The Powys Society 2026 Conference Speakers
Meet our 2026 Conference speakers
John Gray is a political philosopher, whose books include Seven Types of Atheism, Straw Dogs, Black Mass, The Soul of the Marionette, The Silence of Animals, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life and The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. He is a contributing writer to the New Statesman. John has been a long-time member of the Powys Society and has written and spoken in books and broadcasts on all three of the Powys brothers and their circle. He gave a lecture on the Powys brothers and religion at the Powys Society conference in 2015. In 2022, he participated in a BBC Radio discussion on JCP commemorating the 150th anniversary of JCP’s birth.
John writes about his lecture: All three Powys brothers–John, Llewelyn and Theodore–firmly believed that contemplation rather than action should be the chief aim in life, but differed widely in their views as to the nature of contemplation as a way of being. For each of them, it filled a space left by the passing of traditional religion, linking them to something beyond themselves and the human realm–specifically, the natural world. Each approached the contemplation of nature from a different philosophical standpoint: John from a sceptical Pyrrhonism, which aimed to collect and preserve in memory epiphanies of the passing sensations evoked by landscapes; Llewelyn focusing on the natural world as the majestic setting in which he could pursue a life of Epicurean pleasure in defiance of death; and Theodore, a heterodox Gnostic who saw in the natural world the artistry of an unknown God. None of the three understood contemplation as an activity that excluded the human world: John loved old buildings and daily rituals, Llewelyn could delight in an ancient church despite his atheism and Theodore cherished country living while being fully aware of its cruelties. What they had in common is the high value they attached to an inner life that did not require belief, and was directed toward the outer world. Understanding these affinities and differences in the lives and writings of the three brothers will be the aim of the talk.
Julie Lasky is a journalist, editor and critic best known for her writings on design. She has been the deputy editor of The New York Times weekly Home section, the editor-in-chief of I.D. and Interiors magazines, and the managing editor of Print magazine. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest, Elle Décor, Dwell, Departures, Travel & Leisure, House Beautiful, Landscape Architecture and many other publications. She teaches in the graduate industrial design program at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her article, ‘Marian Powys at Snedens’, about Marian’s residences in Snedens Landing, north of Manhattan, appeared in Powys Journal XXIV (2024). Julie is writing a biography of Marian entitled Her Light Materials: Marian Powys and the Drama of Lace.
Julie writes: In 1916, Marian Powys, who had arrived in New York City three years before to live with her eldest brother, John Cowper Powys, opened the Devonshire Lace Shop at 60 Washington Square. Over the next 29 years, she moved her workplace four times as she struggled with the depredations of Depression and wartime economies and with the growing lack of interest in lace. This presentation tracks the Devonshire Lace Shop’s route from bohemian Greenwich Village to elite addresses on the East Side, exploring the reasons for its restlessness. Ultimately, in 1945, Marian closed the business — or did she sell it to one of her workers, an African American lacemaker named Inez Carle?
Courtney Welu holds an MA in English and an MS in information studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She has worked as a Graduate Research Assistant and a Research Associate at the Harry Ransom Center, which holds extensive Powys family collections. Her uncle, Darrell Emmel, left her a JCP archive of his own.
Courtney writes: In November 2023, my great-uncle Darrell Emmel was diagnosed with cancer and decided not to seek treatment. He died six weeks later on New Year’s Day in his home in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Despite the fact that he was in significant pain, he spent the last weeks of his life incredibly energized and optimistic about what the future held– mainly as it concerned the works and legacy of John Cowper Powys.
‘These last days –’ Darrell wrote to me in a letter, ‘I already call them my “JCP buzz” days – I recognize how big JCP will eventually become. I will be helping from the “other side.”’
For most of his adult life, Darrell was an admirer and sometimes scholar of John Cowper Powys. He wrote his 1976 master’s thesis at the University of Toronto on Porius and spent years living in Llangollen, Wales, ten miles from Corwen, where JCP lived with Phyllis Playter, whom Darrell visited several times. In 2007, after the complete edition of Porius was published, Darrell wrote an unpublished manuscript called The Stars Move, a ‘spiritual sign-reading’ of the novel.
I spent many hours with Darrell listening to him talk about JCP, Phyllis Playter, and the rest of the Powys family, but I had never engaged with his work until after Darrell died. Darrell decided on his deathbed that he wanted me to be the steward of all of his John Cowper Powys-related belongings. I was already set to inherit his rather large library.
‘For days now, my spirit friends from the Blessings Depts in the spirit worlds have gotten me fired up about JCP in two distinct ways,’ Darrell writes in another letter, ‘that, so it appears very clearly to me, have established our future as 1) extremely interested observer[s] of what I now unerringly call the JCP ARCHIVE and 2) [you] as its keeper in chief.’
I was chosen as the custodian of Darrell’s JCP archive not just because he loved me, but also because I had a professional connection to the Powys family. When Darrell died, I was in my last year of graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, where I’d been working for over a year as a graduate research assistant at the Harry Ransom Center. The HRC houses archival collections for John Cowper as well as Llewelyn and Theodore Powys, and a broader Powys family collection. Two years previously, when I’d moved to Austin, Darrell said that he was very tempted to come to Texas to visit and take a look at the original Porius manuscript. He never made the trip.
About my presentation…
My presentation will follow two threads: first, the life of Darrell Emmel and how it intersected with the work of John Cowper Powys, along with the papers that he collected over his decades of academic and personal interest; and second, the HRC’s Powys family collections, and my experience going through the material ‘for’ Darrell, where I often feel as though I’m coming up short, since I don’t have near the level of his expertise.
Darrell’s papers include extensive notes on the works and themes of JCP that he wrote while living in Wales; his 1976 master’s thesis; correspondence with Powys Society members including Robert Blackmore and Ichiro Hara; 1970s-era Powys Society newsletters, including one with work by Darrell; and correspondence with the Harry Ransom Center that prompted me to search for his original letter to them in the HRC archive.
I will also discuss some of my findings from the HRC’s Powys collections on themes that Darrell would have had a keen interest in: spirituality, the afterlife, dreams, the stars, and JCP’s journey writing Porius. Because I am a newcomer to JCP’s writing, I lack the expertise to interpret or properly appreciate his drafts. I am left with his correspondence and other miscellaneous material, piecing together who he was through his relationships rather than his grand works. As an archives professional, this is often a situation we find ourselves in: doing our best to do research on behalf of a scholar who knows far more about the subject than we do.
To wrap up, I will highlight the part of Darrell’s collection that I donated to the Ransom Center: a dozen original photos of JCP that were given to Darrell circa 1970 by Albert Krick, JCP’s neighbor at Phudd Bottom in New York. Darrell has a hand-drawn map of Phudd Bottom as well as notes on his conversation with Albert, and these photos are now a part of the HRC’s collection. I will have high-res copies of the photographs to showcase. While I do not know how many copies of these photos are floating around in various archival repositories, most of them were not already present in the HRC’s collections.
Mark Damon Chutter is the Chairman and Academic Director of the Thomas Hardy Society. He is a committee member of the Dorchester Literary Festival, the Dorchester Civic Society, the Joint Heritage Committee and STAND.
Mark is a Head of Performing Arts and an English and Drama specialist. He was shortlisted as one of the top teachers in the country by The Times.
Mark writes that he plans to examine an eclectic range of writers and artists who lived in Chaldon Herring including the Powys family, Sylvia Townsend Warner and the sculptor and artist Elizabeth Muntz. Together, they formed a mini-Bloomsbury group in the 1920s and 1930s. Mark will explore the importance of gender representation and sexual identities within their work alongside the visibility of these significant artists within the Dorset landscape and their contribution to the literary canon..