David Mitchell, author of ‘Cloud Atlas’, will be discussing his new book ‘The Bone Clocks’.

William Buckland: Geologist, theologian, palaeontologist.

What rules the world? The stomach, according to William Buckland. He’s the man who described the first dinosaur from a jaw bone found in Oxfordshire and named it the Megalosaurus. He pioneered the study of cropology (the study of fossil poo) and he’s the man who set about sampling every animal in existence, even the heart of a King. As part of the Oxford Playhouse’s season of Radical Thinking, come Professor Jim Kennedy introduces the man behind the discoveries, the ambition and most importantly the food.

Fossils are not just a thing of the past – every year more prehistoric discoveries are made that inform our knowledge of Dinosaurs. In the concluding talk of our Palaeontology mini-season Dr Tim Ewin, from London’s Natural History Museum, will explain how people go about finding Dinosaurs in Britain today. Tim will discuss significant recent finds and how you can get your palaeontology hat on and find your very own Dinosaur…

Reproducibility is a central principle of scientific research and its importance is now increasingly emphasised. Several fields such as cancer drug discovery, social psychology and computational science are said be undergoing a credibility crisis due to irreproducible results and initiatives to address this are springing up from research communities, funders and other stakeholders.

What does reproducibility mean to your research and how could researchers in Oxford, both individually and as an institution, take steps to promote greater reproducibility of findings? Come along for an evening of discussion and explore this topic with the Oxford Open Science group. We look forward to hearing your views!

Session organisers: Simon Benjamin and Victoria Watson

The seminar will focus on the role of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the modern inter-Orthodox and inter-Christian relations, and the role of the Patriarchate in global politics.

COIN are hosting the launch of international best-seller Naomi Klein’s new book “This Changes Everything”. Tickets for the 8 October event are on sale now.

The Future of the Church of England:
A debate on the future of the Church of England, featuring speakers Revd Dr Andrew Davison, Professor Robin Gill, Lord Mawson, and Revd Canon Anna Norman-Walker. Chaired by Professor Linda Woodhead and introduces by The Rt Hon Charles Clarke.

Christian Fuchs, Professor of Social Media at Westminster University, will lead the discussion of his recently published book Social Media: A Critical Introduction, which navigates the controversies and contradictions of the complex digital media landscape.

Exploring the role of social media in contemporary popular movements including the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, and drawing on theorists including Marx, Weber, Habermas, and Durkheim, Professor Fuchs asks:

Is Google good or evil?
Is Facebook a surveillance threat to privacy?
Does Twitter enhance democracy?
What did WikiLeaks reveal about political accountability, the transparency of power, and new forms of cultural censorship?

Egyptomania: The Allure of Ancient Egypt
With Henrietta McCall, Department of the Middle East, British Museum

2pm Saturday, 11 October 2014 at Ashmolean Museum | Venue Information

Henrietta McCall talks about the enduring appeal of ancient Egypt in western culture. She assesses how it began with Napoleon in the early 19th century; how symbols and imagery from antiquity inspired architecture, gardens, furniture and fashion; and how in the 1920s that appeal reached its climax with the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Join Professor Nick Bostrom for a talk on his new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, and a journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life.

The book talk will be followed by a book signing and drinks reception.

This book talk will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jupxhH9mE-g

About the book:
The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains.

If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.

But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?

‘Tutankhamun and Co. Ltd’: Arthur Weigall and the Discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb

With Julie Hankey, author of ‘A Passion for Egypt: Arthur Weigall, Tutankhamun and the Curse of the Pharaohs’

Ashmolean Lecture Theatre

Tue 14 Oct, 2.30‒3.30pm

From 1905 to 1912, Arthur Weigall was Howard Carter’s successor as Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt. He used his position to conduct a campaign against government practice of allowing amateur collectors to excavate for private profit. With Tutankhamun’s discovery, Weigall came into open conflict with Carter’s patron, Lord Carnarvon, over his exclusive contract with The Times, and ‒ at a time of political unrest in Egypt ‒ over his assumption of rights to the contents of the tomb.

Globalized finance poses major challenges for emerging economies. The Gobal Economic Governance Programme’s Annual Lecture provides an exciting chance to hear from one of Latin America’s leading policy makers. Governor Vergara will share his experiences and insights on the most pressing opportunities and challenges facing emerging economies, particularly in Latin America. How can Latin American countries foster financial stability and economic growth in this new era of global finance? What are the most and least effective policy responses? What can we learn from Chile’s experience?

Sue Thomas, ‘Ghostly Presences: James Potter Lockhart and Jane Maxwell Lockhart in Jean Rhys’s Writing’. Sue Thomas, Professor of English at La Trobe University, Australia, is a Visiting Scholar at OCLW in October 2014. In this informal seminar, she will be talking about her biographical research on the novelist Jean Rhys, whose works include Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea.

Speakers: Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (University College London) and Professor Gil Loescher (Refugee Studies Centre)

Refugee and Forced Migration Studies has grown from being a concern of a relatively small number of scholars and policy researchers in the 1980s to a global field of interest with thousands of students worldwide studying displacement either from traditional disciplinary perspectives or as a core component of newer programmes across the Humanities and Social and Political Sciences. Today the field encompasses both rigorous academic research which may or may not ultimately inform policy and practice, as well as action-research focused on advocating in favour of refugees’ needs and rights. This authoritative Handbook critically evaluates the birth and development of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and analyses the key contemporary and future challenges faced by academics and practitioners working with and for forcibly displaced populations around the world.

In this talk, Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Professor Gil Loescher, two of the Handbook’s editors, will discuss how the book provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the key intellectual, political, social and institutional challenges arising from mass displacement in the world today. Laying out the thinking behind the Handbook, they will examine how it addresses these challenges and attempts to unify a diverse, evolving and crucial field.

Professor Loescher and Dr Fiddian-Qasmiyeh will be joined by a number of the Handbook’s authors, who will reflect on their own contributions to the volume and highlight some of cutting-edge approaches and challenges emerging in their respective areas of expertise.

Order your copy of the Handbook online from Oxford University Press by 30 December 2014 and receive a 30% discount. Click here for details.

Light refreshments will be provided after the event.

In this lecture, Rory O. Millson, Partner at Cravath, Swaine and Moore LLP, will explore the legality and ethics of the increasingly common use of military drones to kill ‘enemy combatants’ in the ongoing fight against terrorist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Weekly seminars on the ubiquitous but underexplored phenomenon of procrastination, the ‘thief of time’. Today’s seminar sees Professor Vince Crawford (Economics) on ‘Now or Later?’

The Emma Press is celebrating the launch of Stephen Sexton’s new pamphlet, ‘Oils’, with a special event featuring Stephen and three other Emma Press poets.

STEPHEN SEXTON studies at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast and Oils is his debut pamphlet.

JOHN FULLER lives in Oxford and will be reading from his new collection of prose poems, The Dice Cup, just published by Chatto & Windus.

KIRSTEN IRVING co-runs Sidekick Books and her first full collection, ‘Never Never Never Come Back’, was published by Salt in 2012.

ANDREW WYNN OWEN recently won the Newdigate Prize. He studies in Oxford and his first pamphlet, Raspberries for the Ferry, was published in March by the Emma Press.

Refreshment available.

Seminar by Prof Beverly Clack, Professor in the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford Brookes University.

The Jerash and Decapolis Cities
With Linda Farrar, historian and archaeologist

Ashmolean Lecture Theatre

Thurs 16 Oct, 2–4pm (inc. tea & cake),

Today, the ancient Greco-Roman Decapolis region straddles the countries of Jordan, Israel and Syria. This lecture explores the distinct characteristics of the cities of Jerash, Gedara, Pella and Philidelphian (Aman) and tells the stories of each cities unique role in the development of this historic region.

Overture to the Oxford Ceramics Fair
With Janice Tchalenko, potter

Ashmolean Lecture Theatre

Fri 17 Oct, 2–3.30pm

Janice Tchalenko is an award-winning potter whose work has been exhibited internationally and commissioned for retail outlets such as John Lewis. In this lecture Janice talks about her work and inspiration.

Part of the Oxford Internet Institute’s Bellwether Lectures series.

Speaker: Caroline Haythornthwaite
Learning has left the classroom. It is being re-constituted across distance, discipline, workplace, and media as the social and technical interconnectivity of the Internet challenges existing structures for learning and education. The new ‘e-learning’ is more than a learning management system – it is a transformation in how, where, and with whom we learn that supports formal, informal and non-formal learning, life-long learning, just-in-time learning, and in ‘as much time as I have’ learning. But to do so, e-learning depends on the power of crowds and the support of communities engaged in the participatory practices of the Internet. We are networked in our learning, but also in our joint construction of knowledge and its legitimation, and in the social and technical practices that support knowledge co-construction, learning and education. This talk explores the emerging trends and forces that are radically reshaping learning and knowledge practices. The talk further explores the changing landscape of learning and knowledge practices with attention to motivations for contributing and valuing knowledge in crowds and communities, and the implications for future knowledge practices.

Nick is Central Europe Correspondent for BBC news. He will introduce his new book, published by Yale University Press, which documents centuries of civilization along Europe’s great waterway, and has been compared to the classic work of Claudio Magris.

“Everywhere the Glint of Gold”: Colourising Tutankhamun’s Tomb
With Liam McNamara, Ashmolean Keeper for Ancient Egypt and Sudan and co-curator of ‘Discovering Tutankhamun’ exhibition

Ashmolean Lecture Theatre

Sat 18 Oct, 2‒3pm

Howard Carter’s evocative description of the ‘wonderful things’ he saw upon entering Tutankhamun’s tomb continues to capture the public’s imagination. The excavation of the tomb and its contents were documented in black and white photographs taken by Harry Burton. This talk explores the various methods by which the excavators – and their successors – sought to ‘colourise’ the contents of the king’s tomb, from 20th-century gouache paintings on ivory, to the latest in 21st-century digital imaging techniques.

Eye of Horus Necklace workshop
With London based jewellery design company Tatty Devine

Ashmolean Museum

Sat 18 Oct, 2 – 3.30pm

Influenced by the ‘Discovering Tutankhamun’ exhibition, join esteemed independent design company Tatty Devine and make your own ‘Eye of Horus’ necklace at this exclusive jewellery making workshop. Learn the essential techniques and skills needed to create a necklace in gold and sapphire mirror Perspex. Create your perfect statement piece or a one-of-a-kind gift that’s fit for a Pharaoh.

Speaker: Lina Molokotos-Liederman (Uppsala University)
The first part of the seminar will look at the Orthodox Christian approach of addressing social issues of poverty, injustice and inequality, and the concept of Orthodox diakonia. The second part will focus on Greece as a case study, discussing the response of the Church to the social costs of the economic crisis (its charitable social welfare activities), but also the impact of this crisis on the Church itself.

As the dust settles after the Scottish referendum and the UK gears up for the next general election, the Oxford Martin School and the Department of Politics and International Relations bring constitutional experts together to debate what next for the United Kingdom?

Panel:

Professor Iain McLean, Professor of Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford and specialist in devolution
Dr Scot Peterson, Bingham Research Fellow in Constitutional Studies and Junior Research Fellow in the Social Sciences, University of Oxford
Chair: Mure Dickie, Financial Times Scotland Correspondent

There will be a drinks reception after the debate, all welcome

About the speakers

Professor Iain McLean was born in Edinburgh and went to school there. He came to England for the first time as a student at Oxford where he obtained his MA, M.Phil and D.Phil. He was a college tutor in an undergraduate college for 13 years, during which the college scaled the heights of PPE. He has worked at the Universities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Warwick, and Oxford, and has held visiting professorships at Washington & Lee, Stanford, Yale, and the Australian National University.

He has been an elected councillor on Tyne & Wear County Council (committee chair) and Oxford City Council (group leader). In recent years he has principally worked on UK public policy, and started the Department of Politics and International Relations Public Policy Unit in 2005.

His research areas and insterests are:

Public policy, especially UK. Specialisms in devolution; spatial issues in taxation and public expenditure; electoral systems; constitutional reform; church and state.
The Union (of the United Kingdom) since 1707. Rational-choice approaches to political history
Dr Scot Peterson primarily in Colorado, in the United States, where he did his undergraduate work in Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He earned a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago in Political Science, and attended law school at the University of California (Boalt Hall) in Berkeley. After practicing law for fifteen years in Colorado he came to Oxford, where he earned his doctoral degree.

He is interested in the constitutional history of the United Kingdom and of the United States, focusing particularly on matters arising from the relationship between church and state. His D.Phil. thesis was about the religious establishments, or the lack of them, in the three nations that make up Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) in the early twentieth century. He is concerned with questions of why those relationships have been maintained in recent history, despite the supposed ‘secularization’ inherent in modern Western democracies. He analyzes them as political and historical phenomena, engaging in archive research and applying rational choice methodology.

The Annual Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture:
Professor Tom Cook, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair in Ethics and Justice, Professor of Sociology, Psychology, Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research, will be this year’s lecturer.

This paper identifies three major assumptions of the current evidence-based policy movement that seeks to use scientific methods to identify effective social policy initiatives: (1) Randomized controlled trials are the best way of identifying what works and should be preferred for building up an evidence base or should even constitute the only legitimate inputs into that base; (2) In policy research it is not difficult to label the causal agent in general language; and (3) Extrapolating from past causal findings (however secure) to future policy contexts depends on formal sampling theory. Empirical evidence is used to address these three assumptions. Each is found to be overstated. A somewhat different model of evidence-based research is briefly proposed. It makes more realistic assumptions about how research can contribute to evidence-based policy and respects the conceptual interdependencies between creating high quality tests of causal propositions, correctly labeling the cause (or effect), and minimizing the extrapolation from past knowledge to future applications.

In this talk by Tom Steinberg, we will explore how previous epochal technologies (e.g steam, nuclear) affected politics and government but didn’t require leaders to develop any brand new, specialist skills in order to govern effectively. You didn’t have to be a master of atomic physics to understand what the Bomb would do, and reading classic texts like Machiavelli could still help you negotiate, even with the Soviets. But the digital revolution is different. It brings policy options to the table that simply didn’t exist before, and makes the standard forms of public sector delivery implode (think Healthcare.gov or the NHS IT disaster). In this seminar, Tom will discuss the nature of this gap, and float some possible solutions.

Please note that this seminar will be conducted ‘off-the-record’ under Chatham House rules and will be followed by a drinks reception.

Tutankhaten ‒ Prince and King
With Dr Marianne Eaton-Krauss, independent scholar

Ashmolean Lecture Theatre

Tue 21 Oct, 2.30‒ 3.30pm

The name of Tutankhamun is familiar throughout the world, yet academics continue to dispute not only the identity of the boy king’s parents, but also the meaning of the name he was given at birth, Tutankhaten. This lecture explores these questions and examines objects that document his life up until the moment the decision was taken to alterhis name to Tutankhamun, marking the conclusion of a campaign to restore the god Amun to his traditional place at the head of the pantheon from which he had been toppled by the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ‘The Poet Who Doesn’t Know: Gabriele D’Annunzio’. British cultural historian and biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett will be delivering a lecture on her award-winning biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Pike. The Pike tells the story of the poet-turned-dictator who wrote ‘One must make one’s life as one makes a work of art’. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Costa Biography Award and the Duff Cooper Prize. Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s previous books are Cleopatra and Heroes.