Laura Salisbury Inaugural Lecture

This lecture analyses how the Second World War shaped, contained, and shifted embodied experiences of waiting in relation to broader ideas of lived time. The second global conflict of the twentieth century produced particular accounts of waiting as both military and civilian populations were exposed to the threat and anticipation of annihilation from the air. The lecture explores what it meant to wait under such conditions and the emergence of ideas and practices of care in both literature and in psychoanalytic thinking that worked to shape a relationship towards an unthinkable future.