Nick Owen

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Sep 30

DEAR FRIEND! YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

By: Nick Owen Categories: News Comments Disabled

DEAR FRIEND! YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

News

I have a chapter in a new book: Dear Friend, You Must Change Your Life. It’s a book of philosophical letters (and commentaries on those letters) edited by the philosopher Ada Bronowski, and just published by Bloomsbury Academic. The book contains twenty letters by philosophers, artists and writers including Seneca, Schiller, Descartes, Marcus Aurelius, Rilke, Lucian of Samosata and Oscar Wilde. Chapter 17 is my commentary on a letter from M. K. Gandhi to Maganlal Gandhi, in 1910. It’s called A Correspondence Theory of Truth. The book is available here. As the cover says, it ‘should be on the bedside table of anyone interested in the history of ideas’.

IMAGE CREDIT: COVER OF DEAR FRIEND YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE (BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC, 2020).

Sep 17

UNFINISHED BUSINESS: NEW BOOK PUBLISHED

By: Nick Owen Categories: Feminism and men Comments Disabled

UNFINISHED BUSINESS: NEW BOOK PUBLISHED

Feminism and men

Unfinished business: the fight for women’s rights has just been published. It’s the book accompanying this exhibition at the British Library, which opens on October 23 2020 and continues until February 2021. I have a chapter in the book, called Men in feminism?, and a section in the exhibition, on the problems of men’s involvement with campaigns for women’s rights. I hope you can visit the exhibition (details here), but if you just want to read the book, edited by Polly Russell and Margaretta Jolly, it’s available here.

IMAGE CREDIT: IMAGE CREDIT: COVER OF UNFINISHED BUSINESS: THE FIGHT FOR WOMEN”S RIGHTS (BRITISH LIBRARY PUBLICATIONS, 2020).

Jul 28

CONFERENCE IN AMSTERDAM

By: Nick Owen Categories: News: Anti-imperialism Comments Disabled

CONFERENCE IN AMSTERDAM

News: Anti-imperialism

I am giving a paper at the 3rd Congress of the European Labour History Network (ELHN), which is being held from 19 – 22 September 2019, in Amsterdam at the International Institute of Social History (IISH).

My paper will be part of the ‘Labour & Empire’ working group, which is titled How Class Worked in the Age of Empire. Comparative and Transnational Perspectives. It’ll be in a round-table session on Friday 20 September, at 09:00, called Knowing and Not-Knowing, which is also the title of my paper.

IMAGE CREDIT: RAMSAY MACDONALD TAKES PART IN A TUG OF WAR (1923).

Jul 08

BRITISH LIBRARY EXHIBITION IN 2020

By: Nick Owen Categories: Feminism and men Comments Disabled

BRITISH LIBRARY EXHIBITION IN 2020

Feminism and men

Next year, the British Library is staging an exhibition called Dreams and Demands: Women’s Rights, Women’s Lives. It will be a major national exploration of women’s fight for equality over the last 150 years. It tells the story of a women’s fight for legal rights in the UK as well as the right to pleasure, self-expression and a fully realised life. The exhibition will also highlight contemporary campaigns for equality.

There will also be an accompanying illustrated exhibition book to be published in spring 2020. I have been asked to write the chapter on men’s relationship to, and sometimes support of, women’s rights. The exhibition book will appear in April 2020, when the exhibition opens.

IMAGE CREDIT: HELP US WIN THE VOTE (1914). (GEORGE GRANTHAM BAIN COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, WASHINGTON D.C. 20540 USA)

Jun 06

MY NEW BOOK IS OUT

By: Nick Owen Categories: Other People's Struggles Comments Disabled

My new book, Other People’s Struggles: Outsiders in Social Movements will be coming out this summer. It’s being published by Oxford University Press, and the publication date is 27 June in the United States of America and 5 September in the U.K.

“The distinction between conscience and beneficiary constituents has been well known to social movement scholars since McCarthy and Zald first proposed it nearly 50 years ago. But until now no one has ever moved much beyond the distinction to tell us why we should care about it. With Other People’s Struggles, Nicholas Owen has done just that, offering a compelling theory of the variable presence of ‘outsiders’ in movements and the impact they have on those struggles.”

Doug McAdam

Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology, Stanford University.

More details here

May 20

2019 STUDENT TEACHING AWARDS

By: Nick Owen Categories: News Comments Disabled

I’ve been nominated for the Oxford University Student Union teaching awards, in the category of ‘outstanding tutor’. The Student Union teaching awards ‘recognize the teachers, tutors, and staff who make a positive difference to students’ experience and lives while at Oxford’. My colleagues at Queen’s, Amy Orben and Andrew Schuman were also nominated. The Students’ Union Teaching Awards ‘recognise the teachers, tutors, and staff who make a positive difference to students’ experience and lives while at Oxford’.

IMAGE CREDIT: DAVID OLDS.

May 10

MY ARTICLE ON DEMOCRATIZATION AND EMPIRE

By: Nick Owen Categories: News: Imperialism Comments Disabled

My article on Democratization and the British Empire has been accepted by the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. It will appear in a special number of the journal in honour of the global and imperial historian John Darwin, who supervised my doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford.

The article tries to connect the political science literature on democratization, and especially its startling finding that British imperialism is positively correlated with post-independence democratic survival, and historians’ work on empire, which is often sceptical about the degree to which the British Empire was serious about democracy. The special number of the journal is expected to appear in 2020.

IMAGE CREDIT: HERBERT BAKER, ARCHITECTURAL DRAWING OF THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE BUILDING (INK AND OIL PAINT ON CLOTH, 1921), PART OF EDWIN LUTYENS’ AND HERBERT BAKER’S DESIGNS FOR IMPERIAL DELHI (NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, BENGALARU).

May 04

GANDHI AND THE CORRESPONDENCE THEORY OF TRUTH

By: Nick Owen Categories: News: India Comments Disabled

A chapter based on a paper I gave at a conference on the Philosophical Letter will be appearing in a book later this year. It’s called ‘Gandhi and the Correspondence Theory of Truth’, and the book is called Dear Friend, You Must Change Your Life: The Letters of Great Thinkers. It’s edited by Ada Bronowski, and published by Bloomsbury.

IMAGE CREDIT: GANDHI COMPOSING A LETTER ON HIS WAY FROM INDIA TO THE SECOND ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE IN LONDON (PRESS PHOTOGRAPH, 1931).

Apr 17

CHAPTER ON COMMUNIST ANTI-IMPERIALISM

By: Nick Owen Categories: News: Anti-imperialism Comments Disabled

I have a chapter in a forthcoming book on imperialism, decolonization and the British working classes. The book is called Labour, Empire and Decolonization: British Imperial and Commonwealth Experiences and it’s edited by Neville Kirk and Yann Béliard, conventor of the ‘Labour and Empire’ group of the European Labour History Network. My chapter is called ‘Alliances from above and below: the failures and successes of Communist anti-imperialism in India, 1920-34’.

IMAGE CREDIT: PHOTOGRAPH OF THE MEERUT PRISONERS FROM B.F. BRADLEY, TRADE UNIONISM IN INDIA (LONDON, ?1932).

Nov 07

WHAT THE WOMEN WROTE

By: Nick Owen Categories: News: the personal is political Comments Disabled

WHAT THE WOMEN WROTE

News: the personal is political

WHAT THE WOMEN WROTE

In another post, I wrote about the New Liberal men’s views of women’s suffrage and the other questions that women had raised, going ‘beyond the vote’, concerning issues such as marriage, maternity and women’s careers. It was called ‘What the men wrote and what they did not’. Both posts are part of my research project The Personal and the Political .

Part of the project is the recovery of what certain women wrote on the same questions. In particular, I focus on the writings of women close to the New Liberal men. One or two figures are already known, but most are not. To give some examples: Margaret Nevinson (wife of Henry Nevinson) wrote short stories for the suffrage press as well as a play. Henry Nevinson’s second wife, Evelyn Sharp edited the W.S.P.U. newspaper Votes for Women and was also a writer of short stories for children and adults. Brailsford’s wife, Jane Malloch, wrote letters to the press and a short story for Ford Madox Ford’s English Review. Graham Wallas’s wife Ada Wallas wrote short stories for magazines including The Yellow Book, as well as women’s history and an autobiography. Lucy Masterman wrote poetry. Florence Hobson wrote and published short stories. As well as the economic and social history she wrote with her husband John, Barbara Hammond wrote an unpublished novel.

The women’s writing can be contrasted with that of the men. The most obvious point is that the men wrote articles in The Nation and the women did not. The women were not part of what Hobhouse termed the ‘apostolic succession’ of Liberal men whose task it was to reinterpret liberalism in each generation.