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.
2025 Lecture
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.
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