T. Wayne Beasley Memorial History Scholarship Banquet
Third Annual Beasley Scholarship Banquet & Lecture
March 30, 2013 7:00 pm
Curris Center Ballroom
James Epstein,
“Scandals of British Colonial Rule”
James Epstein is a historian of modern Britain, specializing in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century political culture. He is Distinguished Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is author of The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement (Croom Helm Ltd, 1982), which re-evaluates the national character of the Chartist movement and its main leader. He is co-editor, with Dorothy Thompson, of The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830-1860 (Macmillan, 1982), which is a collection of essays emphasizing the cultural and lived experience of those involved in what was the largest and most sustained movement for democratic rights in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Professor Epstein has also authored Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 (Oxford University Press, 1994), which explores the ways in which plebeian radicals gave expression to their political beliefs. Radical Expression won the British Council Prize in the Humanities for the best book in British studies, 1800 to the present, published in either 1993 or 1994. Professor Epstein’s article Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” published in Past and Present (1989), was awarded the Walter D. Love Prize by the North American Conference on British studies. More recently, Professor Epstein is author of In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford University Press, 2003). In Practice offers a series of responses to the changing terrain of historical studies, sustaining an argument about the terms governing the production of political meaning, and about how these terms can be negotiated without collapsing the “logic of practice” into the logic of language itself. His new book, Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012), opens in 1806 with the trial of General Thomas Picton, Britain's first governor of Trinidad, for the torture of a free woman of color named Louisa Calderon. The book uses the trial to open up a range of issues explored in subsequent chapters, including colonial violence and norms of justice, the status of the British subject, imperial careering, visions of colonial development, slave conspiracy, and the colonial archive. Professor Epstein has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Huntington Library.
ll proceeds from the banquet will benefit the T. Wayne Beasley Memorial History Scholarship. Once endowed, the Beasley Scholarship will be given to the outstanding rising senior history major. Dr. Beasley taught British and European history in the Murray State Department of History from 1965 to 2008. One hallmark Beasley was known for was a strong commitment to undergraduate students. His colleagues created the scholarship after his death in 2008 to honor the memory of a dedicated teacher and colleague. The fund has grown quickly due to support from Wayne’s daughters and former students.
The cost of the banquet is $40 per person; reservations are required by March 25.
For reservations or to make a contribution to the scholarship, please contact the MSU Department of History at 270-809-2234 or msu.deptofhistory@murraystate.edu.