The 2017 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture will be given by Professor Marina Warner on Wednesday 15th March, titled as follows:

‘What place is this, what land, what quarter of the globe?’: The compass of story in dislocated times.

Against the background of the current refugee crisis, Professor Warner will look at migrating stories, from myths of Troy to Eliot’s uses of Christian legend, tracing the compass bearings they offer.

Marina Warner is a celebrated and prolific cultural historian whose academic works, from Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) to Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (2014), are both internationally acclaimed and highly influential.

Professor Warner is currently Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, before which she held various academic posts including positions at Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton and Stanford. She has been awarded eleven Honorary Doctorates (including one from the the University of Kent in 2005). She was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2005, was made a CBE for services to literature in 2008 and was a Booker Prize Judge in 2015. She is the author of five novels and her most recent collection of short stories Fly Away Home was published in 2015.

Jointly sponsored by Eliot College and the School of English, the lecture will take place in Grimond Lecture Theatre 1 at 6.30pm on Wednesday 15 March 2017. A drinks reception will follow in the Grimond Foyer.