Kasia Boddy is University Lecturer in American Literature in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She has published extensively on short fiction, including The American Short Story since 1950 (2010), and also has longstanding interests in sport and gardening among other forms of everyday culture. One result of these interests, her 2013 work Geranium, was hailed in the Los Angeles Review of Books for uncovering "the geranium’s symbolic significance in twentieth century literature," and showing how, in "subtle ways, their presence continues to inform our notions of gender, class, and race. (In Chicago’s summer of 1964, a geranium in a white person’s windowsill signified that they opposed racism.)" 

 

George McKay is Professor of Media Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Among his many influential works are Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties (1996) and Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (2005). Clive Bloom praised McKay's Radical Gardening (2011) as a work that "fills a gap between the overt political action of immediate protest and the slow cultural protest, both ecological and environmental, that might bring about the deep structural change in society."

 

Caryl Phillips is Professor of English at Yale University. His novels have been taught, translated, and read all around the world, and he has been awarded a wide range of grants, fellowships and honorary degrees. The final section of his Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007) pieces together the different sides of Oluwale's life in Leeds. His latest novel, The Lost Child (2014), interweaves a postwar tale of race and family separation with a fictional response to Wuthering Heights that imagines Heathcliff's early life.  

 

Corinne Silva is a visual artist, and an Research Fellow at the University of the Arts, London. Her moving image installation Wandering Abroad (2009) traces "David Oluwale's final journey down the river" through Leeds while also narrating the city's post-industrial transformations, which have "left little space for new communities to co-exist with the world of commerce." Her subsequent photographic projects, Gardening the Suburbs (2013) and Garden State (2015), explores the relationship between injustice, resistance and the "micro-landscapes" of such private gardens.  

 

Gary Younge is feature writer and editor-at-large for the Guardian. Over 12 years working in the US he provided extensive coverage of the Obama administration and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. His books include The Speech: The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South.   

 

Leeds University, Friday 26 February 2016