Inaugural Lecture: Anna Vaninskaya

This free public lecture celebrates the appointment of Anna Vaninskaya as Personal Chair of Literary and Cultural History at the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh.

Union: A Political Fantasia

How do writers imagine union – the joining of separate things into one? How do they depict national communities, political collectivities and personal associations and explore the ways solitary individuals negotiate their positions within and between them? How do they reconcile the psycho-social and political failures of our discordant reality with the longing to escape from it to an unreal but more harmonious alternative?

In this lecture, Anna will bring together two strands of her research: the fantastic and the political, to ask what writers from radically different traditions could possibly have to say to one another about human unity (and its inevitable obverse, human isolation).

‘Union’ will thus be her method as well as her theme, as she dovetails romantic poetry with political fiction and makes fairies join forces with communists to reveal all the paradoxical implications of the old proverb, ‘union is strength’.

About the speaker

Professor Anna Vaninskaya holds a D.Phil. in English Literature from the University of Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She came to the University of Edinburgh in 2010, after holding a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge.

She is the author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914 (2010), named Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2011; Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien (2020), winner of the 2021 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies; and editor and co-translator of London Through Russian Eyes, 1896-1914: An Anthology of Foreign Correspondence (2022).

She has published over forty articles and book chapters on topics in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture, including socialism, utopianism, historiography, education, popular reading, immigration and Anglo-Russian encounters.

Anna was the Founding Programme Director of the Edinburgh Futures Institute 'Narrative Futures: Art, Data, Society' MSc and is currently Deputy Head of the Department of English and Scottish Literature in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures.

Browse Professor Vaninskaya's staff profile on the University of Edinburgh website

About Inaugural Lectures

Inaugural Lectures are public talks by newly-appointed Professors and Chairs at the University of Edinburgh. The lectures are free and open to all.

Browse more Inaugural Lectures on the University of Edinburgh website

Access and recording

Please note that this lecture is a free, in-person event held on the University of Edinburgh campus. It will not be live streamed - tickets are for access to the venue. However, the lecture may be photographed and/or recorded and added to the University website afterwards. If you would prefer not to appear in any recordings, please contact us in advance or speak to us on the day. It's not a problem.