{"id":354,"date":"2016-11-21T15:21:12","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T15:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bravenewclassics.info\/?p=354"},"modified":"2016-11-28T17:41:48","modified_gmt":"2016-11-28T17:41:48","slug":"conversations-on-communism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bravenewclassics.info\/index.php\/2016\/11\/21\/conversations-on-communism\/","title":{"rendered":"Conversations on Communism"},"content":{"rendered":"

This winter I have teamed up with Dr. Elinor Taylor who teaches English Literature at the University of Westminster to create a podcast series exploring British communism. Elinor has submitted a PhD thesis and written a book on the Popular Front Novel in Britain (forthcoming), so she knows a lot more about the field than I do — and has kindly agreed to be an advisor on the BNC project. The first idea and main focus of\u00a0the series is to curate conversations between experts of various fields who might not otherwise meet, but who nevertheless share a common research interest within the broad realm of communism. The first of these unlikely conversations will be recorded in February 2017 and will feature Richard Seaford, Professor of Classics, and cultural historian, Dr. Ben Harker (Manchester). Their common interest happens to be one of the key “players” of my\u00a0project, Prof. George D. Thomson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"static1-squarespace\"<\/a>We’re looking forward to sharing this\u00a0conversation with you. In fact, we were so anxious\u00a0to get things going\u00a0that we’ve already recorded\u00a0two podcasts. The first,\u00a0if you’re on Twitter, <\/a>you may have already seen. I’ve been experimenting, you see, with different platforms for hosting the podcast and ended up posting our first conversation in November on YouTube and Soundcloud. It is an interview with Robert Lister (KCL) about Frank Walbank’s Marxist (?) Polybius. We sat with coffee on Russian textbooks for cushions outside the British Library. We were surrounded by\u00a0this\u00a0ring of stones, which I now know are not simply\u00a0weird stones — as I call them in the podcast — but Anthony Gormley’s Planets (2002), although\u00a0perhaps the\u00a0two descriptions are not mutually exclusive. Robert is writing his PhD on the Ancient Historian Frank Walbank, who dedicated his working life to\u00a0a three-volume commentary of Polybius. You can listen to, and in fact read, that podcast here:<\/p>\n

Frank Walbank: Polybius and Communism<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n