British Studies Lecture Series

Speaker – Dean Robert King

This occasion celebrates the end of the five-year process, sponsored by Randy Diehl and the College of Liberal Arts, that resulted in 150 Highly Recommended Books. The other committee members for the project were Robert Abzug (Rapoport Chair of Jewish Studies), Roger Louis (Kerr Professor of English History and Culture), Al Martinich (Vaughan Centennial Professor in Philosophy), Elizabeth Richmond-Garza (Director of Comparative Literature), and Steven Weinberg (Welch Chair in Physics). The thoroughly illustrated book assesses the authors of the works selected for inclusion as well as the books themselves. Copies will be distributed at the meeting.

Speaker – David Edwards (GOVERNMENT)

David Edwards has been a dedicated reader of American and British newspapers and opinion magazines since the 1950s. In fact, he still subscribes to more than one hundred print editions of newspapers, magazines, and journals. He will talk about how fake news has evolved into the versions of it that increasingly pervade politics today. And he will answer the question, what are some possible ways of understanding and coping with the challenge to democracy posed by fake news? Having taught government courses at UT for fifty years, David Edwards three years ago became Professor Emeritus. He has written books on international relations (Creating a New World Politics and Arms Control in International Politics) as well as American politics (The American Political Experience). He has served as a consultant to the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Industrial Management Center, and the Danforth Foundation. He has written for the Washington Post, the Nation, and La Quinzaine Littéraire.

Speakers – Bill Brands (HISTORY) Bat Sparrow (GOVERNMENT) Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa (HARRY RANSOM CENTER)

Bill Brands and Bat Sparrow will discuss the difference between writing history and biography, and between writing the life of a living person and that of someone dead, perhaps long ago dead, as well as the attitudes of biographers toward their subjects. And what of reviews that criticize a book seemingly other than the one the author thought he or she had written? Brands and Sparrow will also comment on their experiences of working with archival sources and the perils as well as benefits of interviews. Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa will comment on the dilemmas she has encountered writing professional biography. How does the historian determine where to draw the line between the personal and the professional?

Speaker – Mark Gasiorowski

This lecture will begin with the historic Britain-Iran connection: ‘If you lift up Khomeini’s beard, you will find “MADE IN BRITAIN” stamped on his chin.’ After Iran’s 1978-1979 revolution, US and British officials sought a cooperative, mutually-beneficial relationship with the country’s new leaders. Contrary to what many believed, the CIA did not undertake covert political operations against the new regime and, in fact, rejected many opportunities to do so. The CIA in fact began an extraordinary intelligence-sharing initiative with the British that culminated in a warning that Iraq was preparing to invade Iran. These efforts ended when radical Islamists seized the US embassy in November 1979. Mark Gasiorowski is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University. He taught previously at Louisiana State University and has been a Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Visiting Professor at Tehran University. He is the author of US Foreign Policy and the Client State and the editor, with Malcolm Byrne, of the acclaimed Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran.

Speaker – Joanna Hitchcock

Among the 1,300 passengers aboard the Titanic when she steamed out of Southampton Harbor in April 1912 was Noël, Countess of Rothes. She was traveling to the States to join her husband. This account of Noël’s experiences on the ship, in the lifeboat, and aboard the rescue ship is told through her own eyes, based on letters she wrote immediately after the sinking to her parents and to her cousin, the speaker’s grandmother. Joanna Hitchcock is the former Director of the University of Texas Press and a past President of the Association of American University Presses. She graduated from Oxford University (Lady Margaret Hall) with a B.A. in Modern History. She started her publishing career at Oxford University Press in London. Before coming to Austin in 1992, she was executive editor for the humanities and assistant director at Princeton University Press.

Speakers – Virginia Brown (Dell Medical School), Robert Prentice (McCombs Business School) Stephen Sonnenberg, M.D. (Plan II), Paul Woodruff (Philosophy)

The Oxford Ethics Centre was established in 2003 with the aim of rational reflection on personal and professional ethics: ‘The vision is Socratic, not missionary’. The Oxford Centre promotes discussion on ‘climate change, terrorism, global inequality, poverty, and genetic engineering’. The Centre has transformed the way philosophy is taught at Oxford. ‘Metaethics’ has been crowded out by practical issues. Plans for an Ethics Center at UT have been under consideration for several years and will be discussed at a conference in the fall semester 2018. How should the aims and purpose compare with those of the Oxford Ethics Centre? What strengths should be developed in bioethics to support the Dell School? How will the Center help to promote classes and teaching with an ethical component? One issue is moral injury from events such as the massacre at My Lai and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The Center will also discuss the ethics of teaching: do assignments that give students strong incentives to cheat cause them moral injury?

Speaker – Bernard Wasserstein

At the end of its three-decades-long mandate in 1948, Britain withdrew its administration and 100,000-strong armed forces from Palestine. But unlike its departure from any other dependent territory, it did not hand over to any successor government. Instead it left Arabs and Jews to fight for possession of the Holy Land. Historians have long debated why Britain left Palestine. But how did they leave? Was it a dignified withdrawal or a disorderly cut and run? Bernard Wasserstein was born in London in 1948 and was a Professor of History at several British and American universities. A Guggenheim and British Academy fellow, he has been a recipient of the Golden Dagger and Yad Vashem book awards. Since 2014, when he retired from the University of Chicago, he has lived in Amsterdam. His books, which have been translated into twelve languages, include The British in Palestine, Divided Jerusalem, and Israelis and Palestinians.

Speaker – Karl Rove

Karl Rove’s recent book, The Triumph of William McKinley, deals with the election of 1896 and its consequences. His lecture will expand on the results of the 1898 war with Spain: the annexation of the Philippines and Hawaii in the Pacific and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean as well as Cuba as a protectorate of sorts. To what extent did American political leaders take into account the reaction of the other European powers, above all the British, to these moves toward acquiring an empire? Karl Rove was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff during the George W. Bush administration. He is usually credited with the 1994 and 1998 Texas gubernatorial victories of Bush as well as the presidential wins in 2000 and 2004. Bush has referred to Rove as the “architect.” After the publication of The Triumph of William McKinley, the UT historian H.W. Brands referred to it as “political history at its most engaging.” Rove lives in Austin.

Speaker – Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The debate on Britain’s departure from the European Union, before the referendum and ever since, has invoked the past: ‘Our Island Story’ and a thousand years of history. The Leavers, or Brexiteers, are especially prone to talking of ‘vassalage’ and medieval history, of the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals, of the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), and of 1940, when the British stood alone. A powerful, palpable sense of nostalgia pervades the whole enterprise.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author, a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the New York Review of Books as well as to newspapers and magazines in Britain. His books include The Randlords (1985), The Controversy of Zion (1996), andYo, Blair! (2007). He has been a regular visitor to the British Studies Seminar, talking more than once about Winston Churchill, a book on whose reputation and legacy he is finishing. Since being taken to a football game in Austin, he has considered himself a long-range Longhorn fan.

Speaker – Alan Friedman

Scholars tend to label Samuel Beckett’s early career negatively as either his “Joyce years” or his “Surrealist period,” maintaining that Joyce’s writings had a detrimental effect on Beckett’s initial works and that Surrealism was only a minor influence. But both were critical models for Beckett. He mined his powerful predecessors for themes, ideas, and techniques that he used throughout his career, even as he rejected the aspects of them that did not suit him, and increasingly transcended the constraints of their particular styles.

Alan Friedman, Thaman Professor of English and Comparative Literature, specializes in modern British, Irish, and American literature, the novel, and Shakespearean drama. He is the author of six books and has edited a dozen others, as well as coedited four special journal issues on Joyce and Beckett. His honors include the UT’s Civitatis Award, conferred annually for dedicated and meritorious service to the University. For 20 years he coordinated the Actors from the London Stage program and the student group Spirit of Shakespeare. He has chaired the University’s Faculty Council and is currently Secretary of the General Faculty.

Speaker – James Dee 

Religious beliefs have been questioned and opposed for centuries, from the pre-Socratics of ancient Hellas to the rise of science and the humanistic values of the Enlightenment—often said to be in decline today. This talk will summarize the ideas of a surprisingly large group of Hellenic skeptics and atheists, briefly survey some heresies of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and explore the anti-theological implications of the Scientific Revolution and the emergence of historical-critical biblical studies. Along the way, we will encounter a powerful argument built on sand, an extremely dangerous book that never was, a Christian who was willing to “spit in God’s face,” a decapitated gravestone in London, and a touch of “cosmological vertigo.”

James Dee received his A.B. in Comparative Literature (Honors) from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Texas. He was on the faculty of the Classics Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1972 to 1999, serving as department chair for eight years. His current status is Visiting Researcher-Scholar in Classics. He has held two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for Research and has published nine reference works (six in Homeric studies), along with three dozen articles and reviews.

Speaker – Tony Hopkins

Challenging conventional accounts of the place of the United States in the international order during the last three centuries, Tony Hopkins will argue that the United States was part of a British imperial order throughout this period. After 1898, it ruled a now forgotten empire in the Pacific and Caribbean. It brought formal colonial control to an end after 1945, when other Western powers also abandoned their empires. The conditions sustaining territorial empires had changed irrevocably. Thereafter, the United States was not an empire but an aspiring hegemon. Tony Hopkins held the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and was a stalwart member of British Studies. He is now Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He has written extensively on African history, British imperial history, and globalization. He has recently published American Empire: A Global History (2018).

Speaker – Harshan Kumarasingham 

As the world watches Britain’s slow departure from the European Union, it can be constructive to remember the multiple occasions, especially since 1947, when Britain pulled out of its imperial possessions, often in haste and turmoil. Decolonization changed the nature of the Commonwealth, the seventy-year-old organization that replaced the empire as the focus of Britain’s geostrategic ambitions. This lecture will comment on Brexit in relation to British priorities in shaping the modern Commonwealth.

Harshan Kumarasingham is Lecturer in British Politics at the University of Edinburgh. Originally from New Zealand, he is a political and constitutional historian who has written on British decolonization, the Commonwealth, and the political legacies of empire for post-colonial states. He edited the October 2018 issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, which dealt with liberal ideals and the politics of decolonization. He is currently coediting The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom.

Speaker – Peter Stansky

William Morris was a poet and artist as well as the foremost figure in the
Arts and Crafts movement. He succeeded in reviving some of the techniques of handmade production that machines were replacing. His iconic patterns for fabrics and wallpaper are instantly recognizable, and the baroquely beautiful productions of his Kelmscott Press, using typefaces designed by Morris, are coveted by museums and collectors. His vision inspired the rediscovery of decoration based on natural forms and the inherent beauty of particular materials. Peter Stansky’s assessment of the life and times of Morris will complement the present exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center.

Peter Stansky was educated at Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard. He has spent his career as a Professor of British history at Stanford University. His extensive writing on modern Britain includes two books on William Morris as well as studies of Bloomsbury, George Orwell, and British participants in the Spanish Civil War—and, not least, the arts in Britain during the Second World War. He has recently collaborated with Fred Leventhal on a biography of Leonard Woolf, soon to be published.

Speaker – John Farrell

It is sometimes overlooked that Jane Eyre is a classic Bildungsroman that narrates Jane’s formative years and spiritual education. Even more deliberately, it is a journey narrative. But Jane’s travels follow two incompatible paths. Both paths are narratively constructed as pilgrimages. Charlotte Brontë’s task in the novel—and Jane’s as well—is to make these pilgrimages converge. Their convergence is achieved only as Jane learns to comprehend a poetic language that emerges mysteriously from the novel’s narrative.
John P. (‘Jack’) Farrell joined the English Department at UT in 1974 as an Associate Professor and retired in 2006 as Professor Emeritus. Among his publications are Revolution as Tragedy: The Dilemma of the Moderate from Scott to Arnold and more than fifty essays on Romantic and Victorian literature—the latest of which is ‘Romance Narrative in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes’. He is a founding member of the British Studies seminar.

Speaker – Derek Leebaert

The British Empire remained a superpower at least until 1957. But the re-
elected Eisenhower administration then proclaimed ‘a declaration of
independence’ from British authority. The years in between are freighted with
myths: Britain’s ‘withdrawal from the Mediterranean’; the influence of George
Kennan’s view of Britain within the U.S. government; and Britain and the
beginning of the war in Vietnam. Knowing what actually occurred is vital to
understanding questions of Britain and the United States in the postwar era,
in Middle East destabilization, in the history of the rise and decline of
superpowers—and, not least, Brexit.

Derek Leebaert’s books include Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American
Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan (2010); To Dare and to Conquer:
Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations from Achilles to Al Qaeda
(2006); and The Fifty-Year Wound: How America’s Cold War Victory Shapes Our
World (2002). He is a former Smithsonian Fellow; a founding editor of
International Security, and a founder of the National Museum of the U.S. Army.
He is a partner in the global management consulting firm MAP AG (Zurich).

Speaker – Paul Woodruff

The Irish poet E. R. Dodds (1893–1979) was expelled as a student from Oxford in 1916 for protesting the English reaction to the Easter Rising. As a mature scholar, he transformed classical scholarship with his brilliant book The Greeks and the Irrational. The young poets W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice flourished in his informal salon. Sir Maurice Bowra (1898–1971) became an Oxford institution, a polymath brilliant in high table repartee and the subject of many delightful Oxford anecdotes. His many books were much admired; he was knighted and became Warden of Wadham College at Oxford. When Gilbert Murray retired as Regius Professor of Greek in 1936, Bowra believed that he was heir apparent. So did Oxford society. But under Murray’s influence, Dodds was named to the chair. On his arrival as professor, Oxford treated Dodds as an interloper, whispering that Bowra had been rejected because of his homosexuality and that Dodds had been disloyal to the Crown. What was really at issue between these two exemplary figures? Both were poets, and both were fine scholars, but they were very different kinds of scholars. Paul Woodruff has taught at UT since 1973. His publications include Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, The Ajax Dilemma: Justice and Fairness in Rewards, and The Necessity of Theater. He has translated (with Peter Meineck) all of Sophocles’ surviving plays, as well as Plato’s Symposium (with Alexander Nehamas). This year he has brought out edited volumes on Oedipus and on the ethics of philanthropy. His latest book, which should be in print around November 30, is The Garden of Leaders: Toward a Revolution in Higher Education.

Speaker – George Kelling

The British acquired Cyprus for strategic reasons in 1888, and the island has provided a valuable strategic base up to this day. During World War II, Cyprus faced the danger of a German invasion. The loyalty of the Greek population on the island could not be taken for granted. According to the Governor: “Morale of the majority of Cypriots is at its lowest ebb. In event of invasion we can expect little help from [the Greek Cypriots] and some might even turn against us.” What was the British response to a situation that posed the danger of revolt from within and invasion without? The answer has a bearing on the war in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. George Kelling served in the army from 1958 to 1978. On retiring, he entered graduate school, earning a doctorate in history at the University of Texas in 1988, with a dissertation dealing with Cyprus in the period 1939–1955. He has had a second career as a civilian historian with the air force. He has maintained a vigorous interest in the history of the British Empire, particularly Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean, in World War II.

Speaker – Robert D. King Founding Dean, College of Liberal Arts

Alan Turing was the greatest mathematician Britain produced in the twentieth century. After a brilliant start at Cambridge he became the leading light in the British code-breaking center at Bletchley Park, and he was instrumental in breaking the German ENIGMA cipher by inventing and constructing a prototype of the modern computer. This was key to the Allied victory in World War II. In 1952 he died tragically and alone, a suicide. This is his story. Robert D. King, from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, spent his career at The University of Texas. He was at various times Rapoport Chair of Jewish Studies, Professor of Linguistics, Germanic Languages, and Asian Studies, and member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He was Founding Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, a position he occupied from 1976-1993. He provided material support to Roger Louis in getting the British Studies Seminar off the ground in the 1970s and1980s; and he would like to pay tribute to Walter Wetzels for his commitment to British Studies over many decades.

Speakers – James Loehlin, Alan Friedman, and Eric Mallin ENGLISH

Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’ soliloquy has long been Shakespeare’s most famous speech; but the way in which it has been performed on stage has changed drastically over the centuries. This session will review the history of those performances, from speculation about early modern acting to reviews of eminent Shakespeareans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to some of the most famous film and stage renditions of the twentieth century.

Speaker – Rodolfo John Alaniz HISTORY

Charles Darwin’s voyage aboard HMS Beagle inaugurated a new era in the history of biology. However, Darwin was one of many naturalists who gathered specimens and gained prestige on nineteenth-century British expeditions. This talk will explore the role that the British Empire played in the establishment of Darwin’s theory, and asks what this episode might reveal in an imperial context. Rodolfo John Alaniz is a postdoctoral affiliate at the Institute of Historical Studies and Ritter Memorial Fellow at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. He has taught the history of science at the University of California, Berkeley, and will teach at UT during the 2018-2019 academic year. His has recently completed a monograph, Darwin in the Deep: Marine Invertebrates, Evolutionary Methodologies, and the Emergence of Natural Selection.

Speaker – Nigel Newton CHIEF EXECUTIVE, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING, LONDON

The Harry Potter books have been translated into some 75 languages and have sold more than 450 million copies. Nigel Newton owes the inspiration to publish the first in the series to his young daughter, who read the manuscript and insisted that it was ‘much better than anything else.’ He initially sent J. K. Rowling a check for £2,500. The novels tell coming-of-age stories fantastically yet also realistically, setting them in a world of wizardry, spells, and quidditch as well as homework, adolescent crushes, and cruel elders. Yet not all the grownups are malign: Dumbledore, the headmaster of the wizards’ school Hogwarts, according to Rowling herself, ‘is the epitome of goodness.’ What are Nigel Newton’s own impressions of the characters—and, in his view, the reasons for the success of the series? Nigel Newton is an American-born British publisher originally from San Francisco. He studied English at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He then stayed on in England, learning the book trade first at Macmillan and then at Sidgwick and Jackson, where he became deputy managing director at age 27. He first thought of creating a new company in 1984, and launched Bloomsbury two years later. The firm quickly became prosperous, and its success was ensured when it published J. K. Rowling. Is there a future for Bloomsbury after Harry Potter? ‘You can bet your Hogwarts there is’—especially since I. B. Tauris has now merged with Bloomsbury.

Speaker – Stephen Enniss, HARRY RANSOM CENTER

In the early 1960s a talented group of Northern Irish poets emerged in Belfast, including the future Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. In the decades since, a popular myth has taken root about the Northern Irish Renaissance with some commentators linking the emergence of a new generation of poets to the outbreak of violence in the North. In fact, the Troubles would not erupt for several more years, and the sudden appearance of this new generation had more to do with the individual talents of this group of poets and an extended network of publishers, editors, and academics, many of them London-based. Stephen Enniss will provide a corrective reading of this chapter of literary history and explore the London origins of the Belfast Group. Dr. Stephen Enniss is Director of the Harry Ransom Center. His research interests are in 20th century poetry, and he has written on Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney, among other figures. He is a past recipient of a Leverhulme Fellowship from the University of London, and he is the author of After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon (Gill & Macmillan, 2014). Major acquisitions during his tenure have included the archives of Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, Arthur Miller, and Nobel Laureates Kazuo Ishiguro and Gabriel García Márquez. Before coming to the Ransom Center, he held previous appointments at the Folger Shakespeare Library and at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.

Speaker – Kevin Kenny, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Éamon de Valera (1882-1975) is the most important and divisive figure in modern Irish history. After rising to prominence in the Easter 1916 rebellion, he rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, provoking civil war in Ireland, but he returned to power in the 1930s and became the architect of a new Irish state. During World War II, de Valera consolidated Ireland’s independence through a controversial policy of neutrality. For better and worse, he created modern Ireland. Kevin Kenny is Professor of History and Glucksman Professor in Irish Studies at New York University. His books include Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998), The American Irish (2000), Peaceable Kingdom Lost(2009), Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (2013), and Ireland and the British Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (editor, 2004). He taught at the University of Texas from 1994 to 1999 and at Boston College from 1999 to 2018.

Speaker: Paul Sullivan – ENGLISH

Edward Coleman was drawn, hanged, and quartered for treason in December 1678, a victim of the public frenzy around the ‘Popish Plot’. The Ransom Center’s Pforzheimer Collection includes hundreds of manuscripts from Coleman and his newsletter office, reporting information and court gossip to Richard Bulstrode, a British diplomat in Brussels. Now available online, the letters form a part of the growing world-wide electronic archive. An examination of one of these letters using paleography practice will reveal how digital archives change the way we read history. Paul Sullivan served as Associate Director of the Liberal Arts Honors Program at UT Austin, where he taught humanities and English from 2006 to 2017. He studies early modern English drama and humanism.

Speaker – Philip Waller OXFORD

In ‘Light Reading’, Philip Waller will consider how various major figures, including Prime Ministers and Presidents, have chosen to relax by reading books, and whether their choices carry more significance than might appear. There are conflicts between what people feel they should read and what they do read. This tension is most acute between classics and best-sellers; yet these and other kinds of books are not without similarities. This talk—it is hoped— may cause the audience to reflect on their own reading habits. Philip Waller is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where he has served as History Tutor from 1971 and has been Sub-Warden and Acting Warden. He is author of Writers, Readers, & Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 (2006; 2008), which, while heavyweight in scale (1181 pages!), and lauded as the ‘defining literary history of the period’, is consistently entertaining. Previously, he published books on urban history, religion and politics. He is a past editor of the English Historical Review.

Speaker – Rhonda Evans GOVERNMENT

By using a combination of boat turn-backs, offshore detention and processing, and a refusal to ever accept refugees who have tried to reach its shores by boat, Australia has emerged as a world leader in deterrence. The staggering costs and ineffable human suffering inflicted by these policies have led critics to condemn them as “fiscally irresponsible, morally bankrupt, and increasingly unsustainable politically.” This lecture, however, will argue that Australia’s expensive and inhumane approach is politically self-sustaining. Dr. Rhonda Evans, J.D., directs the Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies at UT-Austin and is a Senior Lecturer in the Government Department. She is a principal investigator for the Australian and New Zealand Policy Agendas Projects. Her research on courts and human rights appears in the Australian Journal of Political Science, Congress and the Presidency, Osgoode Hall Law Review, and Journal of Common Market Studies. She co-authored Legislating Equality published by Oxford University Press.

Speaker – Jonathan Brown

When Fidel Castro formed an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1962, it
sparked the Cuban missile crisis and became a defining incident of the Cold
War. Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana predates the Cuban missile crisis, but
the plot involves missile installations and seems to anticipate the events of
1962. In the real world, the British tolerated the Cuban revolutionaries.
American politicians, for domestic reasons, could not. The British refused to
join the American economic boycott of the Revolution. Did Britain help the
Cuban Revolution to survive US antagonism?

Jonathan Brown’s book, Cuba’s Revolutionary World was published by Harvard
University Press in 2017. His other books include Oil and Revolution in Mexico
(1993); and A Socioeconomic History of Argentina (1979). His articles have
been translated into many languages including Chinese. With Alan Knight he
edited The Mexican Petroleum Industry in the Twentieth Century (1992). With a
UT Ph.D. in History, he has taught at UT History since 1983. He is presently
writing a book on the renegotiation of the Panama Canal Treaty.

Speaker – George Scott Christian

In the last four years, fundamental questions have arisen about the future of
the composite state created by the 1707 Treaty of Union between England and
Scotland. In 2014 a majority of Scots voted to ‘remain’ in the Union. Yet in
2016 a large majority (68%) voted to ‘remain’ in the European Union. The
Scottish Parliament has recently rejected the government’s Brexit bill,
triggering what many believe is a constitutional crisis. Is it? What are the
issues in contention? Could Brexit eventually result not only in Britain’s
detachment from Europe, but in the dissolution of Britain itself?

George Scott Christian holds a virtually unique place in the British Studies
roster for his UT degrees: a B.A. in Plan II in 1982, a J. D. in 1984, an M.A.
in 1997, and a Ph.D. in English Literature in 2000. He is a practicing lawyer
as well as a teacher in English and History. His scholarly work on the British
novel has appeared in the Dickens Studies Annual, and the Thomas Hardy
Journal. He has served as a legislative assistant to a Texas State Senator and
represents clients before the Texas Legislature. He is a devoted member of
British Studies.

Although better known as a nurse, Florence Nightingale was also a skilled data scientist who successfully convinced hospitals that they could improve health care by using statistics. In 1859, in honor of these achievements, she became the first woman ever elected to the Royal Statistical Society. This talk will consider the question of what Nightingale’s experience can teach us about our own age, as we consider the future of artificial intelligence in health care. James Scott is Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Sciences. He is the author of a new book about artificial intelligence, AIQ: How People and Machines are Smarter Together, which explains what everyone needs to know in order to understand how AIQ is changing the world around us.