Gordon B. Hinckley Lecture in British Studies to Feature Nadja Durbach, Professor of History

The Gordon B. Hinckley Lecture in British Studies continues this year with a talk from Nadja Durbach, co-editor of the Journal of British Studies and professor of history at the University of Utah. The lecture will take place on Thursday, January 29, at 2:00 pm in the Cleone Peterson Eccles Alumni House, OC Tanner Ballrooms A&B. The lecture will be followed by an afternoon tea reception.

Chris Jones, professor of English and chair of the lecture series, is enthusiastic about Durbach’s upcoming talk. He says, “Nadja is a brilliant historian of modern Britain. She has a keen eye for the kind of fascinating archival details that others often overlook, as well as great skill in telling powerful and persuasive stories from the minutiae of those details. Although focused on evidence from twentieth-century Britain, her talk has timely relevance and will give us plenty to think about. I can’t wait to hear her!”

A cultural and social historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, Durbach's research focuses on the history of the body and its relationship to the state, the nation, and the empire. She is currently working on a book entitled Registration Nation: Identity, Privacy, and the Recording of Persons in Modern Britain. This project explores how the British state’s attempts to register different populations opened up a range of contentious questions about race, sex, class, legal status, personhood, health, ability, freedom, citizenship, and ultimately the relationship among the individual, the family, the state, the nation, and the empire.

Durbach’s lecture, titled “The Fate of the Foundling, or, Being Undocumented in Twentieth Century Britain,” will bring audiences through an exploration of citizenship, identity, and belonging. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the foundling—an abandoned newborn baby found alive whose parentage was unknown—frequently appeared in British debates about motherhood and the family; poverty and the economy; morality, respectability, and sexuality; nation and empire; and the proper relationship between charities and the state.

Scholars of British culture, however, have tended to lose interest in the foundling once the 1926 Adoption Act provided a legal means to absorb abandoned children into new families. Yet it was in the twentieth century that the plight of the foundling was magnified and took on new importance precisely because unadopted foundlings, and older abandoned children, were often undocumented. That they had either never been registered at birth, or their records could not be traced, meant that abandoned children were not only compelled to survive outside of family units, the bedrock of British society. Without a birth certificate they also had difficulty proving their age, identity, and crucially their status as British nationals, all of which became increasingly important over the course of the twentieth century.

Durbach says, “The story of foundlings in twentieth-century Britain sheds light on the importance of having identity documents issued by the state. In the context of Britain this was about accessing the benefits of the welfare state, but birth certificates in particular also proved that one was a citizen. This story is thus part of a much larger question of what it means to be an undocumented person in the age of the modern state. I hope that my lecture sheds light on these bigger issues of identity, citizenship, belonging, and points to the role of government documents in drawing lines of inclusion and exclusion from the nation.”

 The lecture is free and open to the public. RSVPs for individual attendees and classes are requested – please contact John Boyack at john.boyack@utah.edu or 801-587-7351. 

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About the Gordon B. Hinckley Endowment for British Studies

The Gordon B. Hinckley Endowment for British Studies was named to honor Gordon B. Hinckley, former President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and a distinguished alumnus of the College of Humanities. It honors President Hinckley’s love of literature, learning, and his admiration for Great Britain’s cultural and institutional contributions to the world.

The endowment supports the prestigious annual Gordon B. Hinckley Lecture in British Studies, which is delivered by a leading scholar working in any aspect of British Studies. On alternate years it will be given by a visiting scholar from outside the University of Utah. This lecture series revives an earlier Gordon B. Hinckley Lecture, which ran from 2005 -2013. Previous lecturers include Dr. Emma Sutton (University of St Andrews), Dr. Chris Jones (University of Utah), Dr. Julia Lupton (UC Irvine), Dr. Chris Brown (Columbia University), Dr. Tim Barringer (Yale University), and Dr. Linda Colley (Princeton University).