Oscar winner returns to "inspiring" Sussex

Oscar winner returns to "inspiring" Sussex

An Oscar-winning director who made a film inspired by archives held at Sussex will give a free public lecture on campus next month.

Kevin Macdonald will talk about his crowd-sourced project Life in a Day, which tells the story of one day (24 July 2010) on Earth by using footage that tens of thousands of people around the world uploaded onto the video-sharing website YouTube.

Kicking off the spring term series of Sussex Lectures, his Mass Observation Anniversary Lecture on 26 January will describe how his idea for the film came from the records of ordinary people that he found in the Mass Observation Archive, based in Sussex’s Library.

Another Mass Observation Anniversary Lecture will be given on 7 March by the historian David Kynaston, who will talk about ‘Reshaping our view of the “1945” moment and beyond’.

Those two events are among 13 free public lectures to be held at Sussex in the spring programme of the termly lecture series.

On 31 January, the first of four Professorial lectures takes place, as Professor Katy Gardner tells stories from the “jagged edge” of global capitalism.

The programme continues with a Sussex Centre for Intellectual History Lecture (6 February). In it, Sussex’s Professor Norman Vance will examine "genealogies of the Irish mind".

On 7 February, a second Professorial, this time delivered by Professor Owen Holland, who will look at the past, present and future of robotics and whether we will ever create ‘Robots like us’. The remaining Professorial lectures will be given by Professor Vicky Lebeau (21 February); and Professor Roger Strange (13 March).

Heather Ann Thompson from Temple University in Philadelphia, USA, visits campus on 10 February to discuss ‘Mass incarceration and the unmaking of post-war America’.

In the second of three Sussex Centre for Intellectual History lectures, taking place on 27 February, Professor Nicola Miller (UCL) will discuss ‘Reading Rousseau in Latin America’. The third, delivered by Peter Mandler (Cambridge), takes place on 12 March and is titled ‘The sociological imagination in mid twentieth-century Britain and America’.

Sven Beckert, from Harvard University in the USA, will, on 12 March, lead a lecture exploring the global history of cotton production in the American South.

‘The reputation of King James I revisited for the umpteenth time’ is the topic of the Centre for Early Modern Studies Annual Lecture, delivered on 13 March by Professor Michael Questier from Queen Mary, University of London.

The lecture series concludes on 14 March with the Holleyman Archaeology Lecture 2012 delivered by Helen Geake (Cambridge) and focusing on the discovery in 2009 of the “Staffordshire Hoard” of Anglo-Saxon artefacts.

The lectures are free of charge and everybody is welcome to attend, but you are asked to RSVP as indicated for each lecture: go to the Sussex Lectures booking page. For details of each lecture, refer to the Upcoming lectures page.

Posted on behalf of: Development and Alumni Relations Office
Last updated: Thursday, 22 December 2011

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