Utopia Discourse with Matthew Beaumont

The second in a series of lunchtime talks organised as part of the Venturing Beyond cultural programme at Somerset House.

Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the UCL Department of English and Co-Director of UCL Urban Laboratory, where he directs the Cities Imaginaries strand. His teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century literature; the fin de siècle; early modernism; C20 avant-gardes; film; crime fiction; utopian and dystopian literature; and Marxist and other literary and cultural theories. He is the author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (Verso, 2015), The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle (Peter Lang, 2012) and Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870-1900 (Haymarket, 2009).

In this talk, Matthew will reflect on 'the Future City' and consider utopian fiction's representation of urban space, in reference to his edition of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1887 (Oxford World's Classics, 2007).

This event is part of the Venturing Beyond: Graffiti and the Everyday Utopias of the Street exhibition curated by Approved (by) Pablo and hosted at Somerset House between 3 March - 2 May 2016. UCL Urban Laboratory is supporting a number of events that make up the cultural programme throughout the exhibition. More details on our partnership can be found here.

Image: The Bradbury Building, Los Angeles; Credit: Genji Arakaki on Flickr