Public Lecture and Seminar by Distinguished Visiting Professor 


The School of Social and Cultural Studies is very pleased to be hosting
two presentations by Fred Inglis, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies
at the University of Sheffield in the UK.  Both presentations are open
to the public and free of charge. 

Public Lecture:  "The Performance of Celebrity"
Monday 5 May, 1.00 p.m. Lecture Theatre NW 100

This lecture will take celebrity as a key meaning in modern society and
trace its development from 18th century London to the TV screens of
today. Along the way it will consider celebrity's long industrialisation
through Parisian department stores and the paintings of Manet in the
1860s, the invention of the stinking rich in the Gilded Age and their
proprietorship of Hollywood, the capture of mass propaganda by the Great
Dictators in the 1920s, and its transformation into a condition of
domestic enviability in contemporary popular media. 


Public Seminar: "The awfulness and necessity of Cultural Studies"
Tuesday 6 May, 4.00 p.m. Atrium Building Common Room (At 3.50)

The seminar will set out some of the major problems and riddles which
have come to characterise contemporary academic approaches to the study
of culture and cultural value. While taking full account of the
importance and difficulty of multicultural concerns, it will argue that
universalist ethics remain plausible and inseparable from serious
intellectual life.

*********************
Fred Inglis is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University
of Sheffield in the UK. Previously Professor of Cultural Studies at the
University of Warwick, he has been a member of the School of Social
Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and
Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. He
was born in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, and studied at the
Universities of Cambridge, Southampton and Bristol. Inglis has
frequently written for The Nation, the New Statesman and The Independent
and contributes regularly to BBC Radio. He is a member of the Fabian
Society and has stood as a Labour Party candidate for the UK Parliament
on four occasions.

Professor Inglis is the author of over twenty books, including: "History
Man:  the biography R.G. Collingwood" (Princeton University Press,
forthcoming); "Culture: key concepts in the social sciences" (Polity
Press, 2004); "People's Witness: the journalist in modern politics"
(Yale University Press, 2002); "The Delicious History of the Holiday"
(Routledge, 2000); "Clifford Geertz: culture, custom and ethics" (Polity
Press, 2000); "Raymond Williams: the life" (Routledge, 1995); "Cultural
Studies" (Blackwell, 1993); "The Cruel Peace: everyday life and the Cold
War" (Basic Books, 1991); "Media Theory" (Blackwell, 1990 - translated
into Japanese and Portuguese 1993; into Croatian 1997; into Finnish
1998); "Radical Earnestness: English social theory 1880-1980"
(Blackwell, 1982); "The Promise of Happiness: Value and Meaning in
Children's Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1981); "Ideology and the
Imagination" (Cambridge University Press, 1975).


