
Speaker: James Crossley
All welcome, but you will need to register in advance
This talk will provide an overview of Morton’s life and work based on recent archival research. It will cover 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. The talk will continue with a reassessment of Morton’s role as a historian of England, utopianism, and millenarianism.
James Crossley is Professor and Director of the Critical Study of Millenarian and Apocalyptic Movements at the University of Cambridge, and research professor at MF Oslo. He is the author of the biography A. L. Morton and the Radical Tradition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).