Speaker - Mark Gasiorowski

This lecture will begin with the historic Britain-Iran connection: ‘If you lift up Khomeini’s beard, you will find “MADE IN BRITAIN” stamped on his chin.’ After Iran’s 1978-1979 revolution, US and British officials sought a cooperative, mutually-beneficial relationship with the country’s new leaders. Contrary to what many believed, the CIA did not undertake covert political operations against the new regime and, in fact, rejected many opportunities to do so. The CIA in fact began an extraordinary intelligence-sharing initiative with the British that culminated in a warning that Iraq was preparing to invade Iran. These efforts ended when radical Islamists seized the US embassy in November 1979. Mark Gasiorowski is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University. He taught previously at Louisiana State University and has been a Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Visiting Professor at Tehran University. He is the author of US Foreign Policy and the Client State and the editor, with Malcolm Byrne, of the acclaimed Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran.

Speaker - Joanna Hitchcock

Among the 1,300 passengers aboard the Titanic when she steamed out of Southampton Harbor in April 1912 was Noël, Countess of Rothes. She was traveling to the States to join her husband. This account of Noël’s experiences on the ship, in the lifeboat, and aboard the rescue ship is told through her own eyes, based on letters she wrote immediately after the sinking to her parents and to her cousin, the speaker’s grandmother.

Joanna Hitchcock is the former Director of the University of Texas Press and a past President of the Association of American University Presses. She graduated from Oxford University (Lady Margaret Hall) with a B.A. in Modern History. She started her publishing career at Oxford University Press in London. Before coming to Austin in 1992, she was executive editor for the humanities and assistant director at Princeton University Press.

Speakers - Virginia Brown (Dell Medical School), Robert Prentice (McCombs Business School) Stephen Sonnenberg, M.D. (Plan II), Paul Woodruff (Philosophy)

The Oxford Ethics Centre was established in 2003 with the aim of rational reflection on personal and professional ethics: ‘The vision is Socratic, not missionary’. The Oxford Centre promotes discussion on ‘climate change, terrorism, global inequality, poverty, and genetic engineering’. The Centre has transformed the way philosophy is taught at Oxford. ‘Metaethics’ has been crowded out by practical issues. Plans for an Ethics Center at UT have been under consideration for several years and will be discussed at a conference in the fall semester 2018. How should the aims and purpose compare with those of the Oxford Ethics Centre? What strengths should be developed in bioethics to support the Dell School? How will the Center help to promote classes and teaching with an ethical component? One issue is moral injury from events such as the massacre at My Lai and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The Center will also discuss the ethics of teaching: do assignments that give students strong incentives to cheat cause them moral injury?

Speaker - Bernard Wasserstein

At the end of its three-decades-long mandate in 1948, Britain withdrew its administration and 100,000-strong armed forces from Palestine. But unlike its departure from any other dependent territory, it did not hand over to any successor government. Instead it left Arabs and Jews to fight for possession of the Holy Land. Historians have long debated why Britain left Palestine. But how did they leave? Was it a dignified withdrawal or a disorderly cut and run?

Bernard Wasserstein was born in London in 1948 and was a Professor of History at several British and American universities. A Guggenheim and British Academy fellow, he has been a recipient of the Golden Dagger and Yad Vashem book awards. Since 2014, when he retired from the University of Chicago, he has lived in Amsterdam. His books, which have been translated into twelve languages, include The British in Palestine, Divided Jerusalem, and Israelis and Palestinians.

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 acquiring an empire?

Karl Rove was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff during the George W. Bush administration. He is usually credited with the 1994 and 1998 Texas gubernatorial victories of Bush as well as the presidential wins in 2000 and 2004. Bush has referred to Rove as the “architect.” After the publication of The Triumph of William McKinley, the UT historian H.W. Brands referred to it as “political history at its most engaging.” Rove lives in Austin.

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 enterprise.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author, a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the New York Review of Books as well as to newspapers and magazines in Britain. His books include The Randlords (1985), The Controversy of Zion (1996), andYo, Blair! (2007). He has been a regular visitor to the British Studies Seminar, talking more than once about Winston Churchill, a book on whose reputation and legacy he is finishing. Since being taken to a football game in Austin, he has considered himself a long-range Longhorn fan.

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 increasingly transcended the constraints of their particular styles.

Alan Friedman, Thaman Professor of English and Comparative Literature, specializes in modern British, Irish, and American literature, the novel, and Shakespearean drama. He is the author of six books and has edited a dozen others, as well as coedited four special journal issues on Joyce and Beckett. His honors include the UT’s Civitatis Award, conferred annually for dedicated and meritorious service to the University. For 20 years he coordinated the Actors from the London Stage program and the student group Spirit of Shakespeare. He has chaired the University’s Faculty Council and is currently Secretary of the General Faculty.

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 of historical-critical biblical studies. Along the way, we will encounter a powerful argument built on sand, an extremely dangerous book that never was, a Christian who was willing to “spit in God's face,” a decapitated gravestone in London, and a touch of “cosmological vertigo.”

James Dee received his A.B. in Comparative Literature (Honors) from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Texas. He was on the faculty of the Classics Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1972 to 1999, serving as department chair for eight years. His current status is Visiting Researcher-Scholar in Classics. He has held two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for Research and has published nine reference works (six in Homeric studies), along with three dozen articles and reviews.

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 changed irrevocably. Thereafter, the United States was not an empire but an aspiring hegemon.

Tony Hopkins held the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and was a stalwart member of British Studies. He is now Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He has written extensively on African history, British imperial history, and globalization. He has recently published American Empire: A Global History (2018).

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 priorities in shaping the modern Commonwealth.

Harshan Kumarasingham is Lecturer in British Politics at the University of Edinburgh. Originally from New Zealand, he is a political and constitutional historian who has written on British decolonization, the Commonwealth, and the political legacies of empire for post-colonial states. He edited the October 2018 issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, which dealt with liberal ideals and the politics of decolonization. He is currently coediting The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom.