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New Left Histories Seminar

The New Left Seminar series revisits and revitalizes the intellectual and political contributions of the New Left through a transnational and interdisciplinary framework. It takes up both dimensions of the New Left’s legacy: the history of the New Left as an intellectual and political movement, and the methodological interventions it inspired within the discipline of history. It considers the contributions of key New Left intellectuals and the movement’s broader epistemological implications and, by adopting a transnational perspective, it seeks to illuminate historical change shaped by cross-cultural encounters, asymmetrical power relations and shared struggles in the modern world.

New Left Seminar Conveners

Events 2026

5 February 2026

"Emotional Anarchists"? The anarchic turn in the first British New Left - scope, limits, and missed opportunities
Speaker: Sophie Scott-Brown (Institute of Intellectual History, University of St Andrews)
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What are the extents and limits of the anarchic turn in the New Left? Anarchism gave the NL a language for critique and ways to rethink class politics in the age of affluence; but was their avoidance of anarchy’s challenge to unity misplaced nostalgia, or a shrewd diagnosis of anarchy's fatal flaw?

5 March 2026

‘The Silences of Christopher Hill’
Speaker: Mike Braddick (University of Oxford)
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Christopher Hill was famously taciturn and his surviving papers contain many gaps and silences. He was also reluctant to discuss method and theory directly, or at length. In this paper Mike Braddick discusses the problems this posed in writing a book about Hill’s intellectual life, with particular reference to a central puzzle - his political and methodological commitments after 1956.

9 April 2026

‘A. ‎L. Morton, British Communism, and the New Left’
James Crossley (University of Cambridge)

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This seminar series is planned for the autumn which will be a partnership with the Association for the Study of Modern Italy.

The seminars are facilitated by the Raphael Samuel History Centre, a partnership between Queen Mary University of London and Birkbeck, University of London