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 based on natural forms and the inherent beauty of particular materials. Peter Stansky’s assessment of the life and times of Morris will complement the present exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center.

Peter Stansky was educated at Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard. He has spent his career as a Professor of British history at Stanford University. His extensive writing on modern Britain includes two books on William Morris as well as studies of Bloomsbury, George Orwell, and British participants in the Spanish Civil War—and, not least, the arts in Britain during the Second World War. He has recently collaborated with Fred Leventhal on a biography of Leonard Woolf, soon to be published.

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 emerges mysteriously from the novel’s narrative.

John P. (‘Jack’) Farrell joined the English Department at UT in 1974 as an Associate Professor and retired in 2006 as Professor Emeritus. Among his publications are Revolution as Tragedy: The Dilemma of the Moderate from Scott to Arnold and more than fifty essays on Romantic and Victorian literature—the latest of which is ‘Romance Narrative in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes’. He is a founding member of the British Studies seminar.

Speaker - Derek Leebaert

The British Empire remained a superpower at least until 1957. But the re-

elected Eisenhower administration then proclaimed ‘a declaration of

independence’ from British authority. The years in between are freighted with

myths: Britain’s ‘withdrawal from the Mediterranean’; the influence of George

Kennan’s view of Britain within the U.S. government; and Britain and the

beginning of the war in Vietnam. Knowing what actually occurred is vital to

understanding questions of Britain and the United States in the postwar era,

in Middle East destabilization, in the history of the rise and decline of

superpowers—and, not least, Brexit.

Derek Leebaert’s books include Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American

Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan (2010); To Dare and to Conquer:

Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations from Achilles to Al Qaeda

(2006); and The Fifty-Year Wound: How America’s Cold War Victory Shapes Our

World (2002). He is a former Smithsonian Fellow; a founding editor of

International Security, and a founder of the National Museum of the U.S. Army.

He is a partner in the global management consulting firm MAP AG (Zurich).

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 delightful Oxford anecdotes. His many books were much admired; he was knighted and became Warden of Wadham College at Oxford. When Gilbert Murray retired as Regius Professor of Greek in 1936, Bowra believed that he was heir apparent. So did Oxford society. But under Murray’s influence, Dodds was named to the chair. On his arrival as professor, Oxford treated Dodds as an interloper, whispering that Bowra had been rejected because of his homosexuality and that Dodds had been disloyal to the Crown. What was really at issue between these two exemplary figures? Both were poets, and both were fine scholars, but they were very different kinds of scholars. Paul Woodruff has taught at UT since 1973. His publications include Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, The Ajax Dilemma: Justice and Fairness in Rewards, and The Necessity of Theater. He has translated (with Peter Meineck) all of Sophocles’ surviving plays, as well as Plato’s Symposium (with Alexander Nehamas). This year he has brought out edited volumes on Oedipus and on the ethics of philanthropy. His latest book, which should be in print around November 30, is The Garden of Leaders: Toward a Revolution in Higher Education.

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 us.” What was the British response to a situation that posed the danger of revolt from within and invasion without? The answer has a bearing on the war in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. George Kelling served in the army from 1958 to 1978. On retiring, he entered graduate school, earning a doctorate in history at the University of Texas in 1988, with a dissertation dealing with Cyprus in the period 1939–1955. He has had a second career as a civilian historian with the air force. He has maintained a vigorous interest in the history of the British Empire, particularly Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean, in World War II.

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 suicide. This is his story. Robert D. King, from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, spent his career at The University of Texas. He was at various times Rapoport Chair of Jewish Studies, Professor of Linguistics, Germanic Languages, and Asian Studies, and member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He was Founding Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, a position he occupied from 1976-1993. He provided material support to Roger Louis in getting the British Studies Seminar off the ground in the 1970s and1980s; and he would like to pay tribute to Walter Wetzels for his commitment to British Studies over many decades.

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 twentieth century.

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 Historical Studies and Ritter Memorial Fellow at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. He has taught the history of science at the University of California, Berkeley, and will teach at UT during the 2018-2019 academic year. His has recently completed a monograph, Darwin in the Deep: Marine Invertebrates, Evolutionary Methodologies, and the Emergence of Natural Selection.

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 them in a world of wizardry, spells, and quidditch as well as homework, adolescent crushes, and cruel elders. Yet not all the grownups are malign: Dumbledore, the headmaster of the wizards’ school Hogwarts, according to Rowling herself, ‘is the epitome of goodness.’ What are Nigel Newton’s own impressions of the characters—and, in his view, the reasons for the success of the series? Nigel Newton is an American-born British publisher originally from San Francisco. He studied English at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He then stayed on in England, learning the book trade first at Macmillan and then at Sidgwick and Jackson, where he became deputy managing director at age 27. He first thought of creating a new company in 1984, and launched Bloomsbury two years later. The firm quickly became prosperous, and its success was ensured when it published J. K. Rowling. Is there a future for Bloomsbury after Harry Potter? ‘You can bet your Hogwarts there is’—especially since I. B. Tauris has now merged with Bloomsbury.

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 had more to do with the individual talents of this group of poets and an extended network of publishers, editors, and academics, many of them London-based. Stephen Enniss will provide a corrective reading of this chapter of literary history and explore the London origins of the Belfast Group. Dr. Stephen Enniss is Director of the Harry Ransom Center. His research interests are in 20th century poetry, and he has written on Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney, among other figures. He is a past recipient of a Leverhulme Fellowship from the University of London, and he is the author of After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon (Gill & Macmillan, 2014). Major acquisitions during his tenure have included the archives of Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, Arthur Miller, and Nobel Laureates Kazuo Ishiguro and Gabriel García Márquez. Before coming to the Ransom Center, he held previous appointments at the Folger Shakespeare Library and at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.