History

Question: Is Revolution always about Religion?

Date: 7th February 2017
Podcast: HERE

Panel:
Dr Sam Brewitt-Taylor (Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford)
Richard Spencer (Middle East Correspondent, The Times)
George Artley (DPhil in History)

Chair: Sarah Bochicchio (MSt in Modern British & European History)
Organiser: Heather Mann (DPhil in History)

Speaker Biographies:

Richard Spencer was the Middle East Correspondent at The Telegraph between 2009-2016, based in Cairo after the beginning of the “Arab Spring”, covering the uprising there and the wars in Libya, Syria and Iraq. He travelled regularly to Syria from 2012-14 while it was still possible, reporting from Damascus, Dera’a, Homs, Aleppo and Raqqa, and joined The Times as Middle East Correspondent, based in Beirut, last year. He will be discussing Aleppo as the connection between social change and sectarianism in the Syrian war.

Dr Sam Brewitt-Taylor, Lincoln Derby Fellow, is a historian of 1960s cultural revolution in Britain, interested in how the myths of ‘the Sixties’ were invented, and how they influenced what people did. He researches the role of Christian commentators in inventing Britain’s ‘Sixties’, arguing that their significance has been overlooked due to the contemporary myth of ‘secularization’. His first article, on the role of Christians in inventing ‘secularization’, won the 2012 Duncan Tanner Prize, and is currently writing a monograph on the radical movements in the 1960s Church of England.

George Artley is a third year DPhil student and Junior Dean at Lincoln College, Oxford, working on the law and the English state around the time of the glorious revolution. The title of his thesis is ‘Courts, commerce and constitutional crisis: Sir John Holt, the law and the English state in the late seventeenth century.’ George’s talk discusses the role of religion in the political upheavals in Britain during the 17th Century.