Alun Howkins

Shortly after Alun Howkins passed away in 2018, I wrote to Malcolm Chase at the University of Leeds lamenting this huge loss. Malcolm had been part of the Graduate School at the University of Sussex with me in the early 1980s. He responded by saying that Alun was really the ‘second supervisor for all of us’. This captures something of how we saw him. Second supervisors were less common at that time but we did not need one: we had Alun. No one embodied History at Sussex University better than Alun Howkins: committed to interdisciplinarity, left-wing politics and the making of people’s histories. He loomed over our student years in the best way. He had a presence that lit up a teaching room even before he walked in the door and he never believed that teaching stopped when the seminar was over. He was always fascinated by his students and (in a phrase he often used) was prepared to go to the wall for them if there was a problem. My earliest memory of Alun comes from my first day as an undergraduate in 1979. A talk about the University’s interdisciplinary ‘contextual’ courses became a rant about the new Tory government which, he said, was stealing our education from us (‘mind you, the last government wasn’t much better’).

Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Government (linguistics) · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Adult and Continuing Education Topics · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Higher Education Practises and Engagement · History · Law · Philosophy