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’s a selection of school-aimed talks, a lot of them dealing with Orwell, I’ve given in and beyond the Birmingham area:

- ‘Pleasure or Pain? How to Run a Dystopia’, College of Arts and Law Masterclass series, University of Birmingham (March 2026)
- ‘George Orwell’s Animal Farm: A Didactic Story?’, Sir Thomas Rich’s School, Gloucester (March 2026)
- ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun: Some Dystopian Antecedents’, The King’s School, Gloucester (March 2026)
- ‘George Orwell’s & Margaret Atwood’s Textual Realities’, Repton School, Derbyshire (January 2026)
- in conversation with Madeleine Champagnie, Dorian Lynskey, and Lisa Mullen, ‘1984 in 2024: What would Orwell say?’, Thames Christian School, London (February 2024)
- ‘Is Free Speech Free? George Orwell and the Limits of Liberty’, Gropius Lecture, Impington Village College, Cambridge (May 2023)

I’ve also given talks in schools on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, invasion narratives, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, and First World War literary and visual culture. 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 three sets of Orwell-focused lectures for Massolit: on Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, and ‘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 a judge for the Fendick Speaking Competition at The King’s School, Gloucester (March 2026), and for the 2024 Dymond Speech Competition at my alma mater, Sidcot School.