The Professor Glyn Turton Lecture

The next lecture:

Professor Will Kaufman (University of Central Lancashire), ‘Woody Guthrie: Hard Times and Hard Travelin’: A Live Musical Documentary’

6.30-7.30 p.m. 26 April 2012. Beswick Lecture Theatre, Chester Campus.

Free entry. No tickets; no booking. All welcome.

About the speaker:

Will Kaufman is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Central Lancashire. His areas of expertise include American comedy, the culture of the American Civil War, transatlantic studies, the American 1970s, and American protest music. One of the UK’s senior scholars in American Studies, he has served on the executive committee of the British Association for American Studies and has been Vice-Chair of the Association. He is also a co-founder of the Maastricht (now Middelburg) Centre for Transatlantic Studies in the Netherlands.

Will’s critically acclaimed publications include The Comedian As Confidence Man (1997), The Civil War in American Culture (2006), and American Culture in the 1970s (2009). As a recipient of a Woody Guthrie Research Fellowship from the Broadcast Music Industry Foundation and the Woody Guthrie Foundation, he has written the first political biography of America’s national balladeer: Woody Guthrie, American Radical (2011).

Will is a professional folksinger and multi-instrumentalist, with a life-long passion for American folk music. He has toured Europe and the United States with a pair of live musical documentaries: ‘Woody Guthrie: Hard Times and Hard Travelin’’ and ‘All You Jim Crow Fascists! Woody Guthrie’s Freedom Songs’. Performed at the Glastonbury Festival, the Bath International Music Festival, the Whitby Folk Festival, and the Chester Literature Festival, as well as hundreds of music venues on both sides of the Atlantic, the documentaries have attracted the praise of Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Ry Cooder, Ralph McTell, Martin Carthy, and Christy Moore.

After Will’s performance of ‘Woody Guthrie: Hard Times and Hard Travelin’’, there will be a drinks reception, to which all are invited.

Previous lectures:

Professor Glyn Turton, ‘“Yorkssshhhire”: Some Reflections on Common Speech and Literary Language in the Verse of One County’ (29 April 2010).

About the speaker:

Glyn Turton is Professor Emeritus of the University of Chester, from which he retired as Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 2005. His principal areas of academic interest are comparative literature and English poetry. He is the author of Turgenev and the Context of English Literature (1992) and was a contributor to the Open University’s course reader The Realist Novel (1995). He collaborated with Dr Sara Haslam on the production of a CD-Rom-based study of the poetry of Thomas Hardy and contributed a chapter on how to study poetry to the University of Chester English Department’s book Studying Literature: A Practical Introduction (1995). He has also written on the comic novelists Howard Jacobson and Peter Tinniswood. Since retiring he has given talks on: the imaginative interpretation of the works of Turgenev and Chekov by the Irish playwright Brain Friel; the Sussex writers’ circle around James, Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (for the BBC World Service Russian Section); and Samuel Johnson and New Labour (for the ‘Distinguished Visiting Speaker Lecture on the Enlightenment’ at Essex University). His current interest is in poetry written in and about Yorkshire.

He is a Sheffield Wednesday season-ticket holder and consequently an authority on both tragedy and farce.

Dr Juliet John (University of Liverpool), ‘Dickens Worlds: Culture, Commerce and the Heritage Industry’ (9 December 2010).

About the speaker:

Dr Juliet John is Reader in English at the University of Liverpool. She is the Director of The Gladstone Centre for Victorian Studies in Wales and the North West of England. Her research interests include the work of Charles Dickens, Victorian literature (including theatre), popular culture, melodrama, film, heritage and neo-Victorianism.

Her latest book, Dickens and Mass Culture, will be published by Oxford University Press in January 2011. Juliet is the author of the widely acclaimed book, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2001). Current projects include editing The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013) and acting as Editor-in-Chief for The Oxford (Online) Bibliography of Victorian Literature (launched January 2011).

Professor Michael Green (Northumbria University), ‘For the Sake of Silence: History, Fiction, and the Spaces In Between’ (12 May 2011).

About the speaker:

Michael Green is Professor in Creative Writing at Northumbria University, and a distinguished Fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where he was Head of the School of Literary Studies, Media, and Creative Arts. His research interests include the uses of history in fiction, which is the subject of his influential monograph Novel Histories: Past, Present, and Future in South African Fiction (Witwatersrand University Press, 1997). He has published around forty journal articles and book chapters, and recently contributed a chapter on ‘The “Experimental Line” in Fiction’ to The Cambridge History of South African Literature (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

As Michael Cawood Green, he is author of two acclaimed works of historical fiction, Sinking: A Verse Novella (Penguin, 1997) and For the Sake of Silence (Umuzi, 2008; Quartet, 2010). For the Sake of Silence, which reconstructs the life of a charismatic Trappist leader who transforms a monastery in nineteenth-century South Africa into one of the largest abbeys in the world, was awarded the prestigious Olive Schreiner Prize. It has been described by the English Academy of Southern Africa as ‘a wonderful history and spell-binding drama’ and by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee as ‘a work of history cum fiction that will grip and sometimes amaze the reader’.

Michael’s lecture on the theory and practice of writing historical fiction will include a reading from his novel

Professor Martin Stannard (University of Leicester), ‘Meeting Muriel Spark’ (8 December 2011).

About the speaker:

Martin Stannard is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Leicester. He has published extensively on Evelyn Waugh, following The Critical Heritage (1984) with a major biography in two volumes (1986 and 1992). The first volume was selected by the New York Times as one of the twelve best books of the year; the second was chosen by Frank Kermode, Jonathan Raban, William Trevor, and Muriel Spark as one of their ‘Books of the Year’, and in the year 2000 by William Boyd as one of his Times Literary Supplement ‘Books of the Millennium’.

In 1995, he published the Norton Critical Edition of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, an experiment in textual editing which includes material engaging with the challenge of literary theory to traditional editorial practice, and with the phenomenon of ‘literary impressionism’. He recently completed work on the second edition.

In 2009, Martin’s biography of Muriel Spark was published to great critical acclaim from, among others, Frank Kermode, Jonathan Bate, John Carey, Ferdinand Mount, Ian Rankin, Frances Wilson, and David Lodge. He has also published essays and review-essays on Kingsley Amis, Michael Arlen, Dickens, Ford, David Garnett, Graham Greene, William Gerhardie, Christopher Isherwood, and Philip Larkin, and on the subjects of textual criticism, biography, autobiography and letters.

Martin is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Association, and until recently was President of the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society.