2022 Ian Dyck Memorial Lecture

Please join us for the return of the Ian Dyck Memorial Lecture after a four year interval.

This year's guest lecturer is Simon Gunn from the University of Leicester, who will present "The First Pop Nation? Britain in the 1960s", an exploration of the early days of the pop revolution.

September 28 | SFU VANCOUVER (HC 1400) | 6:30PM | Reception to Follow
Registration required for catering purposes. This event is in-person only.

The First Pop Nation? Britain in the 1960s
In this lecture Simon Gunn explores what made Britain so fertile a locus for the pop revolution from the late 1950s. It is a journey that encompasses the ‘affluent society’ and the post-war baby boomers, the British Empire and the global export of music. As a story it has an extraordinary cast of characters – pill-popping Mods, gangster managers and mascara-eyed divas like Dusty Springfield. But the lecture also asks fundamental questions about what makes a culture ‘creative’ and why Britain, in particular, was able to generate successive youth movements, from pop to punk and beyond.

Simon Gunn is Emeritus Professor at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester. He has published extensively on the middle class in Victorian Britain; on theory and method in urban and social history; and on city planning and automobility. He is currently researching the explosive growth of pop culture in 1960s Britain while also preparing, with Otto Saumarez Smith and Peter Mandler, a multi-authored volume on the modern British city since 1945, modelled on the pioneering two-volume study of the Victorian city edited by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff.

About Dr. Ian Dyck (1954-2007)

Historian Ian Dyck specialized in the society, culture and politics of modern England.

Dyck joined SFU in 1988, where he became an associate professor of History, and received an Excellence in Teaching award in 1991. Dyck's research attracted support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and fellowships in Cambridge and at the Huntington Library. His published works included William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Cobbett’s Rural Rides (Penguin, 2001).

Thanks to the generosity of Ian Dyck’s family, friends, colleagues and students, the endowment that was established in 2008 has been used to bring a visiting historian in British history to Simon Fraser University. There are three components to each visit: a public lecture held at the Harbour Centre campus, a talk on the Burnaby campus for faculty and graduate students and a seminar with the Honours students in History.

The lectureship has become a regular part of the department’s activities and an important point of contact with alumni and the wider community.

Dr. Ian Dyck (1954-2007)

“Hundreds of undergraduates delighted in his Western Civilization lectures and he was much loved as a seminar leader in a course on popular culture in Britain and Europe.”
-John Craig, Department of History