A POPULAR annual lecture series run by Durham University will travel through the past, present and future of literature this summer.

The Late Summer Lecture Series, organised by the University’s Department of English Studies, has run each summer since 2010 – with free, public talks by early-career scholars from Durham and further afield.

The 2021 series ranges from eighteenth-century epic to contemporary dystopia, and from the literature of the Southern USA to the poetry of Cumbria, and features a host of literary characters and themes, from dinosaurs and doctors to vampires and urban animals.

There will be speakers from the universities of York, Cambridge, Royal Holloway, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Exeter, UCL, and Tokyo, plus several from Durham.

The first talk took place on Wednesday, August 18, when Amy Ainsworth of the University of Cambridge and Madeline Potter of the University of York presented two talks themed around ‘Otherworldly Realms’.

This Wednesday’s event will see Ahmed Honeini, of Royal Holloway, University of London, talk about the work of William Faulkner, an author obsessed with the interconnection between past, present and future in the American South.

On Wednesday, September 1, Katie Tobin, a PhD student at Durham University, will talk about reproductive rights in contemporary feminist dystopian literature.

There will then be a talk each Wednesday until October 6.

Each talk will begin at 5.30pm and take place via Zoom.

All talks are free and open to all.

For more information, visit durham.ac.uk/english.studies/events/ or follow the series on Twitter via @LateSummer2021.

Many talks from previous years are available to listen to online, at readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/podcasts/literature-lectures-podcasts.

Durham University’s Department of English Studies is one of the best in the UK and among the top 50 in the world, including around 600 undergraduate students, 60 taught postgraduate students, 60 PhD researchers, 60 academic staff and ten post-doctoral researchers.

Durham is one of the few university English departments to teach and research in literature produced in the UK from the early medieval period to the present day and also offers Creative Writing at postgraduate and PhD level.

For more information, please visit durham.ac.uk/englishstudies.