This year’s Annual Luddite Memorial Lecture will be given by Dr Alison Morgan of the University of Warwick.

The power of song has long been used to give voice to social and political concerns. Dr Alison Morgan from the University of Warwick and author of the “Ballads and Songs of Peterloo”, will explore a range of songs from Luddism to Chartism and consider how there were performed and received.

Dr Alison Morgan’s book, Ballads and Songs of Peterloo, is the first to gather more than 70 contemporary songs and poems about the massacre in a single collection.

Dr Morgan, Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Teacher Education, searched online and physical archives to bring the poems back to light after being inspired by Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famously passionate response to the massacre, The Masque of Anarchy – a poem so radical it remained unpublished until after his death.

Dr Morgan said: “Through these poems and ballads we hear the authentic voice of the people. They were written very quickly, in the immediate aftermath of Peterloo, and they capture a real sense of outrage, of grief – and of revolutionary zeal for change.”

The Brontë Lecture Theatre (room BLG/10) is located on the ground floor of the building marked “03” on the university campus map (PDF).