A Very British Apocalypse: John Wyndham Then and Now School of English Colloquium

10.00-11.00 Professor Allan Hepburn ‘John Wyndham's Trouble with Women' This paper will draw upon the Kinsey report on female sexuality (1954), developments
in contraception, and other signs of the spreading sexual revolution in the 1950s to elucidate Wyndham's views of women's
rights and the regulation of women's bodies in The Trouble with Lichens, ‘Survival', and The Chrysalids.

11.15 – 12.15 Professor Marina Mackay ‘John Wyndham among the Telepathists: Media Culture at Mid-Century' . This paper considers Wyndham's fiction within these
1950s contexts of the telepathy craze and the new age of mass media, two tightly connected versions of what characters in
The Chrysalids call ‘thinking-together'.

12.15 – 1.15 Dr Leo Mellor ‘John Wyndham and the Militarised Imagination' This paper will consider some of the major works of John Wyndham – The Day
of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Midwitch Cuckoos (1957) – as part of a wider reading of what can plausibly
be called the militarised imagination in British culture.

2.30 – 3.30 Professor Mark Bould ‘In the Cracks of the Wyndham Machine' John Wyndham's 1950s novels are often understood in relation (whether conscious or
not) to the end of Empire, the Cold War, atomic bombs and changing gender roles. This paper, however, reconsiders them as
fictions of the Great Acceleration.

3.30 – 4.30 Professor Nick Hubble ‘The Post-Binary-Gender Future Began in the 1950s (‘but everybody [was] too busy watching the bleeding adverts to notice'): A
Brief History of Significant Female-Emancipationism' Wyndham's work consistently rejects sexual essentialism and points the
way forward to post-binary texts.

4.45 – 5.30 Roundtable discussion

5.30 – End Wine reception in the Garden Room, School of English