Schools

I regularly visit secondary schools (state and private) and sixth-form colleges across the United Kingdom to give talks and to deliver collaborative workshops with teachers. My broad areas of expertise in this respect are literary dystopias; the work of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and H. G. Wells; and modernism (especially writers like Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and E. M. Forster). I’m always keen to collaborate with teachers—to find exciting ways to inspire students to learn more about literature and culture, and to help them to develop their ideas about novels, poems, plays, and essays. Here are some examples of school-aimed talks I’ve given:

- ‘Is Free Speech Free? George Orwell and the Limits of Liberty’
- ‘Dracula and Paranoia’ / ‘Dracula and Invasion’
- ‘Dystopias 101: Utopias in Disguise’
- ‘George Orwell, Cancel Culture, and “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”’
- ‘Why did George Orwell write Nineteen Eighty-Four?’
- ‘Dystopian Entanglements: Orwell and Atwood’
- ‘Where the Arts and Humanities Can Take You’
- ‘Free Speech and Censorship: The View from Animal Farm’
- ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four in Context’
- ‘Mrs Dalloway and Modernism’
- ‘Remembering, Commemorating, and Glorifying War’
- ‘Learning at University’
- ‘Empire in The War of the Worlds’
- ‘Literary Dystopias: Atwood and Orwell’
- ‘The Texts of Dystopia’
- ‘Studying the Arts and Humanities at University’

Click here to see an example of one such session I ran in May 2025 with Julie Ashmore at Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College in Darlington (during which we discussed student-formulated questions about Nineteen Eighty-Four).

I’ve also written several pieces for emagazine (see my publications) and recorded two sets of lectures for Massolit, one on Nineteen Eighty-Four and one on Animal Farm, with another forthcoming on Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’.

If you’re a teacher and would like to book me for a talk or workshop at your school, in person or remotely (e.g. via Microsoft Teams or Zoom), please do get in touch.

I recently acted as Chair of the Judging Panel for the 2024 Dymond Speech Competition at my alma mater, Sidcot School.