Biography
Charles Bruce (Lord Bruce) has been a member of the International Academic Advisory Board since 2010. He studied at the University of St Andrews, where he received an MA in Economic History; and at the University of Dundee, where he received an MSc in Spatial Planning and Sustainable Urban Design. He manages an historic family estate in Scotland, involved in tourism, hospitality, farming, forestry, property management and sustainable development. He also curates an internationally significant family archive relating to British diplomatic history in South Asia and SE Asia which includes the papers of James Bruce (8th Earl of Elgin) a British proconsul who was responsible for introducing China and Japan to international diplomacy and global trade in the mid-nineteenth century.
Charles Bruce has maintained his family's connections with Japan and India. He is Hon. Patron of the Japan Society of Scotland, Patron of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies, and Chairman of the Kolkata Scottish Heritage Trust. He is also President of The Democracy Forum, the London-based open policy forum for South Asia.
In 2009 he represented the UK at the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations with Japan, and has subsequently lectured on the close ties which emerged between Meiji Japan and Britain in the nineteenth century. In 2010, he gave the keynote address at the IAFOR conference on the Arts and Humanities, in Osaka. In 2012, he gave the keynote address at an international symposium organised by the University of Edinburgh and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, ‘Cultural Policy and Creative Industries in Japan and Scotland’. In 2014, he gave the keynote address at the IAFOR conference on the Arts and Humanities, in Brighton. He has also spoken frequently in India and the UK on the work of the pioneering sociologist, Sir Patrick Geddes, who introduced town planning to India. He is a contributor to Gitanjali and Beyond, an internationally peer-reviewed journal focussing on the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore.
