Monday 26 September 2011 at 6.00 pm
"Robert Owen and the Owenites: the consumer and consumption in the new moral world."
In association with the Institute of Welsh Affairs.
About the lecture
The political economy of Robert Owen, and those whom he influenced, has been considered from many angles; most notably in relation to the communitarian experiments with which their writings are associated. This paper comes at their work from a different angle, focusing on what they had to say about consumption and the consumer and seeking to relate this to some issues and debates surrounding contemporary consumer society.
About the speaker - Professor Noel Thompson
Professor Thompson graduated from St. Andrews University with a first class joint honours degree in Economics and Modern History in 1974, pursued a Masters degree in Economic and Political Thought at the Queen’s University Belfast, 1975, before undertaking research leading to the award of a doctorate by the Universityof Cambridge, 1981. He spent a short time in the Economic Intelligence Department of the Bank of England, 1978-79 before being appointed as a lecturer in Economic History at Swansea University in 1979. He was awarded a personal chair in 1999, was Head of the Department of History from 2000 to 2005. He became Head of the School of Humanities in 2005and was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor with responsibility for the academic development of the Schools and Departments to remain on the Singleton Park campus in 2008 (see the University's plans for campus expansion).
Professor Noel Thompson’s research is focused primarily on the history of British anti-capitalist and socialist political economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His most recent publications include work on Harold Wilson, the centrist political economy of the Labour party, stakeholderism and the Third Way and socialist views of the working-class consumer in late nineteenth century Britain and the United States. He has just completed a second edition of Political economy and the Labour Party, Routledge, 2006, but the greater part of his present research effort is now focused on the idea of consumption and the place of material culture in British nineteenth and twentieth century socialist political economies.
Professor Thompson is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is on the editorial board of Labor History.
Location
Conference Room 24, Tŷ Hywel, National Assembly for Wales, Cardiff Bay.
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