LSE Lit Fest 2016: 'When Did We Start Dreaming?' by Karma Lochrie

The 2016 LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival is inspired by the five hundred year anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia, often positioned as the text that marks the beginning of utopian thinking. However, ahead of the forthcoming publication of her new book, Nowhere in the Middle Ages (Uni of Penn Press, May 2016), Professor Karma Lochrie questions the tendency to assume that utopianism emerged solely with More’s work. Instead, by unmooring utopian thinking from 1516 and More’s text, she suggests that there are medieval utopianisms that can also animate and enlarge our understanding of the concept. So, as she asks, when did we start dreaming?