The British Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin was created in 1975. For more than thirty years the program has sponsored public lectures in English literature, history, and government, and has conducted a weekly seminar called the Faculty Seminar on British Studies that includes faculty members, graduate students, undergraduates, and members of the Austin community.
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The British Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin was created in 1975. For more than thirty years the program has sponsored public lectures in English literature, history, and government, and has conducted a weekly seminar called the Faculty Seminar on British Studies that includes faculty members, graduate students, undergraduates, and members of the Austin community.
Paula Marantz Cohen DREXEL UNIVERSITY How can decline in enrollments in the humanities be explained? Nationwide in recent years estimates of the drop in liberal arts majors range from one-fourth to one-third of those in English, history, government, philosophy and other traditional subjects. English departments have been hit especially hard. One study found that faculty members seem to […]
Aaron Pratt HARRY RANSOM CENTER Before the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio in 1623 and the efforts of subsequent editors and critics, England’s printed playbooks were considered “riff raff,” connected more with the world of London’s popular theaters than with what we might think of as “capital-L” Literature. Or so we have been told. This […]
Tancred Bradshaw LONDON One of the surprises of Britain’s withdrawal from the Middle East was the successful creation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971. Tancred Bradshaw will discuss the critical role played by Sir William Luce, previously Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Aden Colony, in that transition. Luce was responsible for establishing a viable […]
Philip Goad is the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Professor of Australian Studies (AY2019-20) at Harvard University and Chair of Architecture and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne. He was trained as an architect and gained his PhD in architectural history at the University of Melbourne where he has taught since […]
The London Review of Books was founded in 1979 during a strike at The Times that prevented the publication of the Times Literary Supplement. By the time the dispute at The Times was settled, two issues of the LRB had been published. At the beginning there was only a small circulation. A large proportion of […]
Thomas Ricks NEW YORK TIMES If the best measure of a general is the ability to grasp the nature of the war he faces, and then to make adjustments, George Washington was one of the greatest the United States ever had. This is not perceived even today because he had few victories during the […]
Speaker – David Leal, Nuffield College, Oxford P.G. Wodehouse was England’s greatest comic writer. His new memorial at Westminster Abbey celebrates his achievements as “Humorist, Novelist, Playwright, Lyricist.” He continues to be widely read and written about. Wodehouse is best known for creating sunny fictional worlds into which we can escape, yet he found himself […]
Speaker – Allen Packwood, Churchill College, Cambridge Allen Packwood will use his knowledge of the Churchill Papers, held at Churchill College, Cambridge, to analyze the contents of Churchill’s despatch boxes. He will go behind the iconic image and the famous oratory to look in detail at Churchill’s leadership and shed light on how the Prime […]
Speaker – Philippa Levine Diverse institutions have attempted to order and to organize, to regulate and to banish, to promote and to sell nakedness. Focusing on religion’s always ambivalent relationship with the human body, this talk explores a cultural history with surprisingly powerful contemporary resonance. Philippa Levine holds the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History […]
Speaker – Janine Barchas In the nineteenth century, inexpensive editions of Jane Austen’s novels were made available to Britain’s working classes. They were sold at railway stations, traded for soap wrappers, and awarded as school prizes. At pennies a copy, these reprints were some of the earliest mass-market paperbacks, with Austen’s stories squeezed into tight […]
Speaker – Michael J. Birkner, Gettysburg College This lecture is about journalists based in Australia practicing their craft in 1942, when the prospect of a Japanese invasion was impending. How did professional standards compare with daily practice? Most information came from official sources, and draft articles had to run the gantlet of military censors. What […]
Speaker – Gwyn Daniel OXFORD In many of his plays, Shakespeare deals with profound political questions that have continuing relevance for the contemporary world. His tragedies often have a family drama at their heart. They include conflicts between personal and family loyalties, on the one hand, and on the other the demands of realpolitik. In […]
Speaker – Sandra Mayer Oscar Wilde once described Benjamin Disraeli’s life as ‘the most brilliant of paradoxes’. It served as a model for someone who, as an Irishman and aspiring literary celebrity, shared Disraeli’s outsider status, his Byronic dandyism, his mastery of the quotable epigram, and his quest for fame in the British establishment. This […]
Speaker – Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa Since 1981, conservators who work in libraries and archives to preserve cultural records have been educated typically in three-to four-year graduate programs. Before 1981 in the U.S., however, no higher education opportunities existed—neither undergraduate nor graduate—targeted to the field of library and archives conservation. Why was this case? Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa locates […]
Speaker – Wayne A. Rebhorn Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night has long been associated with the festive aspects of carnival, especially in its rejection of authority and the exploration of gender confusion in its main, romantic plot. But ‘carnival’ as used by Shakespeare also meant a time of grotesque liberation and indulgence. The carnivalesque can be disturbing as well […]
Speaker – Stephen Sonnenberg While a student at Princeton in the late 1950s and early 1960s Stephen Sonnenberg was influenced by the ideas of the literary critic and poet R. P. Blackmur, and read C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). He will explain Snow’s influence on his thinking throughout his life, as […]
Speaker – Sam Baker Often described as the inventor of the historical novel, the Scottish author Walter Scott (1771-1832) was also a poet, lawyer, pioneering editor, and popular historian. This talk will explore the theme of stewardship in Scott’s fiction—with particular reference to his best remembered work, Ivanhoe, and one of his least remembered, The […]
Speaker – Dean Robert King This occasion celebrates the end of the five-year process, sponsored by Randy Diehl and the College of Liberal Arts, that resulted in 150 Highly Recommended Books. The other committee members for the project were Robert Abzug (Rapoport Chair of Jewish Studies), Roger Louis (Kerr Professor of English History and Culture), […]
Speaker – David Edwards (GOVERNMENT) David Edwards has been a dedicated reader of American and British newspapers and opinion magazines since the 1950s. In fact, he still subscribes to more than one hundred print editions of newspapers, magazines, and journals. He will talk about how fake news has evolved into the versions of it that […]
Speakers – Bill Brands (HISTORY) Bat Sparrow (GOVERNMENT) Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa (HARRY RANSOM CENTER) Bill Brands and Bat Sparrow will discuss the difference between writing history and biography, and between writing the life of a living person and that of someone dead, perhaps long ago dead, as well as the attitudes of biographers toward their subjects. […]
The British Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin was created in 1975. For more than thirty years the program has sponsored public lectures in English literature, history, and government, and has conducted a weekly seminar called the Faculty Seminar on British Studies that includes faculty members, graduate students, undergraduates, and members of the Austin community.
