Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century

For the 75th anniversary of 1984, historian Laura Beers explores George Orwell’s still-radical ideas and why they remain critical today. Orwell dedicated his career to exposing social injustice and political duplicity, urging his readers to face hard truths about Western society and politics; the uncanny parallels between the interwar era and our own – rising inequality, censorship, and challenges to traditional social hierarchies – make his writing even more of the moment.  Laura Beers considers Orwell’s full body of work – six novels, three non-fiction works, and multiple essays on politics, language, and the class system – to examine what “Orwellian” truly means and reveal the misconstrued thinker in all of his complexity.  Wide-ranging and thought provoking, Orwell’s Ghosts investigates how the writings of a lionized champion of truth and freedom can help us face the crises of modernity.

Laura Beers is professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C. An historian of modern Britain, she is the author of Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist (Harvard University Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 Stansky Prize for best book published in the field of modern British history, and Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Harvard University Press, 2010). She is the co-editor of Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain between the Wars (Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 2012). In addition to her academic work, Professor Beers has written on British and comparative politics for CNN, the Washington Post’s “Made by History” column, the New Statesmen, and the London Review of Books.