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Robert Owen was a Welsh textile manufacturer, philanthropist and social reformer, and a founder of utopian socialism and the co-operative movement. He strove to improve factory working conditions, promoted experimental socialistic communities, and sought a more collective approach to child-rearing, including government control of education. He gained wealth in the early 1800s from a textile mill at New Lanark, Scotland. Having trained as a draper in Stamford, Lincolnshire he worked in London before relocating aged 18 to Manchester and textile manufacturing. In 1824, he moved to America and put most of his fortune in an experimental socialistic community at New Harmony, Indiana, as a preliminary for his Utopian society. It lasted about two years. Other Owenite communities also failed, and in 1828 Owen returned to London, where he continued to champion the working class, lead in developing co-operatives and the trade union movement, and support child labour legislation and free co-educational schools.
Looking Backward: 2000–1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by the American journalist and writer Edward Bellamy first published in 1888.
Ruth Levitas is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol. She is well known internationally for her research on utopia and utopian studies.
Owenism is the utopian socialist philosophy of 19th-century social reformer Robert Owen and his followers and successors, who are known as Owenites. Owenism aimed for radical reform of society and is considered a forerunner of the cooperative movement. The Owenite movement undertook several experiments in the establishment of utopian communities organized according to communitarian and cooperative principles. One of the best known of these efforts, which were largely unsuccessful, was the project at New Harmony, Indiana, which started in 1825 and was abandoned by 1829. Owenism is also closely associated with the development of the British trade union movement, and with the spread of the Mechanics' Institute movement.
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Kenneth Morrison Roemer, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, an Emeritus Fellow, UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers, and a former Piper Professor of 2011, Distinguished Scholar Professor, and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author or editor of four books on utopian literature, including The Obsolete Necessity (1976), nominated for a Pulitzer, and three books on American Indian literatures, including the co-edited Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005). His collection of personal essays about Japan, Michibata de Dietta Nippon (2002) (A Sidewalker’s Japan), was a finalist for the Koizumi Yakumo Cultural Prize. He is the project director of a digital archive of tables of contents of American literature anthologies Covers, Titles, and Tables: The Formations of American Literary Canons.
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John Strachan is a literary critic, historian and poet, Professor of English and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Bath Spa University, England. Strachan is the current Director of GuildHE Research and Co-Chair of the Charles Lamb Society. He is Associate Editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. Strachan has previously held professorships at Northumbria University and the University of Sunderland. Educated at the University of Southampton (BA) and Wolfson College, Oxford. Strachan specialises in Romanticism, especially late Georgian comic writing (he is the editor of British Satire 1785-1840 and Parodies of the Romantic Age, and the relationship between advertising and literature. He has published two volumes of poetry and, with Richard Terry, is author of a successful text book,Poetry, which was published in 2000 by Edinburgh University Press. Strachan has also published numerous articles in the fields of history, sport studies, poetry, and Irish culture. In 2013 he collaborated with numerous artists and poets to create Their Colours and their Forms: Artists' Responses to Wordsworth, which included some of his own poetry. He lives in Bath, Somerset. As an author, he is widely held in libraries worldwide.
Frank Trentmann is a professor of history in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a specialist in the history of consumption.
Utopian studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that researches utopianism in all its forms, including utopian politics, utopian literature and art, utopian theory, and intentional communities. The term utopia was created by Sir Thomas More in a book with the same name in 1516. Utopian studies can be subdivided into three major parts: study of utopian works, communitarianism and utopian social theory.
Lyman Tower Sargent is an American academic and professor emeritus of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Sargent's main academic interests are utopian studies, political theory, American studies and bibliography. He is one of the world's foremost scholars of utopian studies, founding editor of Utopian Studies, serving in that post for the journal's first fifteen years, and recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Society for Utopian Studies. Sargent was educated as an undergraduate at Macalester College and a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.
The Society for Utopian Studies is a North American interdisciplinary association devoted to the study of utopianism in all its forms, with a particular emphasis on literary and experimental utopias.
The Utopian Studies Society is a European interdisciplinary association devoted to the study of utopianism in all its forms. The Society was established by a group of British scholars following an international conference on the subject at New Lanark, the site of a famous experiment in industrial organisation by the early socialist Robert Owen. The Society was re-launched in 1999, following the "Millennium of Utopias" conference at the University of East Anglia. Prominent utopian studies scholars associated with the European Society include Gregory Claeys, Lyman Tower Sargent, Ruth Levitas, Tom Moylan, Raffaella Baccolini, Artur Blaim, Vincent Geoghegan, Lucy Sargisson and Fatima Vieira.
References
- ↑ biographical note from Royal Holloway History Department
- ↑ Claeys, Gregory (20 January 2022), After Consumerism: Utopianism for a Dying Planet , retrieved 21 November 2023
- ↑ "Palgrave Studies in Utopianism". SpringerLink. Retrieved 21 November 2023.
- ↑ Finn, Margot C. (September 1990). "Review of Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815 – 1860 by Gregory Claeys". The Journal of Modern History. 62 (3): 588–590. doi:10.1086/600555. JSTOR 1881188.
- ↑ Weaver, Stewart (June 1992). "Review of Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism by Gregory Claeys". The Journal of Modern History. 64 (2): 389–391. doi:10.1086/244492. JSTOR 2124644.
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