Professor David Huddart – Public Lecture: Plotting Risk: Dread in Lawrence Osborne

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.

Professor David Huddart - Public Lecture

Date: April 30, 2026 (Thursday)

Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm

Venue: HKU Black Box, Room 54, LG/F, Centennial Campus, HKU (Location map)

Registration is required. Seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

• For HKU members (HKU Portal login is required): https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?ueid=106496
• For non-HKU members: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=106496

Abstract

Through a reading of Lawrence Osborne’s work, this paper focuses on how the tourist experience frequently turns back on itself: the pursuit of pleasure, escape, and elevated self-presentation gives way to anxiety, paranoia, and existential dread. Central to the analysis is the latter, treated not as a fear with a specific object but as an indeterminate atmosphere of forewarning: a “general anxiety” intensified by an inability to locate the source of crisis. In The Glass Kingdom, dread emerges from the novel’s tightening interconnection of private and public worlds, where social anonymity is contradicted by architectural transparency, and where political upheaval and mutual secrecy dissolve assumed boundaries between inside and outside. Dread functions as a narrative analogue to tourism’s screening effects: pleasurable distance obscures exploitation and distrust, until the mask fractures. Through The Naked Tourist and Bangkok Days, the paper argues that Osborne builds this dread by staging the tourist gaze as a practice of roles, surfaces, and misrecognitions. His accounts of travel and expatriate life cultivate a heightened insecurity: an attentiveness to dislocation experienced as foreknowledge. In these autofictions, “outside” tourism becomes inseparable from dread, especially as anxieties associated with political instability and exile intensify the sense that pleasure and familiarity are conditional and reversible.

Biography

David Huddart is Professor and Chair in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He researches recreational ecology, conservation humanities, and life writing. He served on the Humanities Panel for RAE2020, and is currently serving for RAE2026.

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