John Higgins on William Blake

On Thursday 22 October the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA’s) Great Texts / Big Questions lecturer is John Higgins, a highly respected Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town (UCT), who will discuss “A lyric by William Blake – ‘Never seek to tell thy love, love that never told can be’.” 

Higgins will show how readings of a single poem can also serve to exemplify some of the main intellectual and analytic currents of the past forty years, including radical social movements of the ‘60s; feminism and psychoanalysis in the ‘70s; and the recent problematization of racism and xenophobia.

Professor Higgins is the Andrew Mellon Research Professor in the Archives and Public Culture project at UCT. The politics of higher education, contemporary literary and cultural theory are his main research interests. One of the first humanists to be awarded an A-rating by the National Research Foundation, he received the Cape Tercentenary Award of Excellence for his services to literature and culture in South Africa in 2000 and in October this year became a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
The image used above is Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi: Newton by Istvan and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives license.