Fred Inglis, BA, MA, MPhil, PhD, DSc
Role
Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies
Summary of my intellectual interests
Throughout the course of my intellectual career I have been preoccupied by the discovery and judgement of those deep evaluations to which we each give our allegiance and which guide the conduct of our lives. This is to speak very abstractly. What I mean is that, across a wide range of social, cultural and political action, I am concerned to identify those practices and objects which we cherish as the source of value and meaning in the passage from birth to death. By this I do not mean that these values are unchanging: you give your life to a set of values as being those most likely to bring out the best in you and to shape a life of which you can be proud; they will not be the same values for past or future generations.
This quest began with the study of literature, which in the discipline of literary criticism as developed in Britain during the twentieth century was at pains to determine the grounds and justification of value judgements. My purpose quickly became to pursue those grounds into the practices of everyday life. As is apparent from two of my books from many years ago, The Name of the Game and The Promise of Happiness, I tried in those respective cases (sport, and fiction written particularly for children) to select and analyse aspects of the cultural life in question in such a way as to discover why men and women gave their energies to these activities, whether playing sport or telling tales to children, and how their efforts conduced to shaping a tradition within which people might live good lives.
During this venture, as was inevitable, I followed the lead of much more powerful thinkers than myself, who became, as one´s favourite authors do, at once masters and friends. Hence the intellectual biographies of Raymond Williams (1995) and Clifford Geertz (2000). Biography, moreover, seems to me the readiest and most domestic way by which we all explain the course of history to ourselves. The biography of a significant human being illuminates the history which surrounds it. The book in which I most sought to put this notion into action was my history of the cold war, The Cruel Peace (1992). This represented an effort not only to narrate the many sagas worldwide of the Cold War itself, but also to evaluate its cultural products (films, novels, etc.) in relation to a series of select biographies of compelling figures in the course of its trajectory. My subsequent history of political journalism in the twentieth century, People´s Witness (2002), represented a kind of sequel to The Cruel Peace, extending over the whole of the twentieth century, and searching out in the history of political journalism on each side of the Atlantic (and across towards Eastern Europe) those lives and works which, in the commonplace writing of journalism, may be taken to represent its canonical tradition: that is to say, these lives and these writings constituted the best and most enduring ways of discharging the duties of a political journalist to one´s fellow citizens and to history.
For what it is worth, my favourite among my own books is The Delicious History of the Holiday (2000), a loving rendering of what I take to be a magnificent and, after about 1850, egalitarian and democratic movement of popular culture, in which the people at large excuse themselves from the abominable demands of capitalism in order to create a little space in which to renew the best, the most fulfilling and happiest relations of their lives: with those they love best, in the places they love best, in new and thrilling geographies also, and in the modest luxury life mostly denies them.
Other Experience
2004-6 Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow
2002-3 Fellow in Residence Humanities Institute University of Connecticut
2002 Appointed Emeritus Professor University of Sheffield
1997 Appointed to specially created Personal Chair in Cultural Studies, University of Sheffield
1992 Personal Chair in Cultural Studies, University of Warwick
1989 Reader in Cultural Studies, University of Warwick
1977 Reader in Education
1972-77 Lecturer in Education, Division of Advanced Studies, University of Bristol
1969-72 Lecturer in English and Education, University of Sheffield
1966-69 Senior Lecturer in English, Southampton College of Education
1964-66 Research Fellow in Education, University of Southampton
1963-64 ESU Fellow and English teacher, Denver, Colorado, City High Schools
1960-63 Assistant English teacher, Birmingham and Bedford Secondary Schools
Part-time Posts (from 1961 to present):
WEA, University Extra-Mural Departments, and TUC Lecturer, Universities of Cambridge, Southampton, Sheffield, Bristol and Warwick
VISITING PROFESSORSHIPS, FELLOWSHIPS AND DISTINCTIONS
British Council Fellow, University of Leyden, May 1975.
Attlee Fellow, Sevenoaks School, Kent, 1980-81.
Fellow-in-Residence, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, February-June 1984.
Visiting Fellow, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, summer 1987 (British Academy Research Grant).
Elected member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, academic year 1988/89.
Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, July-September 1990.
Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, July-September 1992.
Visiting Fellowship, School of Social and Political Studies, European University Institute, Fiesole, February-May 1994 (British Academy Research Grant).
Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, July-September 1995.
Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, July-September 1998.
Fellow-in-Residence, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, academic year 1998/99.
Fellow-in-Residence, Humanities Institute, University of Connecticut, academic year 2002/03.
Appointed Leverhulme Foundation Emeritus Fellow 2004-6 (funding in order to write the biography of RG Collingwood).
Visiting Professorships (International)
Visiting Professor of English Literature, University of Denver, June-October 1973.
Visiting Lecturer, University of Tasmania, July-September 1978.
Degree Consultant to Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 1992.
Visiting Professor, Nanyang Technological University, July-September 1994.
CIVIC ACTIVITIES
I have four times stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party, in the general elections of 1970, 1974 (twice) and 1987. I have been an active member of the Party's Fabian Society for thirty years, have held various other public and elected offices, and have written an advisory document for the Cabinet on Institutes for Advanced Study in Europe and America.
Indicative publications
Inglis, F. (2004) Culture: key concepts in the social sciences, Cambridge and Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 198 pp.
Inglis, F. (2002) People's Witness: the journalist in modern politics, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 416pp.
Inglis, F. (2000) The Delicious History of the Holiday, London and New York: Routledge, 206pp.
Inglis, F. (2000) Clifford Geertz: culture, custom and ethics, Cambridge and Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 206pp.
Inglis, F. (1995) Raymond Williams: the life, London and New York: Routledge, xx + 332pp.
Inglis, F. (1993) Cultural Studies, Oxford and Cambridge MA: Basil Blackwell, 270pp.
Inglis, F. (1991) The Cruel Peace: everyday life and the Cold War, New York: Basic Books, xx + 402pp, London: Aurum Books.
Inglis, F. (1990) Media Theory, Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 214pp. (Translated into Japanese and Portuguese 1993; into Croatian 1997; into Finnish 1998).
Inglis, F. (1982) Radical Earnestness: English social theory 1880-1980, Oxford and Cambridge MA: Martin Robertson with Basil Blackwell, 253pp.
View a full list of Fred Inglis’s publications
Recent Funded Projects
I am presently Leverhulme Fellow in order to write another biography, this time of the great English philosopher R G Collingwood, by way of restating the conditions of Englishness, and of a special tradition in that definition, namely its public intellectuals. This study will leave me on the intersection between aesthetics, politics and ethics on which I have spent my life.
