Pierre Ryckmans: Artist and Art Historian
Seminar
Pierre Ryckmans is best known for the writing on contemporary Chinese politics under the pen name Simon Leys in which he exposed the inhumanity of totalitarianism at a time of Maoist fanaticism. Yet throughout life his deep appreciation of Chinese art and culture nourished and sustained him.…
Racial Difference, Political Liberalism and the Proliferation of Mechanics Institutes in Mid 19th Century Victoria
Seminar
In the nineteenth century, the Australian colonies witnessed a remarkable proliferation of Mechanics Institutes. By the opening decade of the 20th century, there were more Mechanics Institutes in Australia than in Britain itself, serving a population of less than 20 percent its size. Much…
England’s Green & Useful Land: Vaughan Williams, music & the land question
Seminar
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ use of pastoral idioms, together with his folksong collecting, his advocacy for ‘national music’ and his interest in amateur music-making, is typically understood within the vaunted trinity of nation—landscape—the people. It was this collection of associations, as well as…
Books that Changed Humanity: Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style
Lecture
Youth culture, pop art, cultural studies, style – Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style was an influential early text in the march of cultural studies, but it was also very influential on artists and art criticism, and in fact Hebdige ended up teaching in art school in the US.…
Books that Changed Humanity: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace
Lecture
Dr Ibrahim Abraham explores this controversial masterpiece of post-apartheid South Africa at the turn of the twenty-first century. Disgrace is the novel that not only earned Coetzee (another) Booker Prize but guaranteed him the Nobel Prize awarded in 2003.
HRC Seminar: The Power and the Glory: The US Presidential Election 2020
Seminar
Every US presidential election looms as decisive for the future of the nation's well being and for geopolitical stability and predictability. Why does this one seem more decisive than most? Indeed, will there be a result at all and, if so, how long will the world have to wait? One…
HRC Seminar: Comets, Dynasts, Immensities: Thomas Hardy, Space and Time, 1880-1930
Seminar
In this lecture, Prof Stevenson will explore ways that the bright comet of 1881, one of several Thomas Hardy might have witnessed, encouraged interests in the depths of the cosmos which shape Two on a Tower (1882) and later writing such as The Dynasts (1904-08). New awareness of…