Engels in Eastbourne – International conference to be held to commemorate the 175th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto at the University of Brighton, Eastbourne campus, 1-3 June 2023 [originally postponed from June 2020 due to Covid-19]

Keynote speakers:

Tariq Ali, writer and filmmaker

Terrell Carver, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol

Helena Sheehan, Professor Emeritus at Dublin City University

Engels in Eastbourne will see papers delivered from a range of academics and activists relating to Engels’s life, work and intellectual and political legacy.  Themes will include

– Engels’s relationship to Marx and Marxism

– Engels’s anti-colonialism and internationalism

– Engels’s understanding of the origins of women’s oppression

– Engels’s analysis of natural science and the natural world

– Engels’s understanding of religion

– Engels’s analysis of capitalism and working class and peasant struggles

– Engels’s concept of ‘social murder’

– Engels’s role in revolutionary movements and relationship to other revolutionaries

– Representations and commemorations of Engels

Our keynote speakers:

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics, and seven novels (translated into over a dozen languages) as well as scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of New Left Review.

Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol. He has degrees from Columbia University and the University of Oxford, and has held visiting appointments in the USA, Australia, Japan and China. He has published widely on Marx, Engels and Marxism, including Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought (re-issued for a 30th anniversary edition) and Engels Before Marx (2020), a ‘Palgrave Pivot’.

Helena Sheehan is Emeritus Professor at Dublin City University, and has academic interests in philosophy, the history of Marxism and media studies. She is the author of works including Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History and Navigating the Zeitgeist: A Story of the Cold War, the New Left, Irish Republicanism, and International Communism

For more information on the conference please contact Cathy Bergin c.j.bergin@brighton.ac.uk or Christian Høgsbjerg c.hogsbjerg@brighton.ac.uk

The conference is supported by the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton