Antony Copley

Antony R. H. Copley (1 July 1937 – 18 July 2016) was a British historian. He was an honorary professor at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and specialised in nineteenth century French history and modern Indian history. At the time of his death he was looking forward to a general pardon for gay men who like himself, had been convicted of homosexual acts.^[1][2]

He was born on 1 July 1937 in Hertfordshire, the son of Alan, a solicitor, and Iris Copley, and educated at Gresham's School and Worcester College, Oxford.^[1]

In 1959 he was entrapped by the police in a public toilet, and arrested for importuning with immoral purposes. Advised by his solicitor father, he pled guilty.^[1]

In 1967, he joined the staff at the University of Kent at Canterbury.^[3]

Publications

• "Sexual Moralities in France 1780-1980", Routledge (1989)
• Gandhi: Against the Tide, Oxford University Press (1996)
• Religions in Conflict: Ideology, Cultural Contact and Conversion in Late-Colonial India, Oxford India Paperbacks, 2000
• Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-Rule (Global Encounters: Studies in Comparative Political Theory) by Anthony J. Parel, Judith M. Brown, Antony Copley and Fred Dallmayr (2000)
• Gurus and their followers: New religious reform movements in Colonial India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195649581 (2000)
• A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writings of Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood, Lexington, (2006)
• Hinduism in Public and Private Reform, Hindutva, Gender, and Sampraday, Oxford India Paperbacks, 2009
• Music and the Spiritual: Composers and Politics in the 20th Century, Ziggurat, (2012)
• A Memoir: Historian and Homosexual: Search for a Postwar Identity: Edited Diaries and Journals, Fastprint publishing, (2016)

References