In the summer of 2020 following the brutal police murder of George Floyd, debates about the place of the Confederate symbols erupted across the US. Calls for Confederate monuments to be razed followed as did cries for street names or schools bearing Confederate names to be changed. Since that summer more than 120 Confederate monuments had been removed, including those in Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia. But why does the American Civil War continue to elicit such reactions – some intensely violent – more than a century and a half after its close?

If you are supportive of disability advocacy, should you also be vegan? Should your thoughts on euthanizing a pet be consistent with how you might think about humans in search of assisted suicide? Scholars in disability studies have recently called for greater engagement with animal studies as a field. But complicated questions remain. Disability activists have long been fighting to reclaim the humanity of disabled people, for example, who have historically been constructed in ableist terms as somehow less than human. Should disability and animal activism therefore be linked together?

On the occasion of the publication of Like Love, a collection of essays written over the past 20 years, Maggie Nelson will address her genre-spanning career, which has included criticism, autobiography, lyric prose, poetry, scholarship, and art writing. Nelson will discuss the differences and overlaps between these genres, as well as between her abiding preoccupations, which include aesthetics, ethics, feminism, queer issues, art, and the unpredictable, myriad ways in which content finds form.

This roundtable discussion will explore how the politics of immigration has affected the politics of the Americas and Europe, with experts from these regions providing their expert insight into the similarities and differences between nations dealing with unprecedented migration. Among the topics discussed will be the 2024 elections in many countries around the world, including the United Kingdom and the United States, how immigration politics has changed over time, and possible ways to forge consensus on this polarising issue.

This event is open to the public.

Barbara Savage presents a powerful and inspiring biography of Merze Tate (1905–1996), a trailblazing Black woman scholar and world traveller.

Tabernacles in the Wilderness discusses the work of the United States Christian Commission (USCC), a civilian relief agency established by northern evangelical Protestants to minister to Union troops during the American Civil War. USCC workers saw in the Civil War not only a wrathful judgment from God for the sins of the nation but an unparalleled opportunity to save the souls of US citizens and perfect the nation. Thus, the workers set about proselytizing and distributing material aid to Union soldiers with undaunted and righteous zeal.

Educator, organiser and activist Maria Varela explores her work during the Civil Rights Movement, focussing particularly on her photographic archive. In discussing her images, Maria reflects on narratives of the Civil Rights Movement and how her photographs and experiences challenge that memory.

This talk is part of the event programming for the exhibition, Time to Get Ready: Maria Varela and the Civil Rights Movement.

Today, free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers. In Pax Economica, historian Marc-William Palen shows that free trade and globalisation in fact have roots in nineteenth-century left-wing politics. In this counterhistory of an idea, Palen explores how, beginning in the 1840s, left-wing globalists became the leaders of the peace and anti-imperialist movements of their age.

The use of overwhelming force no longer guarantees victory in war. Under what conditions do supposedly weaker conflict actors ‘outpower’ stronger actors? Lord Alderdice will argue that those most willing to sustain extreme conflict have been ‘devoted actors’ driven by non-negotiable ‘sacred values’. Bringing into dialogue insights from large group psychology, neuroscience, and epigenetics with those of political science, he will describe two factors one biological, and the other from complex large group psychology, that can help explain these apparently non-rational phenomena.