Prof. Mary Davis will talk about her new book on Dona Torr: Historical Materialism and the Communist Historians.
The talk will be on 10 June at 5.30pm in the Gatsby Room (Chancellor’s Centre), Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. All welcome.
Unknown to many, Dona Torr was a quietly influential twentieth-century intellectual. She was a translator and editor (including of works by Marx and Engels), a biographer of Tom Mann, and an important figure in the critical study of millenarianism in English radical history. She was also a mentor to some of the most important historians, including E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill.
Torr's archive has only recently come to light and, with support from CenSAMM, has now been catalogued by the Marx Memorial Library (MML) in London. Prof. Davis is the first person to study the MML Torr archive and has shown that Torr's influence ran much deeper than previously thought. Davis's talk will look at Torr's central role in controversies and debates over the transformation from feudalism to capitalism, as well as 'history from below', which shaped much of twentieth-century scholarship.
