The prestigious annual Gordon B. Hinckley Lecture in British Studies is delivered by a leading scholar.
On alternate years it will be given by a visiting scholar from outside the University of Utah.
2026 Lecture
Date: Thursday, January 29, 2026
Time: 2:00 - 3:30 PM, British Afternoon Tea Reception to Follow
Location: Cleone Peterson Eccles Alumni House, OC Tanner Ballrooms A&B
Free & open to the public
Nadja Durbach
University of Utah Professor of History and Co-editor of the Journal of British Studies
Title: The Fate of the Foundlings, or, Being Undocumented in Twentieth Century Britain
Description: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the foundling—an abandoned newborn baby found alive whose parentage was unknown—frequently appeared in British debates about motherhood and the family; poverty and the economy; morality, respectability, and sexuality; nation and empire; and the proper relationship between charities and the state. Scholars of British culture, however, have tended to lose interest in the foundling once the 1926 Adoption Act provided a legal means to absorb abandoned children into new families. Yet it was in the twentieth century that the plight of the foundling was magnified and took on new importance precisely because unadopted foundlings, and older abandoned children, were often undocumented. That they had either never been registered at birth, or their records could not be traced, meant that abandoned children were not only compelled to survive outside of family units, the bedrock of British society. Without a birth certificate they also had difficulty proving their age, identity, and crucially their status as British nationals, all of which became increasingly important over the course of the twentieth century.
Past Lectures
Date: January 16, 2025
Title: Imperial Ears: Robert Louis Stevenson in Oceania
Description: Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) spent the last six years of his life in Oceania. This lecture introduces Stevenson’s relationships with Pacific musicians including Queen Lili’uokalani, last monarch of the Hawai’ian Kingdom. It asks what role music played in Stevenson’s writing, in colonialism and in indigenous resistance to it.
About Emma Sutton
Emma Sutton is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and Associate of the UK’s Centre for Pacific Studies. Her research focuses on literary-musical relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly: music and decadence; music and literary modernism; and music and colonial history. Her publications include Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford, 2002), Virginia Woolf and Classical Music (Edinburgh, 2013; 2015) and edited collections on opera and the novel, and on E. M. Forster’s work. She has worked closely with indigenous scholars, students and creative artists in Oceania for nearly twenty years, including (since 2018) with musicians at the National University of Samoa.
Date: January 18, 2024
Title: Each His Own Lord: Anglo-Saxons, Neo-Old English, Brexit and the New English Nationalism
Description: In January 2024, Jones gave the Gordon B. Hinckley Lecture in British Studies, where he discussed the use of motifs from early English literature and history in recent English nationalist discourse, alongside a rise in the online use of neo-Old English phrases by extreme nationalist groups. He argued that these phenomena are not coincidental, but mutually reinforcing, and that ideas of “Anglo-Saxon” ethnic identity are being used to construct false historical justification for extreme nationalist ideologies in England.