Animal rights, disability and youth culture will all be put under the microscope as the Humanities in Public festival will return for a second year in Manchester.

Organised by the Manchester Metropolitan University, the programme features talks, debates, fairs, tours and other events and activities, all of which are open to the public.

The first event will be an inaugural professorial lecture by Prof Andrew Biswell, of the Department of English.

Prof Biswell, who is the Director of the International Anthony Burgess Centre, will be lecturing on “WH Auden Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets”.

Following the massive popularity of last year’s Gothic Manchester strand, the mini-festival will return once more, just before Halloween.

Included in this festival of the macabre and fantastical are readings from authors working on the gothic dimensions of austerity politics, tours of the John Rylands Library and of the gothic splendours of the city and author Rosie Garland reading from both of her novels and discussing her alternative life as Goth icon Rosie Lugosi.

In addition to Gothic Manchester, the other strands of the festival will be Animal Worlds, Contesting Youth, Human Trouble: Dis/ability, Multi-lingual Life and Future Histories.

Animal Worlds will present a range of perspectives on animal rights, concerning our uses and abuses of billions of animals each year, for food, scientific research, warfare, labour, and sport.

There will also be a number of high profile speakers for the Contesting Youth strand of the festival, which will take place in November, including Camilla Batmanghelidjh, Dave Haslam and Sylvia Lancaster.

Next year’s events will include a performance by the comedian Laurence Clark, a multi-lingual film festival and exhibitions on local history.

Festival project manager Helen Malarky said:

This year’s festival is going further than ever before in showing how humanities and social sciences subjects connect with wider society. All of our themes this year challenge or contest in different ways – from looking at the issue of meat-eating and animal rights, to popular conceptions of young people and disability, to ideas about what it means to make history – these are hugely significant discussions that powerfully influence and inform people’s day to day lives.

Details HERE

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