Utopian Studies Society

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The Utopian Studies Society (founded 1988) 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. [1] 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.

Contents

Conferences

The Society has organized a series of conferences:

The 2023 conference is scheduled to be held at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj/Kolozsvár, Romania.

A number of significant publications have arisen from these conferences. [3]

Awards

At its 2019 conference the Society conferred a Distinguished Service Award on Professor Darko Suvin, its Guest of Honour and Keynote Speaker.

At its 2021 conference the Society conferred a Lifetime Achievement Award on Professor Lyman Tower Sargent.

Related Research Articles

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Gregory Claeys is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of London.

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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Thomas Patrick Moylan is an American-Irish academic, literary and cultural critic, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Language, Literature, Communication and Culture at the University of Limerick. Moylan's academic interests are in utopian studies and critical theory, science fiction studies, cultural studies, American studies, and Irish studies.

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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 in utopian studies, political theory, American studies and bibliography. He is one of the world's foremost scholars on 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 as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.

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References

  1. "Home". utopian-studies-europe.org.
  2. "Home". newlanark.org.
  3. For example: P. Gallardo and E. Russell (eds) Yesterday's Tomorrows: On Utopia and Dystopia Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2014; A. Blaim and L. Gruszewska Blaim (eds) Spectres of Utopia: Theory, Practice, Conventions Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2012.