Some face-to-face events are returning. Check carefully for any requirements.
The Art of Witnessing War
With Dr Sue Malvern, Reading University
Thursday 5 June, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre
Sue Malvern looks at the role of war artists and photographers as witnesses to conflicts and wars. Starting with WWI, the lecture looks at how the work of artists such as Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson and Stanley Spencer came to be seen as authentic visions of the actuality of the war. It will then consider the iconic status of works such as Picasso’s Guernica (1937), the role of war photographers, and the contemporary issues for artists who give visual witness to war and conflict.
Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132
experimentsandethics.wordpress.com
experimentsandethics.wordpress.com
The Psalms in England
With Prof M J Toswel, University of Western Ontario
Tuesday 10 June, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre
This lecture introduces the Anglo-Saxon psalter, and especially the interlinear vernacular versions in Latin psalters which were a unique feature in Europe at the time, and asks whether these provide evidence for greater engagement with the psalms in English than has generally been acknowledged.
Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132
Tour: Joseph Beuys & Jörg Immendorff
With Colin Harrison, Senior Curator of European Art
3–3.45pm on Wednesday 14 May and Wednesday 11 June
Tours are free, no booking is required. Please meet in Gallery 2.
http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/details/?exh=92
This lecture is hosted by the Oxford Martin School and the International Migration Institute, an Oxford Martin School Institute
If Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress can agree that eleven million unauthorized immigrants are proof of a broken immigration system, why does Congress repeatedly fail to enact comprehensive immigration reform that might stand a chance of reducing illegal migration?
One reason offered by Rey Koslowski is that too many members of Congress are fixated on appropriating money for more Border Patrol Agents and fencing to stop people from crossing the US-Mexico border between ports of entry. Koslowski argues that each additional dollar spent at the border is a dollar that may have been spent elsewhere to a much greater effect in reducing illegal migration, for example, on worksite inspections to enforce employer sanctions against hiring unauthorized migrant workers. After President Obama was reelected with 72% of the Latino vote, Senate Republicans eagerly joined Democrats to forge a comprehensive immigration reform bill but it took throwing $44 billion at border fencing and more Border Patrol agents to secure enough Republican votes to pass the bill with a filibuster-proof majority.
Koslowski argues that this border security overkill is not only bad policy; it failed to attract majority support for comprehensive immigration reform among House Republicans as intended, leaving it unlikely that any immigration legislation will become law before the November 2014 elections.
This lecture will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome
Speaker: Tom Price
The archipelago of Japan is defined as one of the World’s 34 biodiversity hotspots. Learn how staff from the Botanic Garden and Harcourt Arboretum are conducting expeditions to Japan to collect and document the native flora to improve the plant collections held by the University, promote biodiversity conservation and communicate research conducted by the Department of Plant Sciences, Oxford to a wider audience.
All Summer Lectures start at 6.30pm in the Daubeny Lecture Theatre (at
the front of the Botanic Garden) and are followed by a drinks reception in the Botanic Garden. Ticket cost £8 per talk or £36 for the series of 5.
For more details, visit: http://www.botanic-garden.ox.ac.uk/whatson
‘Syria Speaks’ Lecture:
Palmyra: City of Palms
With Linda Farrar, archaeologist and lecturer
Friday 13 June, 2-4pm, Headley Lecture Theatre
Famed for its hauntingly beautiful architectural remains, the ancient city of Palmyra in central Syria was an oasis and important stop on the caravan route across the Syrian desert. Linda Farrar talks about Palmyra’s tombs and archaeological remains, and the powerful figure who dominated its history, Queen Zenobia.
Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/SpecialEvents/?id=148
A colloquium on the writing of J M Coetzee will be held 2-6pm on 13 June in the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson. Speakers include Professor David Attwell, University of York, Professor Elleke Boehmer and Professor Peter D McDonald. This is a free event and all are welcome, but you are advised to register by 9 June. Please email: eleni.philippou@new.ox.ac.uk.
‘On Form’ Sculpture Tour
3-5pm Friday 13 June, Gallery 21
Sculptors from ‘on form’, the exhibition of stone sculpture at the childhood home of the Mitford sisters, Asthall Manor, will be giving tours of selected galleries, discussing the influence of the collections on their own work.
Free, no booking required.
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Talks/?id=105
On Friday 13th June, the Oxford Left Review will be launching OLR Issue 13. Come along to get your copy and chat with the writers and editors. This issue was partially themed on ‘Science, Technology and the Left’, and contains articles, interviews, reviews and fiction on topics including fracking, devolution, Wikileaks, the pharmaceuticals industry and Pakistan, as well as many more. Drinks will be provided.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a complex autoimmune disease affecting up to 1% of the population, causing a disabling inflammatory arthritis. The disease has two clinical similar subsets: autoantibody positive or seropositive disease, and autoantibody or seronegative disease. Recent advances in high-throughout SNP genotyping has resulted in the identification of >100 risk loci, in addition to well-known associations at the MHC. However, understanding the link between genetic loci and disease mechanism, is contingent on investigators identifying causal alleles and elucidating how they function to modify disease susceptibility. Furthermore, the mechanistic relationship between the seropositive and seronegative rheumatoid arthritis clinical subsets is still unclear. We are now just starting to make progress in this direction. Here we present recent work on (1) efforts to localize MHC effects to functional amino acid sites within HLA genes, (2) methodological advances to connect non-MHC loci to functional alleles that influence gene regulation in a cell-specific manner, and (3) how genetics is giving us a clear picture on the heterogeneity of the genetic bases of the two clinically similar conditions of seronegative and seropositive rheumatoid arthritis.
Mark Thompson will be speaking on his biography of the Serbian and Yugoslavian novelist Danilo Kis, Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kis, and questioning, ‘how do you write a literary biography?’ The Life-Writing Lunch is a termly seminar series, in which auto/biographers discuss their work in an informal, friendly setting over a sandwich lunch. There is no charge, but you must register well in advance, by following the link on www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing/events/lwlunch
Al Jazeera host Mehdi Hasan will challenge Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins sans Frontieres and former French Foreign Minister, on France’s military interventionism. Are the country’s motives altruistic or do they respond to a neo-colonialist agenda? And is there a tipping point when intervening becomes essential? Syria, Mali, Libya, Kosovo and more.
This debate will be filmed and aired on Al Jazeera English at a later date. Audience members will be invited to participate in a Q&A section during the second half of the conversation.
Order free tickets here: http://bernardkouchner.eventbrite.co.uk
RANDY RETTBERG, President of iGEM
Randy Rettberg is the man behind iGEM, the global competition for undergraduates and high school students in designing brand new biological parts, or “genetically engineered machines”. An engineer by trade he is the President of the iGEM Foundation, which operates the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a continuously growing library of genetic parts that can be mixed and matched to enable easier construction of synthetic biology devices.
Dr. RICHARD KELWICK, Researcher at CSynBI, Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation (Imperial College)
Richard has been scientific advisor and project manager of three successful iGEM teams, 2011-2013. Most recently, he was the lead advisor for the iGEM team Plasticity, at Imperial College London, which came third out of over 200 teams at the world final, held at MIT.
Dr. JAREK BRYK, National Centre for Biotechnology Education University of Reading
Jarek works at the National Centre for Biotechnology Education on a project to facilitate teaching of synthetic biology on an undergraduate level. He develops experimental kits that will be incorporated in synthetic biology curricula.He currently mentors the iGEM Reading team.
The circular economy is rapidly gaining the attention of businesses, government and the next generation as a framework for re-thinking and designing the future economy.
Join us on 19 June 2014 to debate this topic and address a number of challenging questions:
Can a circular economy really decouple growth from resource constraints?
Is the so-called resource crunch really happening or in reality do we still have an abundance of materials and energy?
Is achieving a restorative, circular economy even possible within today’s financial operating system?
What strategic options do CEOs need to pursue to prepare for competitive advantage in a circular economy?
How can business leaders engage consumers and encourage a ‘demand-led’ transformation?
Speakers: Mr. Jamie Butterworth, CEO, Ellen MacArthur Foundation and SSEE Business Fellows – and – Mr. Peter Lacy, Managing Director, Strategy and Sustainability APAC at Accenture, and SSEE’s Business Fellow.
Dr Jonathan Jong, a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, explores how time is all “in the mind”. Philosophers disagree about the nature of time: does it really flow from the past to the future through the present? There is a good chance that it doesn’t, and that our perception of time is illusory. But why do we experience time as we do?
This talk is part of the University Church’s Trinity term discussion series for students and 20-somethings, ‘A Waste of Time’, critiquing our cultural fetishizing of efficiency. As well as a guest speaker, there will be Q&A and group discussion over wine and cheese.
This event is free and open to all in the students and 20-somethings bracket.
Speaker: Guy Horwood
In 2013, Harcourt Arboretum arborist Guy Horwood was awarded a travel bursary to join the prestigious International Dendrology Society on their study tour of the Czech Republic. The tour of this diverse and unspoilt country started and ended in Prague and visited botanic gardens and natural forests. In this talk, Guy will take you on a virtual version of the tour and share his experiences with you.
All Summer Lectures start at 6.30pm in the Daubeny Lecture Theatre (at
the front of the Botanic Garden) and are followed by a drinks reception in the Botanic Garden. Ticket cost £8 per talk or £36 for the series of 5.
For more details, visit: http://www.botanic-garden.ox.ac.uk/whatson
The Self-Portrait: a Cultural History
With James Hall, author
Saturday 21 June , 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre
Recounting the history of the self-portrait, this lecture offers insights into artists’ psychological and creative worlds. James Hall talks about the medieval ‘mirror craze’, the confessional self-portraits of Titian and Michelangelo, and the multiple selves of contemporary artists such as Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman.
Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132
Early cyberspace theorists predicted that the digital world would be a world of plenty. But today’s Internet users are faced with many kinds of artificially scarce virtual markers, from online game items and digital currencies to likes and followers on social media and reward points in question and answer sites. Many such markers are traded online for significant sums of money and have spawned entire cottage industries for their production. Vili Lehdonvirta, author of Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (MIT Press 2014, with Edward Castronova), argues that these “virtual economies” shape digital media in important ways, and that understanding them is vital for both practitioners and scholars of digital media and entertainment.
In this session, Lehdonvirta will also discuss and debate with economist Greg Taylor about what virtual economies could teach traditional national economies and the economists who run them.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase. The discussion will be followed by book signing and a drinks reception.
Oxford Transitional Justice Research is pleased to invite you to its 2014 Summer Conference ‘Borders and Boundaries in Transitional Justice’.
This year’s conference, hosted with the support of the Planethood Foundation, Law Faculty, and the Centre for Criminology, will explore the issue of how borders and boundaries affect transitional justice processes across the world. The conference is organised around four panels:
The interplay between local, regional, and foreign transnational processes;
The role of diaspora and stateless communities in transitional justice;
The ways in which international law is dealing with cross-border transitional justice concerns; and
How local, national, and global approaches are affecting the theory and practice of transitional justice.
Registration is now open and we encourage all potential participants to register as soon as possible. Spaces are limited. We particularly welcome graduate students and early career researchers working on issues of transitional justice. A small registration fee includes tea and coffee and a light lunch.
A TORCH day conference including keynotes from Terry Eagleton and George Pattison and parallel session papers on theodicy, evil in literature, film and TV, German philosophy (Hegel and Fichte), death and technology, Aristotle, the Akedah, and more.
As part of ‘LoveFriday’, a late night opening at the Ashmolean museum, join us for gallery talks on love, sex, gender, and poetry in the ancient world. Talks will be 15 minutes and given on a rolling basis
‘Love, sex and gender in ancient Egypt’ with Ed Scrivens
‘Latin Love Poetry’ with Sharon van Dijk
‘Love in the Ramayana, Krishna, and the Gopis’ with Nayan Bedia
‘Love, Sex and Tragedy in Japanese Literature and History’ with Lyman Gamberton
‘Sex, gender and power in Imperial China’ with Alex Nachescu
LoveFriday welcome the summer LiveFriday to the Ashmolean for an evening dedicated to Love. Visitors will be invited to seek out love in the museum’s collection; through musical and theatrical performances and interactive workshops. Offering a shared journey, whether as a pre-existing couple or about to be acquainted, you can look forward to exploring the Museum and meeting like-minded people.
As part of our Discover Archaeology day, we are delighted to welcome Dr Liam McNamara and Dr Senta German of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.
Dr Liam McNamara will speak on ‘Discovering Tutankhamun at the Ashmolean Museum’. Dr McNamara is currently involved in the preparation of this exciting exhibition, set to open this summer. Previously Dr McNamara has worked on several British Museum projects, having been inspired to pursue a career in Egyptology from the young age of 11. He now specialises in the archaeology of the late Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods.
Dr Senta German will speak on the illicit antiquities trade. She is currently working in the Ashmolean as an Andrew W. Mellon Teaching Curator in the University Engagement Programme and has a particular interest in performance, gender and the impacts of the illicit antiquities trade and forgeries in the study of history.
This is set to be a fascinating afternoon of archaeological talks by passionate experts in their fields.
What do St. Augustine, Kafka, Samuel Johnson, William James, Susan Sontag, Douglas Adams, Hitler, and Hamlet all have in common? PROCRASTINATION. If it isn’t ‘the quintessential modern problem’ (New Yorker), it is certainly familiar to all who have picked up a pen, both within and outside academia.
Through papers from a variety of disciplines, the speakers will chart the phenomenon of procrastination, and the fraught moral and political claims it provokes. Who procrastinates, how, and why? Is the concept a moral universal, the product of particular contexts, or unique to the anglophone world? What ‘cures’—and what unexpected defences—have various writers proposed?
OBR would like to invite you to our next event in Oxford on Wednesday 16th July at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.
Since the completion of the Human Genome Project, the birth of next-generation sequencing (NGS) has brought exponentially faster and cheaper nucleic acid sequencing methods to scientists, and takes us tantalisingly closer to an era of personalised medicine.
The scope for clinical applications of NGS seems boundless, and this event will provide deeper insights into how academia, established industry and budding start-ups can benefit from the latest advances in the field.
Panellists/Speakers
Gordon Sanghera – CEO of Oxford Nanopore
Stephen Little – CEO of Premaitha Health &
VP of Personalised Healthcare at QIAGEN
Neil Ward – UK District Marketing Manager at Illumina
Anna Schuh – Head of the Molecular Diagnostics Centre at University of Oxford
Join our expert panel from academia and industry speakers to discuss the most crucial challenges in next generation sequencing and its potential applications.
Informal networking drinks will follow the main event.
A public meeting with a short introductory talk followed by questions and discussion.
The war to end all wars
Thursday 17 July, 7:30pm to 9:00pm
Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates
All welcome
Organised by Oxford Communist Corresponding Society.
This is the first in a three-part series of public meetings on violence and war. The three meetings of the series are:
Thursday 17 July
The war to end all wars
Thursday 21 August
The anti-war movement
Thursday 25 September
The end of violence
All are from 7:30pm to 9:00pm in the Town Hall
The World Humanist Congress, held every three years, is a unique event bringing together humanists from over forty countries under the auspices of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. The 19th Congress is being organised by the British Humanist Association and will feature three days of plenary sessions in the Sheldonian Theatre, and workshops, talks, and panel discussions in the University of Oxford Examination Schools about Freedom of Thought and Expression: Forging a 21st Century Enlightenment. Confirmed speakers include: Jim Al-Khalili, Joan Bakewell, Richard Dawkins, A C Grayling, PZ Myers, Taslima Nasrin, Phillip Pullman, Wole Soyinka and Peter Tatchell.
Sue Bolton and Fiona Ruck, smoking cessation specialists, look at the effects of passive smoking and their campaign for smoke-free homes and cars across Oxfordshire.
The talk will include myth-busting statistics and facts covering the effects of passive smoking on both adults and children, as well as a detailed look into what is in the cigarette smoke that is causing the adverse effects. Sue and Fiona will also look at local and national responses to this public health issue, including the Smoke Free Homes and Cars Pledge project.
Our speakers have worked as registered nurses and health visitors and worked for years in smoking cessation, including as a smoking and pregnancy specialist and as a smoking and young person’s specialist for Oxford Smoking Advice Service.