Lecture Series Recordings

No topic in modern British history is seen as differently on either side of the Atlantic as the American Revolution. Americans triumphantly champion the patriots who won the war. But what about the American loyalists, who never wanted independence from Britain in the first place? Sixty thousand loyalists (with 15,000 of their slaves) left the thirteen colonies to resettle across the British Empire, in Canada, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, and beyond. Maya Jasanoff will trace the global loyalist diaspora to show how the refugees cast into relief a transformative moment when they rebuilt their lives abroad. After their loss in America, the loyalists mirrored Britain's own striking resurgence from defeat to become the greatest imperial power in the nineteenth-century world. Maya Jasanoff is Associate Professor of History at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on British history since 1750. Her research on American loyalists marks a shift in settings from her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2005), which looked at imperial expansion in India and Egypt through the lives of art collectors. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books.

The theme of 'Pyrrhic Victory' concerns itself first and foremost with popular remembrance of slaughter, waste, futility, and purposelessness. How did the idea of 'Lions led by Donkeys' become embedded in the historical literature and the literary imagination? In recent years there has been a revolution in historical thinking about command, strategy, and commanders. A critical assessment of England and the Great War must finally include the question of national identity as well as military efficiency, and the evolution of the methods that eventually manifested themselves in the Second World War. John Gooch is Professor of International History at the University of Leeds. He was educated at King's College, University of London, where he took a First in History and a Ph.D. in War Studies. He has published over a dozen books, including Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (with Eliot Cohen), and most recently Mussolini and His Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign Policy, 1922-1940. He is presently completing a survey of war in the twentieth century and a study of Italy in the First World War.

In his book on John A. Hobson, Peter Cain argues that there is a radical tradition denouncing the iniquity of imperialism. Jeremy Bentham played a prominent part in identifying the origins of modern imperialism in the eighteenth century. After examining Bentham's main contribution and demonstrating the richness and power of his ideas, Peter Cain will compare Bentham's work with Hobson's Imperialism: A Study (1902), the most famous statement of the radical case. The argument is that Bentham's thought was seminal in making Hobson's own contribution so distinctive and interesting. Peter Cain is Research Professor of History at Sheffield Hallam University. He is presently at work on a book on the intellectual history of empire in Britain from 1850 to 1914. His books include Hobson and Imperialism: Radicalism, New Liberalism and Finance, 1887-1938, and his famous work with A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000.

When Harold Evans was Editor of the Sunday Times in the 1970s, his chief foreign correspondent, David Holden, was assassinated in Cairo. At 53, Holden was an experienced Middle East reporter and broadcaster. Who might have murdered him in December 1977? And why? Scotland Yard immediately investigated the case along with the police in Cairo. It quickly became apparent that there was an intelligence dimension involving the CIA and, to the chagrin of Evans, a spy within the office of the Sunday Times. The case has never been resolved, but there are recently declassified CIA and other documents that provide further clues. With Harry Evans as a latter-day Agatha Christie, the drama appears to be reaching a conclusion. Sir Harold Evans was Editor of the Sunday Times for 14 years, 1967-1981. Evans became famous for his crusading style of investigative reporting, bringing to public attention stories and scandals often officially denied or ignored. He has subsequently served as editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Monthly press and editorial director of US News and World Report as well as president and publisher of Random House. His books include The American Century (1988) and his recent autobiography, My Paper Chase, to be published in the United States in November. He is the husband of Tina Brown.

The discussion will focus on a significant recent book, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, but each of the participants will address the question of the reason for the enduring significance of Bloomsbury.

In between the outbreak of the Seven Years' War in 1756 and the conclusion of the War for American Independence in 1783, the British Empire shifted from Atlantic commercial and colonial expansion to political dominion and territorial conquest in Asia. Accompanying this shift was the abandonment of the long-standing British ideal of an 'empire of liberty' in favor of an avowedly despotic and military imperialism. Why did the British Empire undergo such a dramatic transformation in ideology and practice? This lecture will argue that the imperial transformation was the symptomatic expression of a wide-ranging crisis in British state and society. This crisis ultimately caused the death of Whig Britain and, with it, the decline and fall of Whig imperialism. James M. Vaughn is an Assistant Professor of History and a Junior Fellow in British Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is an historian of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. He is working on a book that examines mid-eighteenth-century British politics and the transformation of the East India Company from a commercial corporation into a territorial empire on the Indian subcontinent.

Round Table Discussion From time to time the British Studies seminar dedicates a session to subjects of universal importance at the University of Texas. Nothing could be more important than effective teaching. This session will hear brief accounts of effective teaching techniques, successes and failures in the classroom, and the fate of the traditional lecture.

Milton in Areopagitica defines 'a good Booke' as 'the precious life-blood of a master spirit imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life.' Oddly, the definition though often quoted and even engraved on library walls, has never been explained. How are we to understand the equation between 'a good book' and 'lifeblood', specifically the 'lifeblood of a master spirit'? John Rumrich is A. J. and W. D. Thaman Professor of English. He is the co-editor of the Norton critical edition of Seventeenth Century British Poetry (2006) and the Modern Library edition of The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (2007). He teaches early modern poetry and drama in the English Department.

King Lear is a huge play and a painful one. It asks us to think hard about how we treat our parents and how we wish to be treated as we grow old. In certain periods the world seems violently chaotic, and at the same time parents and children feel out of touch. These two fears combined in Shakespeare's day and perhaps also come together in ours. Whenever King Lear is popular, as it is today, it speaks to us about terror and about whether our families can ease our anxieties. Almost four hundred years later, the play remains unforgettable and therapeutic for all generations. A Junior Fellow in British Studies, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza is also Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in Comparative Literature. She holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, Oxford University, and Columbia University. She writes on Orientalism, Cleopatra, Oscar Wilde, Renaissance drama, the Gothic, and literary theory, and she works actively in eight languages. She has won most of U.T.'s major teaching prizes and recently received the new Board of Regents Outstanding Teaching Award.

The Savoy Operas continue to beguile audiences in America if not in England. Why do one's English friends tend to be cool to Gilbert and Sullivan? And why do one's American friends seem to adore them? The ultimate question, perhaps, is why those who adore them do. Louise Weinberg will provide some of the answers. There will be recorded musical excerpts to recall to us the fun and glory of G & S. Louise Weinberg is the Bates Professor at the U.T. Law School, where she teaches such unmusical subjects as Federal Courts and Constitutional Law. Her books include The Supreme Court and the Coming of the Civil War (forthcoming). She is somewhat notorious (since she claims she cannot sing) for bursting into song whenever Gilbert & Sullivan are mentioned.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the partners Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Bentley established in their pottery business a model for modern industry and mass marketing. Yet while Wedgwood's innovations were crucial to the industrial revolution, in fashioning his earthenware Wedgwood drew significantly on neoclassical and gothic traditions. Wedgwood's partner, Bentley, a leading connoisseur of classical culture whose learning informed Wedgwood's forms and their decoration, also fostered the talent of a young girl who would grow up to be the novelist most responsible for the gothic revival in fiction: Ann Radcliffe. What does it mean for our understanding of gothic literature to see its incubation in this very British milieu of early industrial neoclassicism? Samuel Baker is an Associate Professor of English and a Junior Fellow of British Studies. He was an undergraduate at Columbia, received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and has just returned from a year as a Fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities. His first book, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture, will be published later this year.

John Farrell ENGLISH Ever since Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847, many readers and critics have attempted to improve or correct what they perceive as its rough-hewn and carelessly executed narrative. The novel simply leaves too many crucial gaps in its story. Who is Heathcliff? How did he become polished and rich? How did Catherine Earnshaw's ghost end up in a complete stranger's dream? How can Nelly Dean recall in word for word detail the conversations of so many characters over so many years? Beginning with Charlotte Brontë's alarmed reaction, responses to Emily's novel have celebrated its powers while patronizing its many flaws. There is a long tradition of forgiving Emily Brontë for not getting her story straight, either narratively or politically. After all was the book not published the year before The Communist Manifesto? How could it begin with raging revolt and end with a radiant portrait of bourgeois bliss? There's much here, or so it seems, to forgive. John P. Farrell, Professor of English, has taught Victorian literature in the UT English Department for thirty-one years. He has published many essays on the major Victorian authors including four on the Brontës. His current project is entitled 'From Wuthering Heights to Wessex Heights in Washington Heights'.

What makes a good satirist? What skills elicit laughter? Could the secret be an accurate, uncommitted eye for social foibles? Peter Green investigates Kingsley Amis as a nice test case. The only son of prudish lower-middle-class parents, elevated by scholarships into a world he viewed and chronicled as an alien zoo (with an attractive petting section), Amis wrote book after witty book to pay for the sex that shaped his plots and the drink in which he finally drowned. Details appall; the genius remains elusive. Peter Green, Dougherty Professor of Classics at U.T. and one of the founding members of British Studies, also writes on English literature in periodicals such as the New Republic, where the present lecture with the title 'Drink and the Old Devil' had its first genesis as a review-article. He is the author of numerous books on ancient Greece, including Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography (1991).

Cassandra Pybus Visiting Fellow, U.T. Institute of Historical Studies The abolitionist movement in Britain was powerfully motivated by fear that the personal and moral violations of the slave empire would seep out of the colonies and contaminate the metropole. By taking the troubled and troubling character of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights as an example, Cassandra Pybus considers how this fear was realized through the stealthy infiltration of 'home' by the children of masters and their African slaves. Cassandra Pybus holds the Australian Research Council Chair in History at the University of Sydney. She is currently making a documentary film on Wuthering Heights along the theme of the lecture. Her books include Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (2006); and Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers (2006).

'Such, Such, Was Eric Blair' Julian Barnes Barbara Harlow Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth Julian Barnes has prepared a lecture for the next Britannia volume on George Orwell, the famous pen name of Eric Blair. His argument is that Orwell denounced the Empire, which pleased the Left; Communism, which pleased the right; and the misuse of language, which pleased everyone. He was known for straight thinking and honest writing. Yet he once wrote that all art or writing to some extent is propaganda. Did Orwell live up to his own standards of accuracy or did he too sometimes succumb to his own subjective aims? Julian Barnes alas will not be able to attend but an abbreviated version of his lecture will be read. Barbara Harlow and Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth will respond. Julian Barnes is the novelist, essayist, and critic. His most recent book is Nothing to be Frightened Of. Barbara Harlow is Professor of English and an authority on English literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has done research in South Africa and Egypt and is perhaps the leading University of Texas faculty member in the national protest against the CIA's use of torture. Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth is a founding member of the British Studies seminar, a poet, and the internationally recognized authority on the Mexican revolution and the Spanish civil war. He regularly teaches a course on Orwell.

Weslie Janeway CAMBRIDGE Although the existence of Emma Darwin's recipe book has long been known to students of Darwiniana, it has seldom received much attention. As part of the celebration of the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth, food historian and geneticist Weslie Janeway places the cookbook in the context of family letters, diaries, and household accounts to create a window into the social history of Victorian cookery and the Darwin home. Weslie Janeway studied political science at Columbia and Brown universities before working in the finance industry. In 2006 she moved to Cambridge, England, to study genetics. She not only writes about food history, but also works in a stem cell laboratory in Cambridge and serves as a Trustee of The Jackson Laboratory, a genetics research institute in Bar Harbor, Maine. She is the co-author of Mrs. Darwin's Recipe Book: Revived and Illustrated.

Saul Dubow SUSSEX UNIVERSITY Sir Keith Hancock (1898-1988), one of the distinguished practitioners of British economic history, combined breadth of vision, geographical scope, and imaginative reach. His biography of J. C. Smuts of South Africa has changed the lives of graduate students at the University of Texas. Yet he was evasive on the issue of race. This lecture will argue that in the latter part of his life Hancock presented a refined apology for white paternalism in South Africa. Saul Dubow is Professor of History at the University of Sussex. His recent research pursues the theme of colonial science, race, and the ideology of empire. His recent books include A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa (2006).

John Darwin NUFFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD 'Once the British Empire became world-wide, the sun never set on its crises', wrote its shrewdest historian. By the 1830s, at latest, the British Empire had indeed become a global system. Macaulay had urged his countrymen to see Clive and Hastings as the British Cortes and Pizarro. But not until Sir John Seeley's Expansion of England (1883) did British historians begin to see the empire as a global phenomenon. This lecture will discuss Seeley's extraordinary influence, the muted 'revisionism' of the inter-war years, and the history wars that have raged over the study of British imperialism since the 1950s. John Darwin is Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. His After Tamerlane: the Global History of Empire since 1405 was published in 2007. His The Empire Project: the Rise and Fall of the British World-System will be published this year by Cambridge University Press.

Tribute to Betty Sue Flowers 'Hardy and Eliot' Dan Jacobson Betty Sue Flowers Tom Staley Dan Jacobson has prepared a lecture for the next Britannia volume on the poetry of Thomas Hardy and T. S. Eliot. His argument is that Hardy is the greater of the two poets. Dan Jacobson alas will not be able to attend but an abbreviated version of his lecture will be read. Betty Sue Flowers and Tom Staley will respond. The session will be a tribute to Betty Sue Flowers, who has been a British Studies stalwart since the founding of the seminar in 1975. As members of the seminar will probably know, she is retiring as Director of the LBJ Library and moving to New York City. We will miss her at the Friday afternoon seminar sessions and will always look forward to the times she can be with us while visiting Austin.

'A. J. Balfour and His Critics' Ferdinand Mount R. J. Q. Adams LONDON TEXAS A&M The original plan for this seminar session was to have a debate between Ferdinand Mount, the former editor of the TLS, and R. J. Q. Adams, whose recent and acclaimed book on Balfour has stimulated a most interesting range of critical response. Sir Ferdinand will not be able to attend, but an excerpt from his review of the book will be read-to give Quince Adams an opportunity to respond to his critics and to reflect on the art of historical biography. Balfour was one of the remarkable political figures of the twentieth century, Prime Minister 1902-06 and the author of the two declarations bearing his name, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 promising British support of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the Balfour Declaration of 1926 setting the basis for the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Warren Kimball RUTGERS UNIVERSITY During the Second World War, Churchill believed that Irish neutrality threatened British security, specifically Atlantic shipping and the war against German U-boats. At the same time, he believed or rather hoped, that the English-speaking peoples would stand together. For Franklin Roosevelt, Irish neutrality not only challenged the conviction that American national security required British survival against Hitler but also raised divisive and potentially serious political issues at home. Irish-Americans were a powerful voting group. The episode illustrates the different styles of leadership. Churchill wanted to be direct and even belligerent towards Ireland but the Cabinet and FDR held him back. FDR was typically indirect, never confronting the Dublin government while refusing to restrain those who believed the Irish Republic should join the alliance against Germany. Warren Kimball is the editor of the three volumes of Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence published by Princeton University Press. His books include The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman.

'Trevor-Roper and Scotland' 'In Scotland, the apparatus of Celtic tribalism has been assumed, and formalized, by those whose ancestors regarded the Highland dress as a badge of barbarism and shuddered at the squeal of the bagpipe.' Discussion led by Brian Levack and Roger Louis Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) was one of the notable historians of the twentieth century, perhaps most widely known for one of his early books, The Last Days of Hitler published in 1947. Much later, in 1983, he made the disastrous mistake of authenticating a forged set of Hitler's diaries. His reputation has never quite recovered from the Hitler diary episode, but he remains one of the great historical essayists of our time, above all for his limpid and penetrating style, malicious wit, and sharp historical intelligence. One of his books remained unpublished at the time of his death in 2003: The Invention of Scotland, which has now been published posthumously. Highly critical of the Scots, or the Scotch as he calls them, Trevor-Roper argues that constitutional, literary, and cultural myths of ancient Scotland were invented much later. In the case of the kilt, it was a sartorial custom concocted by an Englishman. The presentation on Trevor-Roper will begin with a lecture by Roy Foster of Oxford University but presented in his absence in abbreviated form by Roger Louis. Brian Levack will comment.

George Scott Christian ENGLISH AND HISTORY Historians have extensively studied the influence of the French Revolution on late eighteenth-century Irish society, but what of the Scottish experience during the revolutionary period? Scotland seethed with similar political, social, and economic tensions in the 1790s, convincing British ministers such as Pitt and Dundas that 'North Briton', rather than Ireland, was ripe for a Jacobin insurrection. The 1793 sedition trial of Thomas Muir, a well-to-do Glaswegian lawyer and leader of the reformist Scottish Friends of the People, may have demonstrated the British government's determination to quell incipient revolt, but it ultimately contributed to the re-emergence of a Scottish nationalism that transcended Jacobitism and rejected inferior status in the British state. George S. Christian is a lawyer and an adjunct Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. As a lawyer he has represented clients before the Texas Legislature and various executive agencies for more than twenty years. A former Plan II student, he has received the degrees of B.A., J.D., M.A., and Ph.D. from U.T. He has been a Junior Fellow in British Studies since 2001. His current project is a study of late eighteenth-century Scottish radicalism.

'Philip Francis and the Challenge to the British Empire' Philip Francis was a critic of the excesses and contradictions of the British Empire in four continents. He supported the American and French revolutions and was an articulate opponent of slavery. But he was also, in the view of his critics, a duplicitous and hopeless rake. How can his significance be assessed? Linda Colley's books include Britons: Forging the Nation.

'Colonial Independence' The British phrase 'transfer of power' conveys the impression of an orderly and smooth transition from colonies to new nations possessing sovereign independence. In fact the liquidation of the British Empire was often violent, creating states that were sometimes not only unstable but also unviable. How does the balance sheet look if freed from teleological assumptions such as progress into freely associated states known as the Commonwealth? David Cannadine's books include The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy.

Albert Lewis R. L. Moore Project In the late 1960s Bertrand Russell decided to sell his rich collection of books, letters, manuscripts, and memorabilia, reflecting many aspects of his long and illustrious life. The Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin was a prospective buyer, but McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, captured the papers. Plans were started at McMaster in 1969 for a scholarly edition, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell. Albert Lewis will discuss the history of the project as well as the controversial aspects of Russell's life. In the late 1960s Albert Lewis was working toward his Ph.D. in history of mathematics at the University of Texas. Subsequently he was curator of history of science at the HRC. From 1984 until 1997 he worked on the team of the Russell Editorial Project at McMaster. This was followed by eleven years on the Charles S. Peirce editorial project at Indiana University. He is now in Austin working on the Legacy of R. L. Moore Project in the Educational Advancement Foundation.

Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac NEW YORK TIMES AND CBS In the shaping of the modern states of Iraq and Iran, Americans as well as the British played a significant part: Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell, and, in the American era, the CIA's Miles Copeland and Kim Roosevelt. They helped to enthrone rulers in a region whose very name, the 'Middle' East, is an Anglo-American invention. The aim of the lecture will be to restore to life the colorful figures who for good or ill gave us the Middle East in which Americans are enmeshed today. Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac are co-authors of Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Mastery in Central Asia (1999); and Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East (2008). Karl Meyer is a distinguished journalist of The New York Times and Washington Post; Shareen Brysac is an equally distinguished journalist and producer of prime-time documentaries for CBS.

Dominic Sandbrook London Even today, the 1960s are usually seen as an unprecedented age of dramatic change, sweeping aside old conventions and ushering in a 'cultural revolution' that changed British life forever. Dominic Sandbrook believes that there is a much more complicated picture of an anxious, often highly conservative society in which change came slowly-or, according to many at the time, not at all. Did British politics really change during the supposedly 'Swinging Sixties'? Did the youth culture of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones actually embody a new age? Was there really a sexual revolution? And what really happened during the supposedly pivotal year of 1968? Educated at Oxford, St. Andrews, and Cambridge, Dominic Sandbrook has been a lecturer in history at the University of Sheffield and senior fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford. He is now a writer and newspaper columnist, his work appearing regularly in the London Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. His first book, a life of Senator Eugene McCarthy, was published in 2004, but he is best known for his two best-selling books on Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, Never Had It So Good (2005) and White Heat (2006). He has recently finished a history of America in the 1970s (to be published by Knopf in 2010).

'Glasgow in the 1950s' Bernard Wasserstein University of Chicago Since the Second World War, Glasgow, the 'second city of the empire', has suffered a dramatic fall. Today it is Britain's poorest, most indebted, and most socially troubled metropolis. Its population has dwindled by nearly half. Its staple industries have vanished. Other British cities too have declined, but in none has the downward spiral seemed so precipitous. Drawing on his memories of Glasgow in the 1950s, and in particular of three institutions with which he was intimately associated, Bernard Wasserstein will explore the causes and nature of this story of urban decay and will discuss the prospects for Glasgow's more recent efforts to reinvent itself as a commercial and cultural hub. Bernard Wasserstein was born in London in 1948 but spent most of his childhood in Glasgow. He was educated at Balliol and Nuffield Colleges, Oxford. He has taught at Oxford, Sheffield, and Glasgow Universities, and at Brandeis and the University of Chicago where he is now Ulrich and Harriet Meyer Professor of History. He is the author of nine books, including The British in Palestine (1978), Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (1979), The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (1988), Herbert Samuel (1992), and, most recently, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time. He has spent the past year in Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Christmas Carols led by Barbara Myers

Passages from Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol

In recent years economists have assessed the great depression in the last three decades of the nineteenth century as the 'first globalization boom' rather than as an era of depression. This work of scholarly revision does not fit well with the full documentary record of the time. Why is it that people thought they were depressed if in fact they were not? Or, who was depressed and who was not? What did depression mean for Britain and the British Empire? How does financial turbulence then compare with the financial turbulence now? Mark Metzler, an Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, teaches the history of the other island empire, Japan. His book Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan (2006) tells the story of Japan's adherence to the British gold standard and its culmination in the Great Depression of the 1930s. His work-in-progress is entitled The First Great Depression, 1873-1896: Globalization and Global Crisis.

Dean Acheson was one of the most important, accomplished, and consequential diplomats in American history. He played a decisive part in the conceptualization and creation of a new, American-dominated world order in the wake of the Second World War. He assumed an equally critical role in the development of an overall strategy for containing the Soviet challenge while simultaneously rebuilding the military, economic, social, and political strength of the West. But his relationship with the British is ambiguous. How does he emerge from an evaluation of central role played by Britain as obstacle as well as a partner in Acheson's statecraft? Robert J. McMahon is the Ralph Mershon Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. His books include The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (2003); The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia since World War II (1999); and Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (1994). He served as President of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2001.

Eric Kaufmann LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS The Orange Order is a mass-member association dedicated to upholding Protestantism and the British connection. Formed in 1795 in the north of Ireland, it soon spread to Britain and the colonies. Though outwardly religious in nature, it has always functioned as a secular institution of British-Protestant ethnicity and Unionist politics. In the last half century, the Orange Order has been buffeted by social and political change. Yet the Order's decline does not reflect any waning of 'ethnic' Unionism or sectarianism in general, but rather a shift in Unionist culture from deference to a defiance that leads younger Unionists to reject established institutions. Eric Kaufmann is Reader in Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of The Orange Order: A Contemporary Northern Irish History (2007). He is also the author of The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (2004) and the editor of Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities (2004).

Sir Brian Harrison OXFORD When did 'the Sixties' emerge as a concept rather than as a series of events? Four essential trends or ideas must be taken into account. When asked to provide a hint about the nature of the concept itself, without tipping his hand too much, Sir Brian Harrison said that this must be the difference between an Oxford and a Texas lecture. In Oxford the audience comes to find out. So, come to discover the antecedents of the 1960s or remain forever in blissful ignorance-unless you catch the recorded version for the BBC on the British Studies website. Sir Brian Harrison has been based in Oxford for half a century. He began as an historian of Victorian Britain, but has steadily moved forward in his interests and publications, and is about to publish with Oxford University Press the two concluding volumes in the 'New Oxford History of England'. His most famous book is perhaps Drink and the Victorians (1971). He received his Knighthood as a distinguished historian and for his service in helping to publish the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Winston Churchill's commitment to the cause of Zionism was one of the constant loyalties of his long career-or was it? His attachment to Zionism was something all Israelis and friends of Israel can cite with pride-or was it? On closer examination, the story of Churchill and Zionism is not as simple as Churchillian (and Zionist) enthusiasts have sometimes suggested, and the terms in which he did express his support for a Jewish state were not only anachronistic at the time but may indirectly explain some of the difficulties that Israel faces today. Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author, a former literary editor of the Spectator who now writes for the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement as well as the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. His books include The Strange Death of Tory England, the short polemic Yo, Blair!, and The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma, which won the American National Jewish Book Award. He is now writing a study of Winston Churchill's reputation during his life and afterwards

What were the causes and consequences of the end of the Cold War? The perspectives of the school of historians of International Relations at Oxford provide the key to understanding the complex nature of the post-Cold War era. Paradoxically, the historians who came closest to foreseeing the end of the Cold War were those who made few if any claims to a 'scientific' approach. Their idea of forecasting was based, at the very most, on John Stuart Mill's modest concept of 'a certain order of possible progress'. Since the end of the Cold War, simplistic interpretations of how it ended have contributed to narrow understandings of international order. The spirit of imposed universalism that fled from Moscow has flourished as never before in Washington. Adam Roberts is Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University. He has written and taught extensively on issues relating to the use of force, international law, and international organization. His latest book is The United Nations Security Council and War: The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (2008).

'Romantic British Culture and Botany in India' Theresa Kelley UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN At first sight the scientific theme of botany may seem to be a rather exotic subject in the context of the British Raj, but in fact it played a major part in late-eighteenth century Romantic British culture. The relations in India between British botanists and Indian botanical illustrators convey an intricate and surprising array of influences that challenge the claim, offered by Indian as well as European historians of science-and especially postcolonial theorists-that the work of botanizing India during this period was wholly shaped and directed by British expertise. Theresa Kelley is the Tiefenthaler Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her books include Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge, 1988) and Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge, 1997). She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John D. Simon Foundation for her current book project, 'Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture'. She taught Romantic literature in the English department at UT from 1988 to 1999.

'Conan Doyle: An Assessment beyond Sherlock Holmes' Richard Jenkyns OXFORD Arthur Conan Doyle's newly published letters make clear that he wanted to be remembered as a champion of spiritualism and as a historical novelist, though it is Sherlock Holmes who continues to capture the public imagination. But recent biographies and critical studies have presented a more rounded view of Conan Doyle, his beliefs as well as his work, which reveals both imagination and style. His medical training played a critical part in his career by enabling him to follow a logical progress from a collection of symptoms and rival diagnoses to ultimate conclusion and explanation. The Sherlock Holmes part of his life was relatively short. How does Conan Doyle emerge, as a man and a writer, in relation to the social currents of his time, from politics and war to spiritualism? Richard Jenkyns is Professor of the Classical Tradition, Oxford University, and Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. His work has focused mostly on classical influences, especially in nineteenth-century Britain, and on Latin poetry and Roman cultural history. He has published eight books including The Victorians and Ancient Greece (1980), Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (1991), Virgil's Experience (1998), Westminster Abbey (2004), and A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen (2004). He is currently writing a book entitled God, Space, and City in the Roman Imagination.

'Reconciliation in The Winter's Tale: The Literary Friendship of Robert Greene and William Shakespeare' John Rumrich ENGLISH On October 1-4, The Actors From the London Stage will perform The Winter's Tale in Austin and Winedale. John Rumrich will provide some of the background and context by presenting the case for Robert Greene. A leading light of English literature in his own time, the sixteenth-century author Robert Greene is now best remembered for his characterization of the young Shakespeare as an 'upstart crow'. But the connection with the bard is actually much closer: Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale adheres more strictly to Greene's prose romance Pandosto than do any other of his plays to their source material. As a prologue to the production by the Actors from the London Stage, John Rumrich will examine Greene's relationship to the 'upstart crow' and how it figures into Shakespeare's late drama of guilt and reconciliation. Co-editor of the Norton critical edition of Seventeenth Century British Poetry (2006) and the Modern Library edition of The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (2007), John Rumrich teaches early modern poetry and drama in the English Department.

'Julian Amery: A Nineteenth Century Relic in A Twentieth Century World?' Sue Onslow LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS The active political career of Julian Amery, the notoriously right-wing Member of Parliament, spanned the end of Empire and the transformation in British domestic politics. A politician of immense energy and drive as well as considerable intellectual ability, he held passionate views on Britain's place in the world, which he championed through both overt and covert means. Paradoxically he also held pronounced and consistent liberal views on British involvement in Europe, capital punishment, and social and economic policy, which set him at odds with the Tory diehard wing of his party. Sue Onslow has taught international history at LSE since 1994. She has written on British party politics and British foreign policy on such issues as Suez, Rhodesia, and South Africa. Her forthcoming edited book, White Power, Black Liberation, and the Cold War in Southern Africa will be published next year. She is co-editor of Britain and Rhodesia: Road to Settlement 1977-1980 to be published by the Institute of Historical Research.

'Cardigan Bay' John Kerr SAN ANTONIO John Kerr is a lawyer and novelist who lives in San Antonio. His recent novel Cardigan Bay is set in Ireland and Wales as well as England, and deals with the love affair of an American woman and a British army officer against the background of Irish neutrality and the IRA. The intricate plot includes the failed assassination of Hitler in 1944. Based on scrupulous research, the book demonstrates a commitment to factual accuracy in its portrayal of wartime London and the planning of the allied invasion of Europe. The author will discuss the twin challenges of persuading readers to make an emotional commitment to the protagonists while reassuring them of the care the writer has taken to establish the historical context. An alumnus of Stanford University with a degree in History, and of the University of Texas Law School, John Kerr is President of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research. He is Chairman of the Admiral Nimitz Foundation in Fredricksburg, and a member of the Advisory Board of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas.

'The Question of Intervention in Iraq, 1958-59' Roby Barrett MIDDLE EAST INSTITUTE On 14 July 1958, Iraq began its transformation from a British colonial creation and client state to a fundamental and enduring component of the American presence in the Middle East. The July revolution not only damaged American confidence in Britain's ability to manage regional affairs in the Middle East but also convinced President Eisenhower that the events in Iraq constituted a highly complex interaction of political, economic, and social forces into which decision-makers in Washington had little insight or understanding. With a firm hand on their collar, Eisenhower prevented the British from intervening. Non-intervention would appear in retrospect to have been a wise and judicious decision, perhaps an eternal lesson. Roby Barrett is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington D. C. He has had over thirty years of government, business and academic experience in the Middle East and Africa, providing defense and security policy and technology support to government and aerospace customers. He is a former Foreign Service Officer in the Middle East. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and is the author of The Greater Middle East and the Cold War (2007).

'Ted and Sylvia' Round Table Discussion The recent publication of Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid (Faber & Faber 2007), provides an opportunity to discuss the poetry of both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath as well as to gain perspective on Sylvia's suicide and the subsequent controversy about the reasons. All of the participants are members of the UT English Department. Judith Kroll, whose Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1976, revised edition 2008) has won international recognition, will open the discussion. Judith Kroll Kurt Heinzelman Betty Sue Flowers Tom Cable

'What Did Darwin Mean in The Origin of Species? An Englishman and a Frenchman Debate Evolution' Keith Francis BAYLOR UNIVERSITY Charles Darwin purported to solve the mechanism of evolution in The Origin of Species through his concept of 'natural selection'. Many natural philosophers and scientists of the 1860s and 1870s, both English and French, agreed with the general principles of natural selection but remained undecided about its ramifications for humans. Science came into direct conflict with faith. George Henslow, an English botanist, and Armand de Quatrefages, a French anthropologist, responded by attempting to reconcile evolution with religious belief. At the time these were two representative views, English and French respectively, but they struck a chord of science versus religion that resounds to the present. Keith Francis is Associate Professor of History at Baylor University where he teaches nineteenth and twentieth century British history. His first book on Darwin was published by Greenwood Press in 2007 and was entitled Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species. He is now working on a book about immigration from Grenada to Britain and back to Grenada from 1950 to 2005.

'The Retreat of the Raj: Radicals and Reactionaries in Britain' Pillarisetti Sudhir AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION In the period following the First World War, the voices of imperialism and anti-imperialism in Britain ranged across the political spectrum. The role Britain should play in India was the subject of much of this debate, which was taking place as the Indian national movement gathered momentum and intensified. The timing is significant. The impact of currents in Britain would be felt as changing policy in India. The question is how the debate in England can be situated in the political and economic context of the drive toward the decolonization of the Raj. Pillarisetti Sudhir is the editor of Perspectives, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association. He received his PhD in South Asian history from the University of London for his thesis ('British Attitudes to Indian Nationalism, 1922-1935') submitted through the School of Oriental and African Studies. He taught in universities in India before moving to the United States, and has also taught South Asian history at George Mason University and at the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute. He is the editor of Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (Calcutta, 1993).

'Mountbatten and the Partition of India' Narendra Singh Sarila PRINCE OF SARILA The evidence of Lord Mountbatten's part in the division of India continues to unfold, and with it the worldwide repercussions of the partition. Mountbatten played upon the fears of both Nehru and Jinnah as well as of the Americans that the Soviet Union not only might expand its influence on the subcontinent but also might establish control over the oil of the Middle East. When Mountbatten learned that the Indian National Congress would not join in the 'Great Game' against the Russians, he settled for those who would, in other words, Jinnah and his followers in the Muslim League. Mountbatten more than anyone else was responsible for partition. More than sixty years later it is possible to find in the partition of India the roots of Islamic terrorism sweeping the world today. Narendra Singh Sarila is (so we believe) the first maharaja ever to have visited the University of Texas. As a young head of a princely state, he was Mountbatten's military aide-de-camp in 1947. He has served as India's Ambassador to Spain, Libya, and France. He is the author of The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India's Partition, which became a bestseller in India after its publication last year.

'Invisible Hands in the Eighteenth Century' Dror Wahrman INDIANA UNIVERSITY The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked a new and important departure in Western inquiry into the phenomena of harmony, causality, and chance. The unprecedented dramatic financial crises of the 1720s, among them the South Sea Bubble, drove some Englishmen to reconsider questions of randomness and chance, human agency versus divine providence. Social, theological and scientific developments of the time enhanced the revolution in ideas. These advances in thought eventually became important components of European understanding of order and disorder in the work of Adam Smith, Marx, and Darwin. Dror Wahrman is Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University. He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and completed a Ph.D. at Princeton University, where he was the last student of Lawrence Stone (and thus will no doubt be pleased to answer questions about the famous feud between Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper). His The Making of the Modern Self (Yale, 2004) won both the Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies and the Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

'The Emergence of Academic Disciplines' James Turner NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY The nineteenth century witnessed the development of different approaches to scholarship. The rather abstruse notion of 'philology' gave birth to the modern academic disciplines that we group together today as the 'humanities' and the 'social sciences'. These include not only disciplines with fairly obvious literary and historical roots, such as classics and comparative literature, but also, for instance, anthropology, art history, and religion. In view of their common origins in the nineteenth century, what led to the distinction between the humanities and the social sciences? James Turner teaches in the History Department and the doctoral program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests lie in American and modern British intellectual history, especially the history of universities and academic knowledge. His recent books are The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (1999), The Sacred and the Secular University (with Jon H. Roberts, 2000), and Language, Religion, Knowledge (2003). He is currently writing a book on the origin of the modern humanities, from classical antiquity to the early twentieth century, with a focus on modern Britain and North America.

'Comparing British and American "Empires"' A. G. Hopkins HISTORY The events of September 11 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 generated a considerable debate about the nature of American power in the world at the start of the twenty-first century. Participants gravitated towards one of two positions: one declared that the United States was an empire that stood in a long tradition reaching back to Great Britain and beyond even to Rome; the other held that the United States was not an empire and that analogies with previous imperial powers were mistaken, not least because they ignored the exceptional qualities that had shaped the history of the United States. What emerges from a study of the debate is that Britain, unsurprisingly, was an empire but that the United States, more controversially, is not. The British Empire functioned at a time when the process of globalization encouraged the creation of empires; the United States became pre-eminent in world affairs at a time when globalization entered a phase that was incompatible with empire-building. Tony Hopkins, formerly The Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge, and currently an Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College, holds the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas. He is the author, with Peter Cain, of the prize-winning study, British Imperialism, 1688-2000 (1993, second edn. 2001). His recent books are Globalization in World History (2002), and Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local (2006).

'The American Colonies and the Atlantic World' Stephen Foster NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY The colonial period is easily the most coherent and self-confident field in the broader study of American History. Yet this historiography has not been characterized by consensus. The first practitioners of early American history debated whether the colonies were a proto-nation or if they were entirely shaped by their status as units within the first British Empire. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, further criticism came from Ethnohistory, Gender, and the New Cultural History. Bringing the discussion up to date: What are the changes in scholarly priorities over the last decade in British and American history that give hope for heading towards a broader and still more nuanced approach to the history of early America? Or, negatively put, is the subject headed toward fracture at the hands of proponents of rival methodologies? Stephen Foster is Distinguished Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. He is currently editing a multi-authored Companion Volume to the original Oxford History of the British Empire that will deal with the history of British North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His books include The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture (1991). He wrote the chapter on the historiography of colonial America for the Oxford History of the British Empire.

'Wilson's Curse: Self-Determination, the Cold War, and the Challenge of Modernity in the "Third World"' Jason Parker TEXAS A&M The dissolution of the British Empire and its European counterparts coincided with the main events of the Cold War. Yet the relationship between the superpower conflict and the independence of the Third World should not be taken for granted. Fundamental questions of modernity, identity, and nationhood-questions that defined decolonization and are associated with the Cold War-in fact long predated it. The Cold War would superimpose a strategic and ideological struggle onto the Third World's battle to be free from European domination in the 1950s and 1960s. But this process began much earlier. The widespread failure of post-colonial federations demonstrates the extent to which peoples under colonial rule had developed their own visions of self-determination from the time of Wilson and the aftermath of the First World War. Jason Parker is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida. He is the author of Brother's Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937-1962, forthcoming, Oxford University Press, as well as articles in the Journal of African American History, and the International History Review. He is currently at work on a history of the United States and the Cold War in the Third World, and on a comparative study of postwar Third World federations.

'The British "Establishment" and the Chatham House Version of World Affairs' Roger Morgan EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY, FLORENCE Founded in 1920, and closely connected with the Council on Foreign Relations, London's Royal Institute of International Affairs (based at Chatham House), is widely regarded as part of what has been described by Henry Fairlie, A.J.P. Taylor and others as the British 'Establishment'. The late Professor Elie Kedourie accused it of promoting a 'Chatham House Version' of events, notably of Middle Eastern history. What is the overall assessment of Chatham House's record? Is there an element of conspiracy, or at least of a closed elite as a quasi-learned society, as a provider of intelligence on world affairs, and as a think-tank locked on foreign policy? Roger Morgan studied at the Universities of Cambridge, Paris and Hamburg, and obtained his Ph.D. at Cambridge with a thesis on nineteenth-century German history. From 1968 to 1974 he was one of the directors of the research programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and he was later a Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He has held visiting appointments at several universities, including Columbia, Harvard and UCLA, and is the author or editor of several books on German, European, and international subjects, including (as editor) The Study of International Affairs (1972).

'Strategic and Cultural Triangulation: Britain, the United States, and Europe' Michael Brenner UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH The quest for a common 'Western' identity to orient the global policies of the western democracies is a hallmark of our time, revealing both a heightened sense of common 'civilizational' traits and an awareness that resemblances can be deceiving. Strategic tensions are evident from clashes over Iraq, the frustrated process of 'building Europe' in the European Union, and Britain's irresolute attempts to serve as a hinge between the two sides of the Atlantic. Equally significant, if less prominent, is the cultural manifestation of this quest for common identity, in the form of the permeation of institutions across Europe by American mores and philosophies. It is instructive to consider these strategic and cultural phenomena together. Michael Brenner is Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. His books include Terms Of Engagement and Toward A More Independent Europe. He has held that most glorious of all academic appointments, Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution. And he has been Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the National Defense University.

'Zionists, Indian Nationalism, and British Schizophrenia in Palestine' Lucy Chester UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO The last decade of British rule in Palestine was characterized by Britain reorienting from Zionist to Arab interests. Britain feared Indian protests against anything that might be viewed as infringing on the rights of Arab Palestinians. Indian Muslims supported Palestinian Muslims; Indian non-Muslims identified with Arabs through a common bond of anti-colonialism. One contentious issue was the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish States. The Zionists who would create the State of Israel in 1948 therefore took a keen interest in India in the 1930s and 1940s, seeking to win support of the Indian National Congress and hoping at least to neutralize Indian sympathy with the Arabs. British rule in Palestine was schizophrenic in the sense of contradictory promises and responses, almost as if the colonial state was disintegrating into loss of touch with reality. This is a subject rich in irony in view of the British aim to avert partition; but partition was what they got in both India and Palestine. Lucy Chester is Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she teaches courses on British imperialism and on contemporary South Asia. She is presently completing a book on the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan and the creation of the Indo-Pakistani boundary.

'The Search for Balthazar Solvyns and an Indian Past: The Anatomy of a Research Project' Robert Hardgrave University of Texas - Government Every book has its own story. Every research project has a genesis and evolution. Robert Hardgrave's A Portrait of the Hindus: Balthazar Solvyns and the European Image of India, 1760-1824, published three years ago, completed a project that had its inception in a chance encounter in 1966. The search for Solvyns combined detective work, the serendipity of hours in libraries and archives, and discovery. How did the parts of the project come together? What was involved in telling a complex and engaging story of a little known Flemish artist and his portrayal of the people and culture of Calcutta more than 200 years ago? Robert Hardgrave is the Temple Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Departments of Government and Asian Studies, at the University of Texas. His publications include The Nadars of Tamilnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change (1969, 2006), India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation (7th ed., 2008), various articles and books on Solvyns, and, as a founding member of the British Studies Seminar, an autobiographical essay in Burnt Orange Britannia. He taught at UT from 1967 until his retirement in 2001.

'New Year's Eve 1900: Oscar Wilde and the Masquerade of Victorian Culture' Elizabeth Richmond-Garza ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE Oscar Wilde and the late Victorians are often seen as stiff, formal, and inauthentic. Yet this very artificiality lies at the heart of their attempts to define what it meant to be both British and modern, and to connect traditional ideas about race, gender, and culture with contemporary realities. Though Oscar Wilde might have seemed superficial or shallow in character, in fact he was a profoundly Victorian figure. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza is Director of the Program in Comparative Literature. A Distinguished Teaching Professor, she is an Associate Professor of English and one of the original Junior Fellows in British Studies. Trained in Greek as well as modern aesthetics, she works in eight languages. Her research concentrates on Orientalism, the Gothic, Cleopatra, Oscar Wilde, and European drama. She is currently finishing a study of decadent culture at the end of the nineteenth century entitled 'Masquerade: Wilde, Individualism, and the Fin-de-Siècle'.

'Henry Morton Stanley and the Exploration of Africa' Roger Louis, Diana Davis, A. G. Hopkins UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS Henry Morton Stanley was not only the greatest of the Victorian explorers but also the first to traverse Africa and to crack the system of the Nile, Zambezi, and Congo rivers. He played a part in the creation of the notorious Congo Free State of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Yet his life and his contribution to history have remained controversial until Tim Jeal's magisterial work, which holds a place of its own in recent biographical writing. Round Table Discussion on Tim Jeal's new biography, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer Diana Davis (Geography) A. G. Hopkins (History) Roger Louis (History)

‘Black and White Christmas: The Deep South in the Eighteenth Century’ Helena Woodard English Department Helena Woodard is Associate Professor of English and a Junior Fellow in British Studies. She has taught at U.T. since 1991. Her courses include eighteenth-century British literature and African-American literature. She is the author of 'African-British Writings in the Eighteenth-Century: The Politics of Race and Reason' (1999) and articles on African American women’s writings. More recently she has examined heritage sites, museums, and short stories that seek to recover the slave past. Followed by Christmas Carols led by Barbara Myers This year’s Christmas party does not coincide with U.T. commencement exercises and thus no academic regalia – we shed a tear at the thought of not seeing the festive colors, but perhaps next year.

'The Challenge to Churchill's Wartime Leadership by Sir Stafford Cripps (The "Red Squire")' Gabriel Gorodetsky TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY A country gentleman, Sir Stafford Cripps, ascetic, vegetarian, and a devout Christian with a lucrative law career, cut an incongruous figure in British politics of the 1930s. By the time the Second World War broke out, his radical position, radical even among Labour's most radical politicians, made him an outcast. It was only his appointment as Ambassador to Moscow in 1940 that secured for him a prominent position in the War Cabinet and later a key role in Attlee's Labour Government as the powerful Chancellor of the Exchequer. A sharp critic of Churchill's political vision, Cripps foresaw conflict among the Allies. He hoped to devise a common strategy and to formulate clear guidelines for the post-war settlement. The rivalry between Churchill and Cripps provides a glimpse into their political personalities but its significance lies much deeper. The war was a springboard for both to advance their political visions. For Cripps it marked his ascendancy and introduction into high office, while for Churchill it signified a struggle for political survival as well as for fulfillment as Britain's wartime leader. The positions continue to serve as archetypes of the extremes of modern British national identity. Gabriel Gorodetsky holds the Rubin Chair for Russian Studies at Tel Aviv University. He wrote his dissertation at Oxford University and has been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls Oxford. His books include Stafford Cripps in Moscow, 1940-42: Diaries and Papers (2007).

'The Elusive Brian Moore: His Stature in Modern Literature' Hermione Lee and Christopher Ricks OXFORD Brian Moore (1921-1999), the Belfast novelist, immigrated in 1948 to Canada and subsequently moved to the United States. His novels include The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), the story of a lonely, alcoholic, Belfast spinster, The Managan Inheritance (1979), which deals with an American journalist in search of his Irish heritage, and Black Robe (1985), about a Jesuit missionary in the New World, subsequently made into a film. The HRC holds the Moore papers. Moore's novels always combine a humane directness, a power immediately to engage, with a sense of how the literary inheritance need not come out sounding 'literary'. Moore was never haughty yet he knew that there is no substitute for knowledge and that the novelist has a right to be, on occasion, teasingly or searchingly allusive. Hermione Lee is the Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Her books include Virginia Woolf, and, most recently, Edith Wharton. Her published editions and anthologies include the works of Trollope, Kipling, Willa Cather, and Eudora Welty. Christopher Ricks is Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. His work ranges from Keats to Tennyson to T. S. Eliot and includes an examination of the lyrics of Bob Dylan entitled Dylan's Visions of Sin.

Book Launch: Penultimate Adventures with Britannia The meeting on Friday November 9 will be a book launch for the next Britannia volume, which is entitled Penultimate Adventures with Britannia. The Britannia series thus appears to be reaching a dramatic point. It began with Adventures with Britannia (1995), followed by More Adventures with Britannia (1998), Still More Adventures with Britannia (2003), and Yet More Adventures with Britannia (2005). This will cause a certain tension with future titles. After Ultimate Adventures with Britannia, what next? Post-Ultimate Adventures with Britannia? The book launch for Penultimate Adventures with Britannia will be accompanied by wine and a brass band, and with the announcement of the new Junior Fellows for 2007-2008. This is an important occasion, a celebration, in the history of British Studies. Please try to attend.

'"Who knows the Empire whom only the Empire knows"? Reconnecting British and Empire History' Martin Wiener RICE UNIVERSITY In recent years the common practice of studying British history as separate from the history of the empire has been vigorously challenged. But this challenge has come from one direction only. Scholars have studied at length the ways that the empire shaped Britain, but few have acknowledged the reciprocal ways that the empire was shaped by its being British. Indeed, if Britain proper was 'imperial', the empire was distinctively 'British'. This talk looks at one important facet of the 'Britishness' of the British Empire by examining the way English notions of the 'rule of law' helped to shape imperial life. Martin Wiener is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of History at Rice University. He is the author of Between Two Worlds: The Political Thought of Graham Wallas (1971), and English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (1981). His more recent books include Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture (1990), and Men of Blood (2004). He is now writing a book on criminal justice overseas tentatively entitled Inter-Racial Homicide and Criminal Justice in the British World, 1870-1935. The lecture will be the keynote address to the British Scholar Conference

Matthew Jones NOTTINGHAM UNIVERSITY This lecture will discuss the approach to the dissolution of the British Empire taken by Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister who held office during the critical era of decolonization. The theme will be the way in which Britain transformed the empire in South East Asia in the 1960s by helping to create the new state of Malaysia. The talk will also bring to light new evidence concerning British nuclear weapons in the Far East as well as the circumstances of closing the great Singapore naval base, and will draw connections with the American war in Vietnam. Matthew Jones received his D.Phil at St Antony's College, Oxford, and is now Professor of American foreign relations at the Nottingham University. He is the author of Britain, the United States, and the Mediterranean War, 1942-44 (Macmillan, 1996), and Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961-1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia, and the Creation of Malaysia (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Jeremy Lewis LONDON The secret history of Penguin Books is mainly the story of Allen Lane, who founded the publishing firm in 1935. The Penguin series became famous before World War II with the publication of red-covered Penguin Specials that alerted the British public to the menace of Hitler. During the war Penguins became soldiers' companions throughout the world. But later Penguin would test the boundaries of propriety with the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover. The ensuing controversy would land Allen Lane on trial at Old Bailey. The trial was one public episode in a history that has been as mysterious as it is notorious. Many of Lane's secrets remained secret until Jeremy Lewis's book in 2005. Jeremy Lewis has spent much of his working life as a London publisher, but has been a freelance writer and editor since 1989. The author of three volumes of autobiography, he has also published the authorized biography of Cyril Connolly, and the life of Tobias Smollett. Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane is his most recent book. He is the Editor-at-Large of the Literary Review, and is currently writing a book about Graham Greene and his family.

Dan Birkholz ENGLISH The 32 love-lyrics, known as the Harley Lyrics, have long been recognized for their excellence. Many scholars regard them as the finest literature in English between Beowulf and the Age of Chaucer. Yet fewer and fewer critics deal with the Harley Lyrics, in part because their language is difficult to render but also because they have proven resistant to the historical practices long dominant in literary medievalism. No one knows how a cosmopolitan school of vernacular poetry came suddenly to flourish in backwater Herefordshire a half-century before the late 14th-century 'triumph of English'-but this lecture will explain the far-reaching significance of this literary-historical and geographical case study. Daniel Birkholz is Assistant Professor of English. He received his B.A. from Carleton College, his M.A. from the University of Toronto, and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. His first book, The King's Two Maps: Cartography and Culture in Thirteenth-Century England (2004), was awarded the Nebenzahl Prize. He is now at work on a book that melds medieval literary study and cartographic analysis with documentary biography and historical reconstruction: We Have to Invent Him: Harley Lyrics, Hereford Maps, and the Life of Roger de Breynton, c.1300-1351.

Mark Oaten, M.P. It seems the special relationship between Britain and the United States requires re-evaluation every time there is a change in leadership in either country or whenever there are major strains over particular political issues-Iraq, for example. Mark Oaten will look back at the evolution of the relationship between America and Britain over the last half century. What have been its characteristics from Roosevelt and Churchill to Bush and Blair? What was its low point? Suez? What was its high point? Reagan and Thatcher? To what extent has the war in Iraq damaged relations between the two countries? How can one assess the future of the special relationship in the new era of Gordon Brown? A Liberal Democrat, Mark Oaten has represented Winchester since 1997. In the May 1997 general election, Oaten won the Winchester constituency by a mere two votes. Consequently, the result was declared invalid and in a special by-election, held in November 1997, he convincingly won the seat with a majority of 21,556. Oaten was Chairman of the Liberal Democrats for two years (2001-03) and Shadow Home Secretary for two years (2003-06). He is the chief party spokesman on terrorism, immigration, police, and prison reform. He is the author of Coalition: The Politics and Personalities of Coalition Government (2007).

Eric S. Mallin ENGLISH This year, in early October, The Actors From the London Stage troupe perform Macbeth at UT. It is one of Shakespeare's briefest plays, his shortest tragedy by nearly a thousand lines. It features other peculiarities as well: a tragic hero who is also, unquestionably, a criminal; a tragic heroine whom most audiences don't much like; and a political situation that can be described as murkily and purposely amoral. These features can combine in performance to make Macbeth the most recognizably modern of tragedies, suggestive of a cramped, pressured world at war with no one to root for, and no redeeming outcome to be found. But the play also famously has witches, spells, and an atmosphere of occult wickedness. It therefore tempts us to expect the triumph of good over evil, and it makes us long for simple, virtuous truth to win the day over the polluted, ambiguous times. Can the truth prevail? This lecture will consider the part of Macbeth that constitutes one of Shakespeare's most uncanny meditations on politics and meaning. Eric S. Mallin is Associate Professor of English. He is a scholar of Shakespeare and early modern drama, and an award-winning teacher, having received the President Associates' Teaching Excellence Award, the Texas Exes Teaching award, and several others. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and has written books on historical 'inscription', and on atheism in Shakespeare's plays, as well as articles on Shakespeare and popular cinema.

Susan Pedersen COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Lloyd George's love for Frances Stevenson, his mistress and secretary, carried with it unique political advantages. She was a loyal, efficient, and effective political ally in a partnership that endured for three decades. She helped at every stage and was a vital part of his success. The unusual thing about the relationship was not so much its emotional and sexual context as the political advantages it offered to both parties. It gave her a measure of authority in a male world. Her influence can be detected in Britain's social history. The female secretary, and not just the suffragist, helped open up the political world. Susan Pedersen is Professor of History at Columbia University. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, where she was a member of the faculty from 1988 until 2003. Her books include Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945 (1994) and Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (2004). She is now writing a history of the mandates system of the League of Nations.

Caroline Williams John Frederick Lewis (1805-76), a British painter, lived in Cairo from 1841 to 1851. His painting, 'An Intercepted Correspondence', however, was executed in 1869, eighteen years after he had returned to England. The painting is an excellent example of the Orientalist genre. But it is also much more. Its various layers-the narrative, the interpretive, and the hidden or personal-will be the subject of the lecture. Caroline Williams has been under Egypt's spell since 1962, when a visit to Cairo led to graduate studies in Middle East history at Harvard University and Islamic art and architecture at the American University in Cairo. Her publications and research interests range from The Islamic Monuments in Cairo: The Practical Guide (now in its 5th edition) to articles on the European artists and photographers who discovered Egypt in the nineteenth century. Most recently she has begun a study of contemporary Egyptian painters.

Some 200 years before Al Gore and Live Earth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of the consequences of crime against birds and beasts. In 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', the epic of a seafarer who brings disaster upon his ship by killing one of the greatest of all seabirds, the albatross, Coleridge penned some of Western civilization's most enduring lines: 'He prayeth well, who loveth well/Both man and bird and beast./He prayeth best, who loveth best/All things both great and small'. Today the albatross is one of the most endangered birds in the world. Robin Doughty will assess recent international efforts to save the huge birds from extinction. In recent visits to Australia, New Zealand, and South America, he has gathered information on individuals, governments, non-governmental organizations and international agencies attempting to reduce losses of deep-water seabirds through industrial fishing. Both a poet and a scientist, Doughty earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971, the same year he came to the University of Texas. His nine books include Return of the Whooping Crane and Endangered Species: Disappearing Animals and Plants in the Lone Star State. His poem 'Ponds' includes the following lines: 'These wide-wings stretch and teeter. Their needle beaks tap soft earth, pluck worms, insects too small to see except by ruffled jousters'.

'A. J. Balfour's Achievement and Legacy' R. J. Q. Adams TEXAS A&M Born in 1848, Arthur James Balfour was the scion of two great families, the Scottish Balfours and the English Cecils. 'AJB' became Prime Minister in 1902. Despite high hopes, his Government lasted only three years. Subsequently, after a stormy time as leader of the Opposition, Balfour resigned in 1911, thinking his career was near its end. But he was quite wrong. Ahead lay the war years and a return to government-the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, the Balfour Declaration, the Paris Peace Conference, the Washington Naval Conference, and the 1926 Imperial Conference. It is a remarkable record for a politician still largely remembered as a dilettante and a failure. Behind it all was an extraordinary man, an exceptional career, and certainly a remarkable life. R. J. Q. Adams received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is Peters Professor of History at Texas A&M University. His books include Europe, 1890-1945: Crisis and Conflict (2003), Bonar Law (1999), and British Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of Appeasement, 1935-1939 (1993). His newest work, Balfour: The Last Grandee, will be published in November 2007. He is now writing a book about the world of George V.

The reputations of Britain's two great wartime leaders, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, have known contrasting fortunes since their deaths, not least because of their attitudes towards France and Germany. Lloyd George saw himself as a pro-French politician: France appealed to the old radical, anti-militarist republican in him. But he was also sympathetic to Germany, seeing it as embodying social welfare and national efficiency. As prime minister during the First World War, he inevitably became close to France, especially through his bitter-sweet relationship with its wartime premier, Clemenceau. At the Paris peace conference in 1919, Lloyd George seemed strongly anti-German, but in fact he fought consistently for moderate peace terms, while at the same time attempting to satisfy French security needs. After falling from power in 1922, he was commonly seen as pro-German, and critical of French intransigence on frontiers and reparations. This culminated in his notorious visit to meet Hitler in 1936, a high-point of appeasement for the old war leader. In 1941 Churchill even compared him with Petain. Yet his attitude towards the French and Germans did show consistency of purpose and perhaps underlines his reputation for statesmanship. Lord Morgan was Fellow and tutor, The Queen's College, Oxford, 1966-89, and Vice-Chancellor, the University of Wales, 1989-95. He has written 30 books on nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, including the Oxford Illustrated History of Britain (over 750,000 copies sold), a history of modern Wales, and biographies of Keir Hardie, Lloyd George, James Callaghan and Michael Foot (Harper Collins, March 2007).

Lawrence is often lauded for his ability to capture in words the 'spirit of place'. But in fact, to the extent that place embraces people as well as landscape, Lawrence's collection of essays Mornings in Mexico reveals him as earnest but not entirely successful in his attempt at trans-cultural understanding. Mornings in Mexico is a complex blend of acute perception, learned stereotypes, and an imposition of Lawrence's ideology and impatient temperament on the Mexican places and people that he discusses. In the early 1960s, Chuck Rossman was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, after which he taught in Lima Peru. He finished his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in 1968, and joined the UT English faculty in the same year. He spent a year as a Fulbright Professor at the University of Mexico in the early 1970s. At UT, his main teaching focus has been Plan II honors and 20th-century English literature. His major scholarly interests include D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, the European novel, and recent Latin American fiction.

The British had no wish to partition Ireland or India-or Palestine-and indeed resisted doing so as long as possible. In the end partition, for better or worse, appeared ineluctably to be the only practical answer. The disparate cases of Ireland, India, and Palestine had this in common: none had ever been a politically united territory-except under British rule. Thus the argument of this talk is that partition is not a function of imperialism but of nationalism-which will lead to further reflections on nationalism, its causes and its consequences. Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a journalist and author. He studied Modern History at New College, Oxford, and joined the Spectator in 1975. He writes regularly for the Spectator, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic Monthly. His books include The Randlords (1995), which was a History Book Club Choice in 1996, The Controversy of Zion (1996), and The Strange Death of Tory England (2005). His most recent book is Yo, Blair! (2006).

In the past few years, debate over the 'memory' and legacies of Empire has gained a new, ever higher profile in British public consciousness-and indeed distinctively in that of England, since related developments in Scotland and elsewhere have taken increasingly divergent paths. Dramatic political shifts, and unprecedented soul-searching about national identity and history, contributed to the scholarly debate on the imperial past. This lecture will map these transformations, bringing together arguments from historical interpretation with ones from political life, public history, and popular culture. Stephen Howe is Professor in the History and Cultures of Colonialism, Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol. His books include Anticolonialism in British Politics (1993), Afrocentrism (1998), Ireland and Empire (2000) and Empire: A Very Short Introduction (2002). The Intellectual Consequences of Decolonization is forthcoming from Oxford, as is his edited collection New Imperial Histories from Routledge.

In her celebrated new book, Epic Journeys of Freedom, Cassandra Pybus traces the experiences of black Americans who claimed their freedom during the American Revolution. In this talk she will discuss William Wilberforce and the black settlers of Sierra Leone. Cassandra Pybus teaches at the University of Sydney. She has published more than ten books on Australian and American history including The Devil and James McAuley, which won the 2001 Adelaide Festival Prize for Non Fiction. The session will also provide an opportunity for a discussion of the movie, 'Amazing Grace'.

'All Souls and Oxford in 1956: Reassessing the Meaning of the Suez Crisis' Roger Lewis University of Texas What was it like to be alive and well in Oxford in 1956, when Khrushchev and Bulganin were greeted by students chanting 'Poor Old Joe' to the tune of the Volga boat song, when Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, when Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt? Lord Halifax, in the citadel of privilege, learning and influence of All Souls College, remarked that the problem was the Prime Minister's obsession: Anthony Eden had always had 'a thing about dictators'. In view of Halifax's reputation as an appeaser in the 1930s, the comment is both comic and consistent. It raised the question on everyone's mind. What to do about a charismatic Arab nationalist who had plunged a dagger into the heart of the British Empire, into Britannia herself? Or had he? Roger Louis is the author or editor of some thirty books, the most recent of which is Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization (reviewed in the current issue of the New York Review of Books). He has given Chichele Lectures at All Souls in 1990, 2002, 2003, and 2006. A past President of the American Historical Association, he is the director of the AHA's National History Center. He is a member of the Scholar's Council at the Library of Congress and the Chairman of the Historical Advisory Committee of the US Department of State. Much more important and to the point, as director of British Studies he pays the penalty of having to give a lecture himself when there is a cancellation in the program.

'T. E. Lawrence, Reputation, and Honor's Decline' Bertram Wyatt-Brown University of Florida No figure in twentieth-century Anglo-American history is so enigmatic, intriguing, and charismatic as Thomas Edward Lawrence of Arabia. Although long upheld as a model British hero, his reputation came under furious assault in the 1950s at the hands of biographer Richard Aldington. Aldington's purpose was not only to destroy Lawrence's renown but also to challenge the British ruling class and its code of Edwardian principle and martial honor. Winston Churchill stoutly defended Lawrence as his heroic exemplar. Yet the old order was fading fast. In his classic film, 'Lawrence of Arabia' (1962), David Lean incorporated both the chivalric and the emotionally twisted Lawrence, reflecting both Aldington's baleful interpretation and the more iconic perspective. Nevertheless Lawrence's significance as a military strategist and literary artist as well as a complex personality with remarkable insight and introspectiveness justify his current revival. That resurrection comes when American military strategists finally have rediscovered his wisdom about conducting counter-insurgency. Bertram Wyatt-Brown is the Richard J. Milbauer Professor at the University of Florida and Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of ten books including the famous Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. He is currently writing a book entitled Who Owns the Dead? The Hazards of Biography and Memoir, in which T. E. Lawrence's career will be one of the chapters.

'Britain and World Peace in the 21st Century' David Atkinson Member of Parliament There are already lessons to be learned from Iraq. These lessons should be incorporated into the long-term foreign policy goals of both Britain and the United States. While the importance of the Special Relationship should be emphasized when pursuing freedom and democracy in the world, both countries must now reassess the 'New World Order', as it was called following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and enable the United Nations to be more effective in promoting the provisions of its Charter. The UN's regional organizations can resolve threats and conflicts with reference to the Security Council only as a last resort. The experience of such institutions has been remarkably successful in Europe following centuries of conflict and can be applied to every continent or region, especially the Middle East. Until his recent retirement, David Atkinson was a Conservative Member of Parliament representing the Bournemouth East constituency. He has served as Chairman of the External Relations Committee of the Council of Europe, and leader of the European Democrats for seven years. In addition to his accomplished international portfolio, Mr. Atkinson spearheaded important legislation in the House of Commons including the Millennium Bill and the Traveller Law Reform Bill. He retired at the last British general election after 28 years in the House of Commons.

'Shakespeare's English Rhetoric: Mingling Heroes and Hobgoblins in A Midsummer Night's Dream' Jenny Mann Cornell University Shakespeare is often said to have 'transfigured' his reading, producing A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, out of fragments borrowed from Plutarch, Ovid, and Chaucer and transported into a new theatrical space. This talk identifies the new space as the garden of English rhetoric, a place where Greek figures of speech are turned into English fairy tales. Jenny C. Mann teaches early modern English literature at Cornell University. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Newberry Library, and is currently working on a book project titled Outlaw Rhetoric: Fashioning Vulgar Eloquence in Early Modern England.

'Wordsworth and Coleridge' Adam Sisman London The friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge produced a collaboration generally acknowledged to have inspired the Romantic Movement in England-yet it ended in acrimony and disappointment. This creates an enduring biographical conundrum: interpreting either of the two men sympathetically almost inevitably means showing the other in a bad light. Though there have been excellent biographies of each, biographical writing has been bedeviled by partisanship. 'Why do people have to like Wordsworth and hate Coleridge, and vice versa?' asked Edmund Blunden. By concentrating on the friendship rather than the individuals, there lies an opportunity to write about friendship itself, about rivalry and jealousy, and about egotism. Adam Sisman is the author of A. J. P. Taylor (1994) and Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson (2000), which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge is to be published in March 2007.

'The Earl of Strafford and Wentworth Castle' Michael Charlesworth University of Texas Wentworth Castle, for decades relatively unknown in the world of British Heritage preservation, appeared on the BBC's popular 'Restoration' program and was awarded an unprecedented restoration grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2003. Neglect in the twentieth century left the gardens run down, yet still reflecting the intentions and life of their eighteenth-century designer. After several years of careful and costly work, the gardens will open to the public in Spring 2007. Sir Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (1672-1739), initially began designing the Yorkshire house and its 500-acre landscape gardens with parkland as the result of a bitter feud with another branch of the Wentworth family. A soldier and diplomat in the service of King William III and Queen Anne, Thomas Wentworth was made the 1st Earl of Strafford in 1711. Determined to create an estate suitable for a man of his importance, he designed a garden that combined the useful and the beautiful in an expression of power and prosperity. Strafford designed his domain to be his monument. By studying how he created and shaped Wentworth Castle, can we achieve a richer historical understanding of his achievements as a statesman and a patron of architecture? Michael Charlesworth is an Associate Professor of Art and Art History. He has written about garden history and the Gothic revival. His book Landscape and Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France will be published in February 2008.

'Animal Feelings and Feelings for Animals in Chaucer' Susan Crane Columbia University In Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer offers sharp and surprising insights about human relationships with other animals. While it might appear that a little dog, a cock, and a falcon simply help Chaucer to comment on human society, bonds of sympathy between humans and animals reveal a deeper curiosity about animals themselves, and about what kinds of relationships are possible with them. Rather than seeing animals as sharply different from humans, in line with philosophical thought of his time, Chaucer explores human-animal connections through the commonplace experience of feeling for animals. The Prioress weeps over her pet dogs, the Nun's Priest laments the plight of a vain rooster, and in the Squire's Tale a princess rescues a falcon in distress. What does it mean to pity animals, or to feel compassion for their suffering? Susan Crane is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her books Insular Romance (1986), Gender and Genre in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1994), and The Performance of Self (2002) discuss feudal thought, chivalry, magic, sexuality, honor, and faith in medieval literature and culture. A book in progress will ask how medieval people understood animals and their place in creation.

Round Table Discussion 'The Queen' Elizabeth Cullingford ENGLISH Karen King AMERICAN STUDIES Roger Louis HISTORY Bryan Roberts SOCIOLOGY

John Garrett was a self-made apostle of high culture. In the late 1930s, as a headmaster, he made his name by bringing the practices of public schools such as Eton and Harrow to a new state school in suburban London. He hired remarkable teachers (Rex Warner for classics, the painter Claude Rogers for art), and capitalized on associations with W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot to bring distinction to his curriculum. In 1943 his triumphs won for Garrett the headmaster's job at Bristol Grammar School, where he built a tradition of annual performances of Shakespeare-and a record of admissions to Oxford and Cambridge in a manner similar to that of 'The History Boys'. John Garrett's work coincided with a national movement that aimed to spread the advantages of secondary education, epitomized by the public schools and their privileged access to the ancient universities. Success brought ironic changes, emblematic of wider shifts in British society: Garrett, at Oxford a member of a fashionably leftist circle, moved steadily to the political right as he climbed the professional ladder. Bristol Grammar School, which once provided a number of 'free places' in return for state funding, is now a fully independent-that is, private-school. Paul Sullivan defended his dissertation, Ludi Magister: The Play of Tudor School and Stage, in 2005. His essay, 'Playing the Lord: Tudor Vulgaria and the Rehearsal of Ambition' has been accepted for publication by ELH (English Literary History, Johns Hopkins University Press).

It is wrong to regard imperialism as an important part of British domestic culture and society. Whatever the British Empire represented to the world at large, a majority of Britons had only vague ideas about empire, if any, for most of the nineteenth century. Around 1900, the Empire burst into the public perception in a way that made many Britons uneasy. Many opposed imperial expansion and the Boer War. When the British came under serious pressure to decolonize in the mid-twentieth century, the public will to maintain the Empire no longer existed. Its dissolution caused surprisingly little trauma, in part because the general public had never really been interested in it. Bernard Porter's The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004) was awarded the Maurice D. Forkosch Prize of the American Historical Association. His other books include Critics of Empire (1968) and The Lion's Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-1995 (3rd edn., 1996).

A Missing Contributor! Don Graham is the J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature. His most recent books are Kings of Texas: The 150-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire and Lone Star Literature: From the Red River to the Rio Grande. He is a frequent contributor to Texas Monthly.

In the years after the First World War, the British confronted a series of rebellions throughout the Empire, from India to Ireland. Straining under the triple burden of increasingly recalcitrant subject peoples, straitened means, and a critical public at home, the imperial state searched for creative solutions to counter-insurgency. In the newly conquered territory of Iraq, it invented a new system of colonial policing known as 'air control', in which the Royal Air Force patrolled the country, and bombarded villages and tribes to put down unrest and subversive activities. It was in Iraq that the British first practiced, if never perfected, the technology of bombardment. The British cultural imagination about 'Arabia' shaped surveillance practices in Iraq, inspiring the invention of the air control regime on aesthetic as much as practical grounds. The vision of a romantic, inscrutable, and chivalric Arabia-and the British claim to a special appreciation of those qualities-also helped defend the regime's violent excesses before a critical and curious public. Priya Satia is Assistant Professor of British History at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2004. Her forthcoming book is entitled The State That Couldn't See: A Cultural History of British Intelligence-Gathering in the Middle East, 1900-1932.

Britain, despite being a prominent founder of the United Nations and a Permanent Member of the Security Council, was from the outset wary of the United Nations. The UN Charter alluded discreetly to decolonization, causing unease among the European colonial powers. By the mid-1960s, the problem of decolonization had been largely replaced by the Cold War as the major obstruction to implementation of the Charter. The end of the Cold War moved Britain and its allies into a different and easier phase, one in which the British found the United Nations to be a useful instrument in bringing to an end at least some armed conflicts, in part through UN peacekeeping. The principles and practices of the United Nations evolved constantly and with a certain consistency. Britain actively participated in shaping these changes, but not always positively-especially in decolonization. After the dissolution of the European and Russian empires and the end of the Cold War, however, Britain has been able to contribute significantly to the functioning of the United Nations as well as the genuinely noble goal of peacekeeping. Marrack Goulding is a specialist on the Middle East, having spent twenty-six years in the British Diplomatic Service. He then became the UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping (1986-1993), and Political Affairs (1993-1997). In 1997 he left the United Nations to become Warden of St. Antony's College, Oxford.

C. Wright Mills (1916-1962), the political sociologist and influential intellectual, had a little to say about a great many subjects, and a lot to say about a few subjects of great importance. In his major books, The New Men of Power (1948), White Collar (1951), The Power Elite (1956), and The Sociological Imagination (1959), he laid down a social theory that many readers have viewed as characteristically American. Mills was raised and educated in Texas. Throughout his career, he nurtured cosmopolitan aspirations. This was especially true in the last phase of his life, for example through his visits to London. Mills built friendships with E. P. and Dorothy Thompson, Ralph Miliband, and Stuart Hall. The magnitude of his influence in Britain, far greater than previously recognized, provides a new perspective on his life and times. John H. Summers is Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University. In 2006 he received his doctorate in American intellectual history from the University of Rochester. His writing has appeared in the Journal of American History, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review. His biography of C. Wright Mills is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Nearly a century ago T. S. Eliot praised John Donne's 'unification of sensibility', inaugurating a great surge in interest in that witty seventeenth century poet. With the rise of postmodernism, academic interest in Donne waned. But a small cadre of scholars persisted. As a result, scholarship has gone far beyond the familiar Jack Donne, conflicted by his sexuality and mired in outmoded learning. The lost Lothian portrait of Donne has been recovered, revealing a youthful poet who just may have flirted with treason. Donne's supposed self-serving conversion has been debunked, and Anne Donne's presence in the Songs and Sonets ratified. In addition to these new historical and biographical insights, new editions of Donne's works are appearing, among them the Variorum edition of the poetry, which is proving one of the major efforts of textual scholarship of our era. Kate Gartner Frost is the author of Holy Delight: Typology, Numerology, and the Autobiographical Tradition in John Donne's 'Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions'. She will serve as President of The John Donne Society in 2008.

Few studies of the causes and outcomes of the Mau Mau insurgency in post-Second World War colonial Kenya manage to be sympathetic to the predicaments of both British settlers and African colonial subjects. At the time most British commentators attributed the insurgency to African irrationality and superstition. Historians since have tended to blame settler oppression. Yet the crisis in Kenya can be understood as a clash between two forms of economic and social development precariously enjoyed by both settlers and Africans. Themes worth pursuing are the expansion and contraction of social boundaries, and the maintenance of proper behavior and community obligation. How were these issues debated by the white settlers at the time? By black Africans? John Lonsdale is Professor of Modern African History, University of Cambridge. He is currently completing work on the decolonization of Kenya and the political thought of the country's first President, Jomo Kenyatta. He is co-author (with Bruce Berman) of Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. He has edited South Africa in Question and is General Editor of the Cambridge University Press series in African Studies.

In recent years, the existence of a 'British World' has become perhaps the most influential framework through which historians in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere have examined the social and cultural linkages that bound their societies together in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. What was the 'British World', and what was its connection with that much more familiar structure of power and influence, the British Empire? How far was the 'Britishness' that was thought to unite the component countries of the British World a source of strength and cohesion in the imperial system? Or was its real significance to divide and embitter Britain's imperial subjects along the fault line of race? This lecture assesses the impact of this new historical approach and discusses the tensions that may have existed between the world of 'Britishness' and the bonds of empire. John Darwin has been a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, since 1984. He is the author of Britain, Egypt and the Middle East (1981) and Britain and Decolonization (1988), and is a contributor to the Oxford History of the British Empire. His book, After Tamerlane: the Global History of Empire, will be published next spring.

Members and friends of British Studies will have seen the Feliks Topolski paintings of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and many others in the Tom Lea Rooms and elsewhere in the Harry Ransom Center. Born in Poland in 1907, Topolski studied at the Warsaw Academy of Art and settled in England in 1935. An artist with the interests and powers of a reporter, an anthropologist, and a historian, he captured events from Indian independence to the Vietnam War. His work is at once satirical, affectionate, and psychologically penetrating. Daniel Topolski, who often traveled with his father, will talk about the artist's life and work, and the current exhibition at the HRC. His BBC radio series, 'Topolski's Travels', won the 1993 Travelex Radio Award. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics and 2004 Athens Olympics, he served as the BBC's commentator for rowing events.

Hamlet, always one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, has been continually reinvented on the stage. Hamlet anticipates the enduring relevance of the play when he speaks of the Players as the chroniclers of the time who 'hold the mirror up to nature'. Hamlet remains an inexhaustible text in part because of its own concern with interpretation and the ambiguity of human speech and action. Hamlet himself has been the focus of centuries of intense speculation, daring actors, audiences, and critics to 'pluck out the heart of his mystery'. He has been a Renaissance prince, an Enlightenment rationalist, a suicidal and passionate Romantic, a Freudian neurotic, and an existential rebel. The history of our responses to Hamlet contains parallels to the play itself, as its elusive hero moves from a medieval to a modern world. James Loehlin is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Shakespeare at Winedale program. Each summer he takes students into the Texas countryside, to the Winedale Historical Center, to study and perform three Shakespeare plays. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Shakespeare and modern drama, and has written on Shakespeare and Chekhov. In 2005 he won the Chad Oliver Teaching Award in Plan II and a President's Associates Teaching Award.

Fifty years ago British scholarship in Islamic studies moved from Orientalism to 'area studies'. At the beginning of the 21st century a similar change is taking place. Synthesizing the global and the local has the potential to transcend abstract theory and narrow area studies-if the Middle East can be seen in the larger geographical context of the Indian Ocean. Such a configuration, which is still artificially divided by area specialists, would help to restore more comprehensible dimensions of British as well as Islamic history. In much British and American scholarship, and official policy of the two governments, 'civilization' remains a basic unit. In the 1990s, major debates involving Islamic Studies concerned the 'clash of civilizations' between the Islamic and Western worlds. These debates have an archaic tone because of the obsolescence of 'civilization' as an effective conceptual unit of analysis. As in the case of the definitions of the 'Middle East' and the 'Indian Ocean', the development of more effective units for analysis is a primary requirement for the new era of Islamic studies. John O. Voll is Professor of Islamic History and Associate Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding of Georgetown University. His books include The Society of Muslim Brothers (1969), Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (1994), and Islam and Democracy (1996).

At the height of his fame, Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was the most famous English writer in the world. His plays, novels, and short stories were translated into almost every known language. To his millions of readers he became synonymous with a particular type of Englishness: courteous, conventional, and urbane. He seemed to be the quintessential English gentleman. It was an image that Maugham took care to foster. Yet in many respects Maugham's personality was a pastiche, effectively disguising a mass of contradictions. Born and brought up in France, he claimed to be happiest in London, a city he spent a lifetime escaping. A devastating satirist of English society, he was also passionately patriotic, risking his life for his country in both world wars. A married man and a father, he was also an undercover homosexual very much aware of long shadow cast by the trial of Oscar Wilde. After a happy student life at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, Lady Selina worked as assistant literary editor at the Daily Telegraph (1968-1982) and then as literary editor of Harpers and Queen (1987-1995). She has written three biographies, Nancy Mitford (1985), Evelyn Waugh, (1994), and Rosamond Lehmann (2002). She is a regular reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph and the Times Literary Supplement.

The fall of Singapore in February 1942 is a defining moment in both British and Australian history. Popular nationalist accounts in Australia emphasize Churchill's 'betrayal'. Australians increasingly see Singapore's surrender as marking-in the words of Prime Minister John Curtin at the time-as the start of a 'battle for Australia'. The fiftieth anniversary of the surrender saw a controversy over claims that many Australian soldiers had deserted before the surrender. What is the substance of these claims? What is their significance for Australia's sense of national identity and its relationship with Britain? Peter Stanley is Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial (Australia's national military museum) where he has worked since 1980. He has published 18 books including Quinn's Post, Anzac, Gallipoli, Tarakan: An Australian Tragedy, White Mutiny, and For Fear of Pain: British Surgery 1790-1850. His forthcoming book, 1942: Battle for Australia? will be published by Penguin.

In 1984-85, during the protracted coalminer's strike in Great Britain, Tony Harrison, the well-known poet, dramatist, translator, and screenwriter, wrote the poem 'v.', modeled to an extent on Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'. In 1987, after Channel 4 made a film version of the poem, 'v.' acquired a certain notoriety, less for its subject matter-the socioeconomics of the coalfields and in particular the city of Leeds-than for its reproduction of yobbo-slang and graffitied obscenities within the text of this 'highbrow' and highly allusive poem. Aesthetic and social decorum, the politics of work stoppages and unemployment, and the new demographics of contemporary British urban life-these were the subjects raised and debated by Harrison's complex and compelling poem, when translated into its new cinematic medium. Profs. Heinzelman and Charlesworth will host a discussion of the poem in light of these issues. (A copy of the poem can be found online by searching for 'Tony Harrison v.') Kurt Heinzelman, Professor of English, is a poet and translator. His scholarly research has been in the areas of British Romanticism, Modernism, and Poetry and Poetics. Michael Charlesworth, Assistant Chairman in the Art History Department, is originally from the north of England. He received his Ph.D in the history and theory of art at the University of Kent in Canterbury. His scholarly fields are landscape art and the history of gardens as well as photography before 1918.