Land and People: Indigeneity and Consent in Lawman’s Brut
Fiona Somerset (Professor, LCL & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)
with a response by April Anson (English & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)
Wednesday, February 4, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
Far-right nationalists have appropriated the concept of indigeneity in recent years to create isolationist arguments (one land, one language, one people). Recently, historians have worked to counter these claims by suggesting that until the Enlightenment, people in Europe did not have a concept of indigeneity, because they did not have a concept of popular consent. The book I am writing on the history of consent demonstrates otherwise: in this talk I will show how the early thirteenth century English writer Lawman in his historical poem the Brut develops a theory of indigeneity based on popular consent. However, Lawman’s understanding of indigeneity tends to delegitimize far-right nationalist arguments, rather than supporting them.
Fiona Somerset is Professor of Comparative Literature and Culture and of Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut, where she has served as Codirector of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and Interim Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is finishing work on a book on the medieval history of consent through silence, and preparing to write another book on personhood in the Middle Ages.
April Anson is an assistant professor of English and Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut where she serves on the executive committees for American Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Prior to joining UConn, Dr. Anson was assistant professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Anson works at the intersection of environmental humanities, Indigenous American studies, and political theory.
Access note
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