The Yorkshireman Who Made Italy: Sir James Hudson at Turin, 1852-63

Dr Owain Wright is coming to Leeds City Library on Thursday 29 October to talk about Sir James Hudson, a Yorkshireman who spent a decade in Turin and ended up right in the middle of the Risorgimento. The session is called The Yorkshireman Who Made Italy: Sir James Hudson at Turin, 1852-63, and it's part of the Leeds Cultural Conversations series.

If you're not familiar with the name, Hudson was a British diplomat born in Yorkshire who spent 1852 to 1863 in Turin, the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia. That was the heart of the Risorgimento — the movement that eventually unified the various states of the Italian peninsula into a single country. The talk asks how the modern Italian state, which only dates from the mid-nineteenth century, was shaped not just by Italian patriots and politicians but by a Brit who was described as 'more Italian than the Italians themselves'. To get the full picture, Wright draws on Italy's wider heritage as the centre of the Roman Empire, the seat of the Catholic Church and the birthplace of the Renaissance.

Dr Owain Wright is a political and cultural historian specialising in British relations with Italy. Before taking up his current post as Senior Lecturer in European History at Leeds Beckett, he held positions at Lancaster, Kingston, Worcester and Ulster Universities. This talk is part of Leeds Cultural Conversations, a series of public lectures organised by the Centre for Culture and Humanities at Leeds Beckett University and run in partnership with Leeds Central Library.

It's a free session, running from 12:00 to 13:00 at Leeds City Library, Calverley Street, Leeds LS1 3AB.