Dr David Page

David Page is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, a member of the Commonwealth Media and Good Governance Working Group, and an author and consultant on Media and Communications in South Asia.

A historian by training, he spent a year teaching at Edwardes College Peshawar on VSO in 1966-67 before returning to Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the constitutional origins of the Partition of India. He worked in the BBC World Service for over 20 years with editorial and managerial responsibilities for BBC radio broadcasts in south Asian languages. He was the Editor of the BBC Urdu Service from 1977 to 1985 and the first editor of the Pashto Service, which began broadcasting in 1981. After leaving the BBC in 1994, he has undertaken research, training, consultancy and writing projects relating to journalism and the media in South Asia.

He is the author of Prelude to Partition (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1982); co-author (with William Crawley) of ‘Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting, Culture and the Public Interest’ (Sage, New Delhi, 2001); and co-editor (with William Crawley and Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena) of ‘Embattled Media: Democracy, Governance and Reform in Sri Lanka’ (Sage, New Delhi, 2015). He has lectured on South Asian politics at Oxford and London Universities. He is a trustee of Afghanaid, a British charity working in rural development in Afghanistan.