If we want to decolonise the university, we first need to decolonise our imaginations. Many Black and indigenous artists are wrestling with the legacies of colonialism, enslavement and environmental destruction. How do we reconstruct histories that have been lost or erased? And what futures can we imagine in a time of imminent catastrophe?

Hazel V. Carby is professor emeritus of African American studies at Yale University. Her most recent book, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands was awarded the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding in 2020.

The word ‘culture’ now drags the term ‘wars’ in its wake, but this is too narrow an approach to a concept with a much more capacious history. This lecture will examine various aspects of that history – culture and power, culture and ethics, culture and critique, culture and ideology – in an attempt to broaden the argument and understand where we are now.

Terry Eagleton has written around fifty books, including, most famously, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), and more than eighty pieces for the LRB. He taught for many years at Oxford, becoming the Warton Professor of English Literature in 1992, and then at Manchester and Lancaster.

A powerful Western narrative holds the Shoah to be the incomparable crime of the modern era. But we find our moral and political consciousness profoundly altered when Israel, a country founded as a haven for the victims of genocidal racism, is itself charged with genocide. What is the fate of universal values after Israel’s collapse into violent nationalism?

Pankaj Mishra’s books include From the Ruins of Empire, Age of Anger and, most recently, the novel Run and Hide. He writes a column for Bloomberg View and contributes regularly to the Guardian, New Yorker and London Review of Books.

Pankaj Mishra’s lecture has now sold out; you can add your name to the waiting list by tapping ‘Get tickets’ then ‘Join Waitlist’ here. Tickets for the other two lectures in the series remain available.