Public lectures
Our public lecture series forms a key part of our annual events programme, showcasing the expertise and research of some of Queen Mary's leading experts
Inaugural lectures
Our inaugural lectures are an opportunity for our professors to introduce themselves and their field and to showcase their achievements in research, teaching, public engagement and impact. Lectures are free of charge and open to both the University community and the general public and we warmly invite all staff, students and members of the community to attend.
“I sure miss George W. Bush:” Deconstruction, Post-Truth and Trump | Prof Lasse Thomassen
Wednesday 26 March 2025, 6-7.30pm
Maths Lecture Theatre, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End campus
How do we respond to post-truth and populist demagogy? It is common to think of deconstruction as a postmodernist precursor to post-truth. In this talk, Professor Lasse Thomassen will argue that deconstruction is in fact a very serious way to respond to post-truth discourse. Deconstruction is nothing but the unconditional search for truth. To show this, Thomassen enlists Jacques Derrida, Stephen Colbert and Donald Trump.
Lasse Thomassen is Professor of Politics. After completing his PhD in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex, Lasse taught there for two years and then moved to the University of Limerick. He joined Queen Mary in 2007. From 2019 to 2021, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen.
![A photo of students in a lecture theatre](/politics/media/politics/header-images/Header---Lecture-theatre.jpg)
Daniel Kato Memorial Lecture
Daniel Kato was a brilliant scholar and teacher of US Politics and History whose life and work were tragically cut short by his untimely death in November 2019. The annual Daniel Kato Memorial Lecture celebrates Daniel’s life and showcases the contribution of Daniel’s work to our understanding of the state of US democracy today and in the past. Previous events have explored the significance of Daniel’s most famous work, the book Liberalizing Lynching, his work on the carceral state and historical patterns of racialized politics in the US, and his contribution to the community of researchers and students here at Queen Mary.
2025 | Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Tuesday 11 March 2025, 5-7pm
Montagu Lecture Theatre (GC601), Graduate Centre, Mile End campus
This year's Daniel Kato Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who will be joined by Gary Younge as discussant.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University. She is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by the University of North Carolina Press, a semi-finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction and a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer in History. Taylor’s book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction in 2018. In 2021, Taylor was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship.
Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in England. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine, the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media and winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism. He has written six books: Dispatches From the Diaspora, From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter; Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century; Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South.
Selected previous lectures
Professor Kimberly Hutchings, 2022
The last twenty years have seen a large increase in the amount of academic work dealing with the ethics of war and peace, as well as the amount of direct engagement of academics with states and militaries in trying to bring moral considerations into the conduct of war.
This lecture explored different ethical traditions of thinking about war and peace and their implications for understanding and judging the present in world politics. It argued that, too often, ethical theorists neglect the messy and complex interrelation of war and peace. Because of this, their arguments either lack purchase on the world or are too easily subsumed into the legitimation narratives of powerful state actors. This suggests that ethical theorists not only need to think differently about war and peace, but also to think differently about the nature of ethical judgment.
Professor Jef Huysmans, 2022
What do the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in the Ukraine, and climate change have in common? An understanding that politics, whether global, international, or planetary, are defined by struggles for survival. In each of these cases, delivering security intensely operates as the first and main objective of politics. Borders close to an unseen extend to protect human life from a global pandemic. European politics is being redefined through militarised geopolitical fears of threats to state survival. Calls for a planetary politics continue to intensify in reference to life on earth heading towards a catastrophic collapse. Security seems to truly be the baseline of contemporary political order. However tempting such a conception of politics is today, one of the defining challenges for critical engagements with security remains how to take war, environmental degradation and pandemics serious but without making security the defining point of view of social and political life.
‘Really? Is that a major challenge? Why would you want to be critical about security in these conditions that obviously call for a profound security response? And, even if you want to, how can you gain critical leverage on security in a world that seems saturated by insecurities of such international and planetary magnitude?’ The lecture will engage with these objections by revisiting developments in Critical Security Studies (CSS) since the 1990s and propose a post-critical analytic that fractures security by foregrounding a conception of life-in-motion rather than life-unto-death. In doing so, the lecture introduces an international political sociology of insecurity that seeks to challenge the grip that founding politics in death retains in contemporary politicisations of insecurity.
Professor Rainbow Murray, 2018
Why do certain men dominate politics? Is it really because they are the most talented and qualified to do the job? To answer this question we need to consider how we define and recognise merit and qualification. Part of the problem is that the definition of the job is shaped by those who do it. This reinforces and validates the status quo of privileged men from narrow, elite backgrounds. Restricting the talent pool to these men has repercussions for the overall quality of representation, and the quasi-exclusion of many social groups from the representative process has real consequences for policy outcomes and citizen satisfaction with democracy.
So we need to rethink what it means to be a good representative, and recognise the need for and benefits of diversity. We also need to consider the demands made on politicians – the financial costs of running for office, the negative impacts on family life, the constant scrutiny from (social) media – and consider how these present particular barriers to members of certain social groups. Unless we can level the playing field by making candidate selection criteria and working conditions more inclusive, we will all continue to suffer from sub-optimal representation.
Professor Kimberly Hutchings
Hear from Professor Kimberly Hutchings as she explores different ethical traditions of thinking about war and peace and their implications for understanding and judging the present in world politics.