Professor Peter Boxall discusses Paradise and Utopia in a secular context. Images of perfect worlds must be more than mere wish-fulfillment, they must be put into relation with the world as it is in order to generate hope.
Speaker: Peter Boxall, Goldsmiths’ Professor of English at the University of Oxford
Lost edens, hoped for utopias. The idea that a better place exists haunts the human imagination.
Accompanying the ‘On Paradise’ exhibition at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, this podcast series features members of the University of Oxford Humanities community discussing conceptualizations of paradise and utopia in different historical and cultural contexts. The exhibition, featuring the work of Oxford-based artist, Saad Qureshi, was curated by Paul Basu, Professor of Anthropology and Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, who also interviewed the podcast participants.
In this episode, Peter Boxall, Goldsmiths’ Professor of English at the University of Oxford, discusses Paradise and Utopia in a secular, political context. He argues that images of perfect worlds must be more than mere wish-fulfillment, they must be put into relation with the world as it is in order to generate what he calls the ‘drama of hope’.
