British Studies Lecture Series

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 be in denial about the general decline. How in a practical way might interest in humanities majors be revived? One university has tried a blend, for example, of computer science and philosophy. At UT the Plan II program offers such courses as ‘Water and Society’, and ‘Law and Ethics’.  Here is a hint about English majors: it has to do with Shakespeare. Paula Marantz Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English and Dean of the Honors College at Drexel University. She is the author of five nonfiction books and five best-selling novels. She writes frequently for the Times Literary Supplement, The Yale Review, The American Scholar, and The Wall Street Journal. She is a co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature and the host of the nationally distributed TV show, The Drexel InterView (retitled for next season The Civil Discourse).

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 lecture will offer the beginnings of a new narrative that places quartos at the center rather than on the periphery of literary culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Aaron T. Pratt is the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center. With a Ph.D. in English from Yale University, he is a specialist in bibliography, the history of the book, and the literature and culture of early modern England. His academic work has appeared in a number of journals and edited collections, and he is currently working on a book to be titled Quarto Playbooks and the Making of Shakespeare.

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 political structure for the previously semi-independent sheikhdoms of the Gulf. Against the odds, he succeeded in his quest to create the UAE and to establish Bahrain and Qatar as independent states. Tancred Bradshaw received his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies and has since taught at Birkbeck College, the University of London, City University, and Florida State University. His books include King Abdullah I and the Zionist Movement and Glubb Pasha and Britain’s Project in the Middle East, 1920–1945. His talk will draw on his recent book, The End of Empire in the Gulf. He is currently working on a book entitled Britain and Oman: The Illusion of Independence.

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 1992 and was founding Director of the Melbourne School of Design (2007-12). He has been President of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia & New Zealand (SAHANZ), editor of its journal Fabrications, and in 2017, was elected Life Fellow. He has been President of the Australian Institute of Architects (Victorian Chapter) and in 2014, was elected Life Fellow. In 2008, he was made a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA). He is co-author of Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture, 1917-1967 (Miegunyah Press, 2006) and Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (Miegunyah Press with Powerhouse Publishing, 2008); co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2012); co-author of An Unfinished Experiment in Living: Australian Houses 1950-65 (UWA Press, 2017); Architecture and the Modern Hospital: Nosokomeion to Hygeia (Routledge, 2019); Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture (Miegunyah Press and Power Publishing, 2019); and AustraliaModern: Architecture, Landscape and Design (Thames & Hudson, 2019). He was co-curator of Augmented Australia at the Australian Pavilion at the Venice International Architecture Biennale (2014) and Visiting Patrick Geddes Fellow, University of Edinburgh (2016). He is currently researching his next books, one on Australian-US architectural relations, the other on Australian architect and critic Robin Boyd.

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 the reviews focused on academic issues. And there was, in the words of its editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, both “a leftish point of view” and a certain amount of condescension and even mockery directed at it. The LRB’s archive, which has found a home in the Harry Ransom Center, provided the basis for a history of the LRB’s first four decades. Sam Kinchin-Smith is Head of Special Projects at the LRB. He compiled the London Review of Books: An Incomplete History (2019) with the support of an HRC fellowship. He is the author of a monograph on Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (2018) and the editor of a catalogue of the political artist Kaya Mar’s work, Naked Ambition (2020).

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 entire War for Independence. But it was not a war that would be won by battles. It was a different sort of conflict. Washington came to understand this, and he changed, moving away from the offensive strategy that was natural to him. Washington adjusted, while the British did not. And that made all the difference.   Thomas Ricks is the military history columnist for The New York Times Book Review and a visiting fellow in history at Bowdoin College. Before becoming a full-time author, he covered the U.S. military for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal for 25 years, receiving two Pulitzer Prizes as part of reporting teams at those newspapers. He is the author of six books, including Pulitzer finalist Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003-05. His most recent book was Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom. He is married to Mary Kay Ricks, author of Escape on the Pearl.

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 embroiled in a dark real-world controversy for making five radio broadcasts from Berlin, at the behest of the Nazi government, in 1941. Friends such as George Orwell commented at the time that he was politically ignorant and unaware of the implications of his actions. Others in Britain called for his execution as a traitor. But what were the facts? Could he be accused of anything more damning than gross naïveté? What did Wodehouse actually know about politics, and what does that knowledge, or lack thereof, mean for his legacy? David Leal is Professor of Government and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford. His research interests include Latino politics, religion and politics, and immigration policy as well as Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. His works include over forty journal articles, including a recent one in the Baker Street Journal. He is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Politics in the United States (in progress) and Migration in an Era of Restriction and Recession (2016). In the Government Department, he teaches a course on British government and politics.

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 Minister conducted wartime operations. One of his first agonizing challenges was how to respond to the collapse of France in May 1940.

The Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, Packwood is a Fellow of Churchill College. The center houses the papers of Margaret Thatcher and many other leading British figures as well as those of Winston Churchill. Packwood recently published How Churchill Waged War: The Most Challenging Decisions of the Second World War, an extensive study of Churchill's wartime command. He holds the rank of OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society."

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 and Ideas at UT. Her most recent book, part of the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series, is on eugenics. The third edition of her The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset will be out in January, and a Japanese translation will follow in the spring.

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 columns on thin, cheap paper. Few of these bargain books survive, yet they made a substantial difference to Austen's early readership. These were the books bought and read by ordinary people. Janine Barchas is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. She has also written for the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition to her scholarly publications, she created the digital project What Jane Saw, which reconstructs two popular, commercially successful Georgian art exhibits witnessed by Austen. The Ransom Center is currently selling her new book in conjunction with the 'Austen in Austin' exhibition in the Stories-to-Tell gallery.