Alison Light and Suzan Meryem Rosita Kalayci, warmly invite you to the launch of Bessie Quinn, Survivor Spirit: from Galashiels Mills to Garden Cities. The story of an Irish family in Scotland, 1845-1922 by Ursula Howard.
Ursula will be in conversation with Alison Light about Bessie Quinn, followed by discussion. Drinks and nibbles will be served.
Ursula Howard’s working life in adult and further education and community publishing, where she specialised in historical perspectives on literacy, showed her how learning, determination and the power of writing has changed lives, and enriched understandings of the history of the powerless. Names, voices and myriad stories disturb silences, social class-based categorisation, and assumptions about the lives and culture of others.
After a career in teaching and educational leadership, Ursula joined the Institute of Education in London (IoE, now UCL). She was appointed Director of the National Research and Devlopment Centre for adult literacy, English language and numeracy from 2002-9, a large-scale international research centre involving several universities, with the aim of creating a strong knowledge base and influencing educational policy. She was Visiting Professorial Fellow at the IoE 2008-2012.
Ursula spent ten years in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, where she taught refugees from Eastern Europe, then graduated with a first class degree in History and German at Sussex. She developed her Sussex University DPhil on 19th century literacy policies and practices into her book, Literacy and the Practice of Writing in the 19th Century: a Strange Blossoming of Spirit (2012). It was well received, widely reviewed and is still frequently cited in the fields of literacy, adult learning and life writing. She has published numerous articles and chapters in research journals and books on adult learning and literacy, past and present, in the UK and Germany. Ursula has an honorary doctorate from Wolverhampton University and in 2009 was awarded an OBE for her work in adult and further education.
A great-granddaughter of Ebenezer Howard, the son of a London pastry-cook who became the visionary founder of the Garden City movement, Ursula has been absorbed since childhood in social history and its relevance to now. In her new book: Bessie Quinn, Survivor Spirit: from Galashiels Mills to Garden Cities (2022), she links his achievement to the life-stories of post-Famine, working-class catholic Irish immigrants to 19th century Scotland. She has unearthed the forgotten Quinn family and situated them in the social, cultural and economic context of industrialising lowland Scotland. One of them, her grandmother, defied the odds and through her own agency forged a new life as a modern woman among the English social reformers of early 20th century.