A public lecture with Dr Federico Finchelstein (The New School, New York). Abstract Dr Finchelstein will analyze the history and memories of the Dirty War in Argentina after 1983. He will especially focus on the 'dictatorial memories' of the right and the extreme right. These memories were essentially defined by its conspiratorial takes on the recent history of violence in the country. Dr Finchelstein will stress how transnational and transcontextual histories of genocide played a key in first defining the ideology of the perpetrators during the Dirty War and then in the post-dictatorial conspiratorial reformulations of the past. Biography Professor Finchelstein is the author of five books on fascism, populism, Dirty Wars, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe. His forthcoming book is: From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press, 2017). His last book, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War (2014), focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea throughout the twentieth century, analyzing the connections between fascism and the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the military junta's practices of torture and state violence, with its networks of concentration camps and extermination. His previous book, Transatlantic Fascism (2010), studies the global connections between Italian and Argentine fascism.More than 50 academic articles and reviews by Mr. Finchelstein, on subjects including fascism, Latin American, American and European populism, genocide, and anti-Semitism, have been published in books and specialized peer-reviewed journals in a number of languages. He has been a contributor to major American, European, and Latin American newspapers and news media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico, Reuters, Mediapart (France), El Diario (NYC) Clarin (Argentina) and Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil).

Conspiracy and Democracy

Dr Federico Finchelstein - 21 February 2017 - The Dirty War in History and Memory

A public lecture with Dr James Harris (University of Leeds). Abstract Between the winter of 1936 and the autumn of 1938, approximately three quarters of a million Soviet citizens were subject to summary execution. More than a million others were sentenced to lengthy terms in labour camps. Commonly known as 'Stalin's Great Terror', it is also among the most misunderstood moments in the history of the twentieth century. The Terror gutted the ranks of factory directors and engineers after three years in which all major plan targets were met. It raged through the armed forces on the eve of the Nazi invasion. The wholesale slaughter of party and state officials was in danger of making the Soviet state ungovernable. The majority of these victims of state repression in this period were accused of participating in counter-revolutionary conspiracies. Almost without exception, there was no substance to the claims and no material evidence to support them. By the time the terror was brought to a close, most of its victims were ordinary Soviet citizens for whom 'counter-revolution' was an unfathomable abstraction. In short, the Terror was wholly destructive, not merely in terms of the incalculable human cost, but also in terms of the interests of the Soviet leaders, principally Joseph Stalin, who directed and managed it. The Great Fear presents a new and original explanation of the Stalin's Terror based on intelligence materials in Russian archives. It shows how Soviet leaders developed a grossly exaggerated fear of conspiracy and foreign invasion and lashed out at enemies largely of their own making. Biography James Harris is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (1999) and co-author (with Sarah Davies) of Stalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order (2015). He co-edited (with Sarah Davies) Stalin: A New History (2005), and edited Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin (2013). He is currently writing a book on the origins of the Communist dictatorship

James Harris - 14 February 2017 - The Great Fear: Intelligence and Threat Perception under Lenin and Stalin

A public lecture by Professor Sir Richard Evans. Abstract After Napoleon's final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the conservative regimes of the Restoration quickly developed a paranoid suspicion of conspiracies which, they feared, were being hatched to overthrow them. For their part, democrats across Europe formed secret societies like the carbonari, while groups of junior army officers from Spain to Russia plotted to remove Restoration governments and drive the programme of the French Revolution forward. This lecture asks why the politics of the 1820s were so dominated by conspiracy, and attempts to fit the dynamics of plot and counter-plot into the larger framework of the history of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in the modern age. Biography Sir Richard Evans FBA is Regius Professor Emeritus of History and President of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge. He is Principal Investigator in the Leverhulme Programme Grant 'Conspiracy and Democrary' at CRASSH. His latest book, 'The Politics of Power: Europe 1815-1914', will be published by Penguin Books on 1 September 2016.

Professor Sir Richard Evans - 22 November 2016 - The Conspiratorial World of European Politics in the 1820s

A public lecture by Dr Iain Lauchlan (University of Edinburgh) Abstract This paper investigates the fall of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky. He was the creator of the Soviet secret police, Lenin’s fearsome enforcer and the man who many thought represented the last serious impediment to Stalin’s seizure of power. His death in the Kremlin in July 1926 had all the elements of a great theatrical production: timely relevance to the mood of the age, a grand location, and a stellar cast. In fact many observers found it difficult to believe that such a meaningful pattern of events could have been woven by accident alone and suspected that some hidden artist was spinning the web. This talk will explore the conspiracies and conspiracy theories surrounding Dzerzhinsky’s demise, in doing so it seeks to ascertain the true cause of his death and its significance. Biography Iain Lauchlan received his BA (1993) and PhD (1998) from the University of Leeds. His PhD thesis and first book (‘Russian Hide-and-Seek’) were on the tsarist secret police based on research in the newly opened Russian state archives. He began his academic career as a research fellow at Helsinki University in 1999, which thanks to Finnish Academy funding provided him with access to the former Communist Party and KGB archives in Moscow. This led to a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship at St Cross College, Oxford from 2001 to 2004 and after that a lectureship at Stirling University. He was appointed to his current post as Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Edinburgh in January 2010 and Senior Lecturer in 2016. He is currently completing a biography of the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Dr Iain Lauchlan - 15 November 2016 - Conspiracy in the Kremlin: Who (or what) killed Felix Dzerzhinsky?

Between Diabolical Instigations and Criminal Combinations: Conspiracy Theories in Political Trials, 16th-19th century A public lecture with André Krischer (University of Münster) Abstract Conspiracy theories were not only a conspicuous element of public discourses in early modern England, spread by countless pamphlets and other sorts of printed media since the late 16th century. They also played a crucial role in political trials. As a result of the specific understanding of treason in common law as an ’imagination of the king’s death’, a traitor was always a conspirator, in league with the devil. This narrowing of conspiracy and treason was an important factor for the popular understanding of conspiracies as a deadly threat to state and society. In my lecture, I will show how conspiracy theories became an indispensable element of the legal language used in treason trials and how such trials served as propagators of conspiratorial narrations. I will also look at the discursive changes that took place during the period under investigation. When treason allegations became critical around 1800, political crimes were reinvented as ‘seditious conspiracies’, still bearing the notion of dangerous subversions and machinations. While my lecture is primarily concerned with England, I will give a comparative perspective on conspiracy theories in political trials in the Holy Roman Empire and show how the legal definitions were influenced by the English model. Biography André Krischer studied history, philosophy and English literature in Cologne and Bonn. He completed his D.Phil. in 2006 and Habilitation in 2015. He is currently a Lecturer in British history at the University of Münster, Germany, where he is also a Principal Investigator on the DFG-Collaborativ Research Centre ‘Cultures of Decision Making’ (SFB 1150) and on the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ (EXC 212). He is interested in the cultural history of diplomacy and foreign relation in the early modern world, the visual history of religious violence, the history of bureaucratic and parliamentary procedures of decision making and the history of political crime. The history of conspiracies is a major focal point in his forthcoming book on the history of treason and treason trials in England from the 16th to the middle of the 19th century (which will be published with Aschendorff Books in 2017) and also of two volumes which he is editing. One is a cultural history of treason and treason discourses from the antiquity to the present (Verräter. Kulturgeschichte eines Deutungsmusters, Cologne (Böhlau) 2017), and the other is a collection of essays on assassinations and conspiracies as political crimes, ca. 1400-1900 (forthcoming with Constance University Press in 2017).

André Krischer - 11 October 2016 - Between Diabolical Instigations and Criminal Combinations

A public lecture by Professor Dr Michael Butter (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen) Abstract While conspiracy theories constituted legitimate knowledge in the United States in the past, they have lost this status in the present. Yet, they still possess commonsensical appeal. The continuing attraction of their stigmatized knowledge is nowhere more powerfully dramatized than in the novels of Dan Brown, which all evoke large-scale conspiracies that then turn out not to be true at all. At the same time, conspiracy theorizing might be changing its status again, as the successes of Donald Trump, who has embraced various conspiracy theories, during the Republican primaries suggest. Michael Butter is Professor of American Studies at the University of Tübingen. He is the author of Plots, Designs, and Schemes: American Conspiracy Theory from the Puritans to Present (2014) and has written various essays on different aspects of conspiracy theory. He also was the main proposer of the COST Action “Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories” which brings together scholars from more than thirty countries and a dozen disciplines to explore European conspiracy theories for the next four years. This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception. This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/

Michael Butter - 17 May 2016 - The Continuing Attraction of Conspiracy Theory: From Dan Brown to Donald Trump

A public lecture by Rob Brotherton (Barnard College, Columbia University) Abstract Why do people believe conspiracy theories? What’s the harm if they do? And just what is a conspiracy theory, anyway? Conspiracy theories captured the attention of philosophers and historians decades ago, but it is only within the last few years that psychologists have begun gathering data on these kinds of questions. In this talk, Rob Brotherton provides a psychological perspective on conspiracism, drawing on his own research as well as other insights explored in his new book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. In particular, research into cognitive biases and heuristics – quirks in the way our brains are wired – suggests that we’re all intuitive conspiracy theorists; some of us just hide it better than others. Rob Brotherton is an academic psychologist and science writer. He completed a PhD on the psychology of conspiracy theories with the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2013. Rob lectured at Goldsmiths for a year before moving to New York City, where he now teaches classes on conspiracy theories and science communication, as well as other aspects of psychology, at Barnard College, Columbia University. Rob's book on the psychology of conspiracy theories, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, was published by Bloomsbury in 2015. This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception. This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/

Rob Brotherton - 10 May 2016 - Suspicious Minds: The Social and Cognitive Psychology of Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy and Terror in the French Revolution - A public lecture by Marisa Linton (Kingston University) Abstract Conspiracies, both real and imagined, played a central role in the shifting dynamics of French revolutionary politics. This talk will look at how fear of conspiracy influenced decisions taken by revolutionary leaders during the most traumatic period of the Revolution - the Terror of the Year II (1793-94). Successive revolutionary factions were subject to a specific form of terror, the ‘politicians’ terror’, whereby they themselves were denounced as ‘the enemy within’ and put to death. This talk will examine the ideological, tactical and emotional factors that led some of the Revolution’s most prominent leaders, including Brissot, Danton, and Robespierre, to be condemned as secret conspirators against it. Biography Marisa Linton is currently Reader in History at Kingston University. She has written extensively on the political culture of the French Revolution and the French Enlightenment. She is the author of Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013), a study of the political leaders of the French Revolution and the process whereby they came to ‘choose terror’. She is also the author of The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (Palgrave, 2001), which examines how the Enlightenment concept of political virtue became an integral part of the language of revolutionary politics. She is the co-editor of Conspiracy in the French Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007). Her other publications have addressed such subjects as: Robespierre’s political ideology; the concept of the political hero in French revolutionary politics; the intellectual origins of the French Revolution; and religious toleration in eighteenth-century France. She frequently writes for popular publications, such as History Today and BBC History, and has made several television and radio appearances. She is currently working on a further book for Oxford University Press, a study of four Jacobin leaders, Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins and Saint-Just, to be entitled Saturn’s Children: Leaders of the French Revolution.

Marisa Linton - 19 APril 2016 - Conspiracy and Terror in the French Revolution

Enlightenment and Conspiracy - A Public lecture by Darrin McMahon (Dartmouth College, USA) In this talk McMahon will address the role of conspiracy and conspiratorial thinking in the intellectual culture of the long 18th century. Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock professor at Dartmouth College, and formerly the Ben Weider Professor and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. Born in Carmel, California, and educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale, where he received his PhD in 1998, McMahon is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which has been translated into twelve languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Library Journal, and Slate Magazine. In 2013, McMahon completed a history of the idea of genius and the genius figure, Divine Fury: A History of Genius, published with Basic Books. He is also the editor, with Ryan Hanley, of The Enlightenment: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, 5 vols. (Routledge, 2009); with Samuel Moyn, of Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2014); and with Joyce Chaplin of Genealogies of Genius (Palgrave, 2015). McMahon has taught as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, the University of Rouen, the École Normale Supérieur, École des Hautes Études, and the University of Potsdam. His writings have appeared frequently in such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, Slate, Washington Post, The New Republic, and the Literary Review.

Darrin M McMahon - 1 March 2016 - Enlightenment and Conspiracy

The assassination of Alvaro Obregón: jury trials and the problem of truth in post revolutionary Mexico A public lecture by Professor Pablo A. Piccato (Columbia University). Abstract When José de León Toral killed president elect Álvaro Obregón in July 1928, president Plutarco Elías Calles decided that the case would be tried in a penal court, to show the world the impartiality of the Mexican justice system. In the middle of a growing religious conflict, Calles wanted to avoid the demonstrations of Catholic popular support that followed the extrajudicial execution of other would-be assassins the year before. The jury trial against León Toral and his alleged accomplice, Concepción Acevedo, became an unprecedented media event, however, in which multiple conspiracy theories about the death of Obregón and the justice of tyrannicide were discussed in national radio broadcast, and fully transcribed in the newspapers. The case contributed to the elimination of jury trials in Mexico City and opened an era of popular skepticism toward the judicial system in general. Pablo Piccato, professor, specializes in Mexican history. He has worked on the political and cultural history of Mexico, and on the history of crime. He is currently working on an overview of crime in Mexico during the twentieth century. This event will be followed by a wine reception. This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.

Professor Pablo A. Piccato - 3 December 2015 - The Assassination of Alvaro Obregón

Imitation Games: Conspiratorial Sciences and Intelligent Machines A public lecture by Professor Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge) Please note the later start time of 5.30pm for this lecture. Abstract Influential public declarations about the normative system of the sciences produced in the mid-twentieth century by authorities such as J D Bernal ('The social function of science', 1939) and R K Merton ('Science and technology in a democratic order', 1942) urged the fundamental contrast between science and secrecy: what Merton significantly labeled 'communism' meant that scientists must and did publicise and share their work as widely as possible. A decade later, at a key conjuncture of the Cold War, inquiries in fields such as computation (Alan Turing 'Computing machinery and intelligence', 1950) and psychological politics (Edward Hunter, 'Brainwashing', 1950) described the opposite phenomenon: the importance of sequestered and secretive knowledge in scientific understanding and management of human intelligence. The relations between these normative systems and their role in public culture were important themes in the emergence of the imageries of science and secrecy in the mid-twentieth century. Professor Simon Schaffer is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and has been a Fellow of Darwin College since 1985. Until recently he was editor of The British Journal for the History of Science. His research interests include the history of physical science and the social history of science. In July 2012 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. Professor Schaffer was jointly awarded the Erasmus Prize in 2005 for the book Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, which he co-authored with Steven Shapin. In 2004, he presented a series of documentaries for the BBC about light and the history of its study and knowledge.

Simon Schaffer - 27 October 2015 - Imitation Games: Conspiratorial Sciences and Intelligent Machines

Suspect Science: Climate Change, Epidemics, and Questions of Conspiracy 17 - 19 September 2015 Convenors Dr Nayanika Mathur and Dr Alfred Moore, Research Fellows on the Conspiracy and Democracy project. Summary In recent years conspiracy theories have come to be seen as a threat to democracy. They have been variously linked to a crisis of trust in government, to the undermining of democratic deliberation, and a weakening the state's capacity to govern. Particular concern has focused on conspiratorial suspicion of science, in cases ranging from climate change to HIV-AIDS to vaccines and public health surveillance more generally. Where science, politics and power intersect we find rich ground for suspicion and mistrust of experts, and accusations of conspiracy. This raises a number of important questions. Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? How do people think about conspiracies? How are we to make sense of the relationship between mistrust of expertise and accusations of conspiracy? How have boundaries been drawn between authorized and unauthorized knowledge? How are anxieties about conspiracies related to more general problems of explanation and causal attribution in complex environments? In this conference we aim to situate these questions about 'suspect science' in broader conceptual, geographical and historical contexts. We will address them by drawing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, public health, history, politics, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and we will consider a wide range of empirical cases. Through this interdisciplinary approach we hope to stimulate critical reflection on the shifting problems of doubt, denial and dissent in the politics of knowledge. Keynote speakers: David Runciman, University of Cambridge Eric Oliver, University of Chicago Harriet Washington, University of Las Vegas, Nevada

Harriet Washington : Epidemics of Conspiracy

Eric Oliver : Enchanted America: Magic, Metaphor and Conspiracy Theories in US Public Opinion

David Runciman - A Climate of Conspiracy

Technological conspiracies are good conspiracies - at least from the perspective of their proponents. Understanding their dynamics, especially within the context of liberalism, may help shed light upon an apparent puzzle of twenty-first century living: why, when individual privacy is being systematically undermined by both governments and corporations, so few people seem to care. The answer, I suggest, has much to do with rapidly changing conceptions of self and society, but also a prior, fundamental commitment to imagining both self and society as quantifiable and controllable. Leading liberal theorists today tend to see the digital challenge to privacy as undermining one of the core commitments of liberalism. However, I wish to suggest that our current predicament is the result of liberalism's internal logic , a political theory that formally eschews conspiracy thinking in favour of science and modernity, yet one that manages to employ theories of good conspiracy, nonetheless. Technological conspiracies are the fulfilment of a modern, liberal dream, bringing together political power and technology so that citizens are fully known to their governments and corporations such that older concerns with privacy simply become irrelevant. A public lecture by Professor Lawrence Quill (San Jose).

Professor Lawrence Quill - 9 June 2015 - Technological Conspiracies

How do conspiracies happen, how can historians use them to understand more about the past, and where do they begin and cease to be relevant to the study of history? Conspiracy and Democracy, a Leverhulme-funded research project. More information is available at www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.

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