Speaker – Karl Rove Karl Rove’s recent book, The Triumph of William McKinley, deals with the election of 1896 and its consequences. His lecture will expand on the results of the 1898 war with Spain: the annexation of the Philippines and Hawaii in the Pacific and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean as well as Cuba as a protectorate of sorts. To what extent did American political leaders take into account the reaction of the other European powers, above all the British, to these moves toward...

Speaker – Geoffrey Wheatcroft The debate on Britain’s departure from the European Union, before the referendum and ever since, has invoked the past: ‘Our Island Story’ and a thousand years of history. The Leavers, or Brexiteers, are especially prone to talking of ‘vassalage’ and medieval history, of the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals, of the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), and of 1940, when the British stood alone. A powerful, palpable sense of nostalgia pervades the whole...

Speaker – Alan Friedman Scholars tend to label Samuel Beckett’s early career negatively as either his “Joyce years” or his “Surrealist period,” maintaining that Joyce’s writings had a detrimental effect on Beckett’s initial works and that Surrealism was only a minor influence. But both were critical models for Beckett. He mined his powerful predecessors for themes, ideas, and techniques that he used throughout his career, even as he rejected the aspects of them that did not suit him, and...

Speaker – James Dee  Religious beliefs have been questioned and opposed for centuries, from the pre-Socratics of ancient Hellas to the rise of science and the humanistic values of the Enlightenment—often said to be in decline today. This talk will summarize the ideas of a surprisingly large group of Hellenic skeptics and atheists, briefly survey some heresies of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and explore the anti-theological implications of the Scientific Revolution and the emergence...

Speaker – Harshan Kumarasingham  As the world watches Britain’s slow departure from the European Union, it can be constructive to remember the multiple occasions, especially since 1947, when Britain pulled out of its imperial possessions, often in haste and turmoil. Decolonization changed the nature of the Commonwealth, the seventy-year-old organization that replaced the empire as the focus of Britain’s geostrategic ambitions. This lecture will comment on Brexit in relation to British...

Speaker – Tony Hopkins Challenging conventional accounts of the place of the United States in the international order during the last three centuries, Tony Hopkins will argue that the United States was part of a British imperial order throughout this period. After 1898, it ruled a now forgotten empire in the Pacific and Caribbean. It brought formal colonial control to an end after 1945, when other Western powers also abandoned their empires. The conditions sustaining territorial empires had...

Speaker – Peter Stansky William Morris was a poet and artist as well as the foremost figure in the Arts and Crafts movement. He succeeded in reviving some of the techniques of handmade production that machines were replacing. His iconic patterns for fabrics and wallpaper are instantly recognizable, and the baroquely beautiful productions of his Kelmscott Press, using typefaces designed by Morris, are coveted by museums and collectors. His vision inspired the rediscovery of decoration...

Speaker – John Farrell It is sometimes overlooked that Jane Eyre is a classic Bildungsroman that narrates Jane’s formative years and spiritual education. Even more deliberately, it is a journey narrative. But Jane’s travels follow two incompatible paths. Both paths are narratively constructed as pilgrimages. Charlotte Brontë’s task in the novel—and Jane’s as well—is to make these pilgrimages converge. Their convergence is achieved only as Jane learns to comprehend a poetic language that...

Speaker – Derek Leebaert The British Empire remained a superpower at least until 1957. But the re-elected Eisenhower administration then proclaimed ‘a declaration ofindependence’ from British authority. The years in between are freighted withmyths: Britain’s ‘withdrawal from the Mediterranean’; the influence of GeorgeKennan’s view of Britain within the U.S. government; and Britain and thebeginning of the war in Vietnam. Knowing what actually occurred is vital tounderstanding questions of...

Speaker – George Kelling The British acquired Cyprus for strategic reasons in 1888, and the island has provided a valuable strategic base up to this day. During World War II, Cyprus faced the danger of a German invasion. The loyalty of the Greek population on the island could not be taken for granted. According to the Governor: “Morale of the majority of Cypriots is at its lowest ebb. In event of invasion we can expect little help from [the Greek Cypriots] and some might even turn against...

Speaker – Paul Woodruff The Irish poet E. R. Dodds (1893–1979) was expelled as a student from Oxford in 1916 for protesting the English reaction to the Easter Rising. As a mature scholar, he transformed classical scholarship with his brilliant book The Greeks and the Irrational. The young poets W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice flourished in his informal salon. Sir Maurice Bowra (1898–1971) became an Oxford institution, a polymath brilliant in high table repartee and the subject of many...

Speaker – Nigel Newton CHIEF EXECUTIVE, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING, LONDON The Harry Potter books have been translated into some 75 languages and have sold more than 450 million copies. Nigel Newton owes the inspiration to publish the first in the series to his young daughter, who read the manuscript and insisted that it was ‘much better than anything else.’ He initially sent J. K. Rowling a check for £2,500. The novels tell coming-of-age stories fantastically yet also realistically, setting...

Speaker – Stephen Enniss, HARRY RANSOM CENTER In the early 1960s a talented group of Northern Irish poets emerged in Belfast, including the future Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. In the decades since, a popular myth has taken root about the Northern Irish Renaissance with some commentators linking the emergence of a new generation of poets to the outbreak of violence in the North. In fact, the Troubles would not erupt for several more years, and the sudden appearance of this new generation...

Speaker – Kevin Kenny, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY Éamon de Valera (1882-1975) is the most important and divisive figure in modern Irish history. After rising to prominence in the Easter 1916 rebellion, he rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, provoking civil war in Ireland, but he returned to power in the 1930s and became the architect of a new Irish state. During World War II, de Valera consolidated Ireland’s independence through a controversial policy of neutrality. For better and worse, he...

Speaker: Paul Sullivan – ENGLISH Edward Coleman was drawn, hanged, and quartered for treason in December 1678, a victim of the public frenzy around the ‘Popish Plot’. The Ransom Center’s Pforzheimer Collection includes hundreds of manuscripts from Coleman and his newsletter office, reporting information and court gossip to Richard Bulstrode, a British diplomat in Brussels. Now available online, the letters form a part of the growing world-wide electronic archive. An examination of one of...

Speaker – Philip Waller OXFORD In ‘Light Reading’, Philip Waller will consider how various major figures, including Prime Ministers and Presidents, have chosen to relax by reading books, and whether their choices carry more significance than might appear. There are conflicts between what people feel they should read and what they do read. This tension is most acute between classics and best-sellers; yet these and other kinds of books are not without similarities. This talk—it is hoped— may...

Speaker – Rhonda Evans GOVERNMENT By using a combination of boat turn-backs, offshore detention and processing, and a refusal to ever accept refugees who have tried to reach its shores by boat, Australia has emerged as a world leader in deterrence. The staggering costs and ineffable human suffering inflicted by these policies have led critics to condemn them as “fiscally irresponsible, morally bankrupt, and increasingly unsustainable politically.” This lecture, however, will argue that...

Speaker – Robert D. King Founding Dean, College of Liberal Arts Alan Turing was the greatest mathematician Britain produced in the twentieth century. After a brilliant start at Cambridge he became the leading light in the British code-breaking center at Bletchley Park, and he was instrumental in breaking the German ENIGMA cipher by inventing and constructing a prototype of the modern computer. This was key to the Allied victory in World War II. In 1952 he died tragically and alone, a...

Speaker – Rodolfo John Alaniz HISTORY Charles Darwin’s voyage aboard HMS Beagle inaugurated a new era in the history of biology. However, Darwin was one of many naturalists who gathered specimens and gained prestige on nineteenth-century British expeditions. This talk will explore the role that the British Empire played in the establishment of Darwin’s theory, and asks what this episode might reveal in an imperial context. Rodolfo John Alaniz is a postdoctoral affiliate at the Institute of...

Speakers – James Loehlin, Alan Friedman, and Eric Mallin ENGLISH Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’ soliloquy has long been Shakespeare’s most famous speech; but the way in which it has been performed on stage has changed drastically over the centuries. This session will review the history of those performances, from speculation about early modern acting to reviews of eminent Shakespeareans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to some of the most famous film and stage renditions of the...

document.createElement('audio'); http://podcasts.la.utexas.edu/british-studies-lecture-series/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/09/18-09-07-British-Studies-Lecture-Series.mp3 Speaker – Jonathan Brown When Fidel Castro formed an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1962, it sparked the Cuban missile crisis and became a defining incident of the Cold War. Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana predates the Cuban missile crisis, but the plot involves missile installations and seems to anticipate the...

document.createElement('audio'); http://podcasts.la.utexas.edu/british-studies-lecture-series/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/09/18-08-31-British-Studies-Lecture-Series.mp3 Speaker – George Scott Christian In the last four years, fundamental questions have arisen about the future of the composite state created by the 1707 Treaty of Union between England and Scotland. In 2014 a majority of Scots voted to ‘remain’ in the Union. Yet in 2016 a large majority (68%) voted to ‘remain’ in the...

Although better known as a nurse, Florence Nightingale was also a skilled data scientist who successfully convinced hospitals that they could improve health care by using statistics. In 1859, in honor of these achievements, she became the first woman ever elected to the Royal Statistical Society. This talk will consider the question of what Nightingale’s experience can teach us about our own age, as we consider the future of artificial intelligence in health care. James Scott is Associate...

Karl Rove’s recent book, The Triumph of William McKinley, deals with the election of 1896 and its consequences. His lecture will expand on the results of the 1898 war with Spain: the annexation of the Philippines and Hawaii in the Pacific and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean as well as Cuba as a protectorate of sorts. To what extent did American political leaders take into account the reaction of the other European powers, above all the British, to these moves toward acquiring an empire? Karl...

Challenging conventional accounts of the place of the United States in the international order during the last three centuries, Tony Hopkins will argue that the United States was part of a British imperial order throughout this period. After 1898, it ruled a now forgotten empire in the Pacific and Caribbean. It brought formal colonial control to an end after 1945, when other Western powers also abandoned their empires. The conditions sustaining territorial empires had changed irrevocably....