A very British apocalypse: John Wyndham then and now School of English Colloquium

10am to 11am Professor Allan Hepburn ‘John Wyndham's Trouble with Women'
This paper will draw on 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.

11.15am to 12.15pm Professor Marina Mackay ‘John Wyndham among the Telepathists: Media Culture at Mid-Century'
This paper considers Wyndham's fiction within the 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'.

12.15pm to 1.15pm 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.

2.30pm to 3.30pm Professor Mark Bould ‘In the Cracks of the Wyndham Machine'
John Wyndham's 1950s novels are often understood in relation, whether consciously 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.

3.30pm to 4.30pm 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.

4.45pm to 5.30pm Roundtable discussion

5.30pm Wine reception in the Garden Room, School of English