On the Value of the Humanities and Our Victorian Inheritances: Working Against and Within the Narrative of Economic Crisis Seminar

This seminar will be given by Dr Zoe Hope Bulaitis from the University of Birmingham.

Even in a global pandemic, the economic value of a university degree still makes front-page news. Dr Zoe Hope Bulaitis' recent book Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture, and Economics, 2020) intervenes in this current political debate by expanding the question of 'value-for-money' and the econometric assessment of education across a kaleidoscopic range of values. Instead of taking the traditional defensive stance, Bulaitis uses humanities-oriented tactics of close reading, theoretical reflection, historical nuance, and an ability to clearly articulate in order to demonstrate the levels of entanglement between university education, cultural institutions, policymaking agendas, and artistic work.

Given that this talk is for Southampton's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research, Bulaitis will specifically reflect on how tracing the shift from liberal to neoliberal education from the nineteenth century to the present day opens up rich and previously underdeveloped narratives of value in higher education in England. 

Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance is an open-access publication and can be downloaded in full, free of charge, here.

 

This seminar will take place via Microsoft Teams. Please ensure you book a place to receive the meeting link. The deadline for bookings is 1pm on the day of the seminar (02/12/20).