We are delighted to announce that this year’s annual society lecture will be given by Dr Ingrid Hanson, University of Manchester, on Wednesday 18th October at 5pm, Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, Manchester City Centre.
Title: Slow reading and the processes of protest: nature, culture, and conscientious objection
Abstract: In a moment when protest is being vilified and closed down in the name of public order, what can we learn from the writings, the solidarity and the internal disagreements of the protestors and conscientious objectors (COs) of the First World War (and from what we don’t know about them)? What does ‘a belief in collective security’, to borrow Raymond Williams’s phrase from his own statement of conscientious objection to the Korean War, look like? How does it relate to pacifism and internationalism, to war, racism, protest and community, human and non-human? This talk will draw on published and unpublished writings of First World War COs and their supporters, from Fenner Brockway to Vernon Lee, to consider the ways slow, close attention to the literature of the past and to ‘the real multiplicity of things and living processes’ in Williams’s phrase, that make up the natural world and its relationship to humans and human labour, is used to challenge or expose processes of domination and subordination.
The lecture will start at 5pm. It is free and open to all. No need to book. All enquiries to ben.harker@manchester.ac.uk.
Address: Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, 29 Cross Street, Manchester, M2 1NL.
Ingrid Hanson is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. She is author of William Morris and the Uses of Violence (Anthem Press, 2013), co-editor of Poetry, Politics and Pictures: Culture and Identity in Europe, 1840-1914 (Peter Lang, 2013), and editor of a forthcoming (2023) Oxford University Press edition of William Morris’s works. She has published articles and book chapters on aspects of late-Victorian socialist journalism and culture, utopianism and peace protest, and has spoken on Radio 4’s In Our Time and Radio 3’s The Essay about her research. Her current project, a monograph provisionally entitled Disturbing the Peace, 1848-1930, examines the constitutive role of antiwar and pro-peace literature, song, protest and lament in British culture. She has disturbed the peace herself in protests against war, unjust working conditions, and the detention of asylum seekers, among other matters.
The Raymond Williams Society 