Dennis Smith

Dennis Smith, who was initiated as a historian at Cambridge, and as a sociologist at LSE and Leicester University, has travelled much of the world, driven by curiosity, but found his professorship at Loughborough, just a few miles from Nottingham, his place of birth, in a region renowned for a string of restless characters from Robin Hood to Alan Sillitoe.

He is the product of a dual immigration, coming from South Welsh mining roots and Irish farming stock in County Sligo near the west coast. Dennis Smith found his way through the tightening bonds of the English education system while managing to maintain (on reflection) a remarkable degree of freedom to teach, research and publish in those areas where his mind and imagination took him. This has ranged from lively early-Victorian cities such as Birmingham and Sheffield through to post-war ex-colonies of the British Empire, especially apartheid-ridden South Africa and Burma under military dictatorship.

In all these travels through space and time, both virtual and real, he has been digging out details of a central struggle in the modern world between two opposing forces. On the one hand, powerful establishments - imperial, racial, religious, patriarchal, quasi-feudal, fascist, communist and capitalist - determined to keep those whose efforts serve or oppose them under repressive control. On the other hand, excluded and displaced individuals, groups and nations who are driven to fight to reclaim the justice and opportunities they are denied.