Category: Past SHS Meetings
Imperial Politics in the Indian Ocean
5 March 2025
Speaker Laleh Khalili
The Indian Ocean basin is one of the most contested political spaces in contemporary politics, not least because of the long history of colonial conquest and imperial projection there. In this talk, Laleh Khalili will discuss the long history of the intrusion of European powers into this maritime space and discuss the afterlives of colonialism and continued imperial interest in this space. Read on ...
Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the invention of Guerrilla Journalism
Socialist History Public Zoom Meeting
on Wednesday 15 January 2025
The Extraordinary Life of a Revolutionary Journalist
I will talk about the subject of my book, my father, the radical journalist Claud Cockburn, who fought successfully against the political and media establishment. To Graham Greene, he was the greatest journalist of the twentieth century. Read on ...
A. L. Morton: Life in the Radical Tradition
Speaker: James Crossley
This talk provided an overview of Morton’s life and work based on recent archival research. It covered the formative influences on Morton’s political and intellectual development and contextualise his work in light of his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Morton’s main publications will be discussed, including A People’s History of England (1938) and The English Utopia (1952), explaining the shifting emphases between the two.
Read on ... REWILDING WILLIAM MORRIS
Speaker Dr Phillippa Bennett
Rewilding has an essential role in addressing the current climate crisis and has also inspired a significant and highly popular corpus of literary non-fiction in which individual writers describe their own personal experiences and processes of rewilding. Rewilding has often been conceived in individualist terms however in such writing, and contemporary rewilding discourses more generally can perpetuate the idea that ‘Nature’ is something other than human, whilst prioritising human needs and desires. Read on ...