the Oriental Gothic, health, travel and tourism.

Conan Doyle studies is a fast-growing field of research for academics and students. We hope the papers given in this symposium will also be of interest beyond the academy to the broad parish of those readers who enjoy the work of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Speakers include:

Eleanor Dobson (University of Birmingham), ‘Unwrapping Egypt: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Mummy Stories Reconsidered’

Darryl Jones (Trinity College Dublin), ‘Arthur Conan Doyle: Adventures in the Sudan’

Douglas Kerr (Birkbeck and Hong Kong University), ‘Redemption on the Imperial Frontier: Conan Doyle and Kipling’

James Machin (Technical Editor, Edinburgh Edition of Arthur Conan Doyle), ‘Chaldeans, Phoenicians, and Lost Civilisations: Conan Doyle and Near Eastern Antiquity’

Shafquat Towheed (Open University), ‘The First Anglo-Afghan War (1841-2), Oriental Knowledge, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Mystery of Cloomber (1889)’

Brian Wang, (Hong Kong University), ‘China through Doyle’s Eyes and Pen’

https://ies.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/conan-doyles-orient