Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event Date: 26 May 2011
Room B35, Birkbeck Main Building
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

Talking Books – Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain

This is the first in a series of public debates and conversations in 2011 about academic books of major importance. This event will revolve around Stefan Collini’s book Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. On its publication in 2006, the book attracted extensive comment for its analysis of the concept of the intellectual and its exploration of the traditional claim that ‘real’ intellectuals have not existed in Britain (or, more often, England). For this event, four younger scholars from various disciplines will reflect on the significance of the book and its bearing on their own work. In conversation with the author they will move beyond the immediate reception of the book and consider its subject-matter in a series of longer perspectives.

Speakers to include:

• Stefan Collini (Cambridge)
• Matthew Beaumont (English, UCL)
• Joel Isaac (History QMUL)
• Clarisse Berthezène (Institut Charles V, Université Paris)
• Jonathan Derbyshire (New Statesman)
• Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck) Chair

Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at UCL, where he has recently set up a City Centre. He is the author of Utopia Ltd. (2005) and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). In addition, he is the editor of Adventures in Realism (2007) and the co-editor of Restless Cities (2010).

Joel Isaac is Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London. He also currently holds the Balzan-Skinner Lectureship in Modern Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge (Spring 2011). His research focuses on the history of philosophy and the social sciences in the United States.

Jonathan Derbyshire is Culture Editor of the New Statesman. His literary journalism has also appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, Prospect and the Times Literary Supplement.

Clarisse Berthezène is a Lecturer (“maître de conférences”) at the University of Paris Diderot. She is the author of Les conservateurs britanniques dans la bataille des idées. Ashridge College, premier think tank conservateur (Presses de sciences po, 2011) and a number of articles on British Conservatism, notably « Creating Conservative Fabians : the Conservative Party, Political Education and the Founding of Ashridge College, 1929-1931 », Past & Present, 182, February 2004, pp. 211-240. Her new book Training Minds for the War of Ideas. The cultural and intellectual politics of Conservatism in the interwar years will be coming out with Manchester University Press.

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Introduction by Joanna Bourke.

Order of Speakers:

Stefan Collini

Matthew Beaumont

Joel Isaac

Clarisse Berthezène

Jonathan Derbyshire

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WHY HUMANITIES?

Event Date: 5th November 2010
Room B34, Birkbeck College, Malet St, London WC1

Programme:

Welcome – Miranda Fricker (Birkbeck) .

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Stefan Collini (Cambridge) ‘Holding our nerve’  - (AUDIO HERE)

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Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck)
‘La Fontaine’s Cat, Kafka’s Ape, and the Humanities’   – (AUDIO HERE)

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Francis Mulhern (New Left Review)
‘Humanities and University Corporatism’   – (AUDIO HERE)

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Raimond Gaita (Kings, London)
‘Callicles’ Challenge’  - (AUDIO HERE)

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Iain Pears (Historian and Writer)
‘Taxes, banks, loans, and students’   – (AUDIO HERE)

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Kate Soper (London Met)
‘Rhetoric, Reality, Revisionings’   – (AUDIO HERE)

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Quentin Skinner (QMUL)
‘Why the history of philosophy?’  - (AUDIO HERE)

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CLOSE .

Introductory conference lecture by  Professor Onora O’Neill,  Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve – ‘The Two Cultures Fifty Years On’

Event Date: 5th November 2010

Room B34, Birkbeck College, Malet St, London WC1

WHY HUMANITIES?

Stefan Collini (Cambridge) ‘Holding our nerve’

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Royal Holloway Department of History

Hayes Robinson Lecture

Date:  2 March 2010

Stefan Collini – (University of Cambridge) History in English Literary Criticism

The styles of literary criticism that were particularly influential in British culture in the middle decades of the 20th century have frequently been characterised as‘ahistorical’. This lecture identifies some of the fundamental historical assumptions underlying such work and situates them within a broader intellectual history.

Professor Stefan Collini, FBA, is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University. He has written widely on the relations between literature and intellectual history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is author of Liberalism and Sociology (1979), That Noble Science of Politics (1983), Public Moralists (1991), Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (1994), English Pasts (1999), and Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006). Collini has edited works by J.S. Mill, Matthew Arnold, Umberto Eco, and C.P. Snow, and published essays on T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Raymond Williams, cultural criticism, and the historical development of the concept of ‘culture,’ among other topics. His current research interests include ‘Condition-of-England’ writing, social criticism, literary journalism, the history of literary criticism, and ideas of culture. Collini is a frequent contributor to journals such as The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books.

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