Dr Elizabeth Bruton will deliver a lecture on the vital role of wireless amateurs during World War One and their consequential influence on the development of broadcast radio in the early 1920s.

Music Business Seminar to promote Record Store Day. Bit of industry chat and some live music for the price of a pint! Love to see you there 🙂

Rome: an Empire’s Story
With Professor Greg Woolf, University of St Andrews
Saturday 19 April, 11am–12pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

Our April Director’s Special Guest Lecture will be given by Professor Greg Woolf, University of St Andrews, on the subject of the Roman Empire, telling the story of how this mammoth empire was created, how it was sustained in crisis, and how it shaped the world of its rulers and subjects.

Tickets on the door £8/£7

Local craftsman Simon Clements will talk about the techniques and materials used in making stitched and glued canoes, illustrated with model canoes from the Pitt Rivers collection.

These were the original Native American “Utility vehicle” – come along and find out how to make your own and learn more about the boat collection here at the Museum.

The Global Art Compass: New Directions in 21st‒century Art
With Alistair Hicks, author

Tuesday 22 April, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

Alistair Hicks talks about his new book in which he argues that no single curator, critic, or dealer should monopolize our view of contemporary art. Instead, he encourages us to make our own way through the art world: to see art, listen to the artist, and trust our own responses.

Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

Professor Xuejun Zhang
1Institute of Dermatology and Department of Dermatology at No.1 Hospital, Anhui MedicalUniversity, Hefei, Anhui 230022, China.
2Key Laboratory of Dermatology (Anhui Medical University), Ministry of Education, China, Hefei, Anhui 230032, China.

Previously, we performed genetic epidemiological study, family-based linkage study, fine mapping study and candidate gene association study to search for the susceptibility gene/loci of complex diseases. However, these approaches have their limitations in terms of seeking susceptibility genes for complex diseases due to its genetic heterogeneity and phenotype complexity. Now GWAS have been proved to be a powerful approach for the identification of susceptibility genes for common diseases and great progress has been made by GWAS, although it also has its limitations. We have been endeavoring in studying the genetics and susceptibility genes for complex diseases. To fully explore the genetic basis of complex diseases, we can rely on GWAS of SNP and CNV, whole genome sequencing, exome sequencing, whole genome epigenetics, whole genome transcript and whole genome expression and so on. Through deep disease susceptibility genes research, plus what we learn from the function and mechanism studies, we could get a chance to find clinical predictor and to elucidate disease pathogenesis. It will be very useful for disease diagnosis, prediction, risk evaluation and prevention and treatment. The ultimate goals are to develop new drug for treatment and finally make personalized medicine come true. Herein, I would like to give an overall introduction what we have done and learned during seeking susceptibility genes for complex diseases.

The Topic of the Debate segment of the afternoon (from c. 630pm) will be
______ … “THE ART of BEING HUMAN” … _________
We’ll explore how art has been/ could be used for social, personal, and also spiritual development. Do you think Modern Art is an Empty SHELL?!

“Art with no Meaning is Pointless; Aesthetics alone don’t make great Art”
Do you agree with the above statement?

With Wu Tang Clan trying to claim there latest album is ART by releasing only one copy (for sale to the highest bidder!) can anything now be art?

How has art affected you? Does it have to be in a gallery or coffee table book to classify as “a work of art”? What about Graffiti? Performance Art?

Come to the ART BAR and take part in our discussion as part of Festival Taster “Jam Sandwich” on Sat 26th April. Workshops start at 5pm including Hoola Hooping, Costume making, interactive theatre, musical improvisation (jamming)

speakers:
Dr. Rachel Ibreck, Lecturer in Securing Human Rights, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Dr. Julia Viebach, Career Development Lecturer, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford

Arts of War and Peace: Samurai Culture in Japan
With Jasleen Kandhari, art historian

Tuesday 29 April, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

The Edo period in Japan was a peaceful time ruled by the Tokugawa Shoguns. This lecture explores the sumptuous art forms of Samurai culture including arms and armour, lacquerware, gold screen paintings and Japanese tea ceremony wares from the 17th‒19th centuries.

Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

Medieval Craftsmen
With lecturer Tim Porter

Wednesday 30 April, 2–4pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

Tim Porter explores the great legacy of medieval craftsmanship. Under choir stalls and lost in dusty corners, the work of woodcarvers survives in scores of medieval churches. Sometimes a towering rood screen will give their work context, but more often it’s a matter of eloquent fragments, worn by centuries of human touch.

Tickets £9/£8 (includes tea and cake)
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

Speaker: Dr Dallal Stevens (Warwick University)

Part of the Refugee Studies Centre Trinity term Public Seminar Series

The Egyptian Myths: A Guide to Ancient Gods and Legends
With Garry J. Shaw, historian

Thursday 1 May, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

In this introduction to the mysteries of Egyptian mythology, learn about gods, goddesses, and demons, and the parts they play in the netherworld and the cosmos.

Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

Join us in the Edmund Safra Lecture Theatre, Saïd Business School, for a talk by Dr Gavin Yamey MD MPH, a physician and medical journal editor with training in public health who leads the Evidence to Policy initiative E2Pi in the Global Health Group at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Prompted by the 20th anniversary of Investing in Health, the World Bank’s 1993 World Development Report (WDR 1993), in 2013 an independent commission of 25 renowned economists and global health experts from around the world revisited the case for health investment. The commission was chaired by Lawrence Summers, the Chief Economist at the World Bank responsible for choosing global health as the focus of WDR 1993, and co-chaired by Dean Jamison, lead author of WDR 1993. The commissioners aimed to reconsider the recommendations of WDR 1993; to examine how the context for health investment has changed in the past 20 years; and to develop a highly ambitious forward-looking health policy agenda targeting the world’s poor populations. The report, Global Health 2035: A World Converging Within a Generation published in The Lancet, lays out a roadmap for achieving dramatic gains in global health by 2035 through: a grand convergence around infectious, maternal, and child mortality, major reductions in the incidence and consequences of non-communicable diseases, and the promise of pro-poor universal health coverage.

*ALL WELCOME* Join us for a drinks reception immediately afterwards

The surviving polychromy of a second century Roman marble sculpture at the British Museum (BM SC 1597), also known as the Treu Head, was investigated scientifically and rigorously compared to other Greek and Roman works of art. The analysis showed very close similarities between the paint layers of the Treu Head and those of contemporaneous, highly naturalistic mummy portraits from Egypt.

The extremely limited extent of surviving paint on the head and the highly sophisticated painting technique make the reconstruction of the original polychromy a task fraught with difficulties. With the intentional aim of excluding a modern reinterpretation of ancient painting techniques, the colour reconstruction proposed here was created by digitally ‘transplanting’ images of face parts from original Roman mummy portraits onto the Treu Head. The digital transplant involved reshaping the different facial features of the mummy portraits to those of the Treu Head. The novelty of this colour reconstruction lies not only on the thorough scientific reliability of the data, but also on the use of only Roman painted objects.

The final appearance of the head is therefore not intended as a definitive reconstruction of the ‘original’ appearance, but as a ‘possible’ appearance.

Chairman of Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP. David Boies has conducted many of the leading commercial, constitutional and civil liberties cases in the US. He represented Vice President Al Gore in “Bush v Gore” and the Justice Department in “United States v Microsoft”, and has led the battle for civil rights on many fronts including the right of marriage for gay citizens. Mansfield College Annual Hands Lecture, Convener Baroness Helena Kennedy QC.

Subtitle: Forced displacement, coercion and foreign policy

Seminar by Professor Kelly M. Greenhill (Tufts University)

Part of the Refugee Studies Centre Trinity term Public Seminar Series

Writer of autobiography, poetry, fiction and journalism and Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths University Blake Morrison brings some of his latest work and interesting discussion to St. Anne’s.

Popular Representations of Development takes a novel approach to the broad discipline of development studies that goes beyond narrow policy or social science frameworks. Instead, the authors reassess the breadth and popularity of development studies through analysis of literature, films, and other non-conventional forms of representation.

Encompassing the FLJS programmes in development and law, film, and literature, this book colloquium invites attendees to rethink their understanding of development issues in favour of a holistic approach.

Participants include

Professor David Lewis, editor of Popular Representations of Development and Professor of Social Policy and Development, LSE

Dr Catherine Jenkins, Lecturer in Law and Chair of the Centre for Law and Conflict, SOAS

Dr Tim Markham, Head of Department, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck

Dr Amir Paz-Fuchs, Lecturer in Employment Law, University of Sussex

Martin Wynne, Digital Methods Specialist, Oxford e-Research Centre

Join English PEN (the literary network which works to defend and promote free expression) for an evening of poetry and debate, with discussion about how publishing and human rights campaigns can join forces to help writers from across the world (ages 15+).
As part of the Oxford Brookes University Festival, Outburst, at Pegasus, 6-10 May 2014. #OutBurst2014

Novelist Ali Smith, author of Artful, Hotel World, and The Accidental, returns to St. Anne’s after holding the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in European Comparative Literature in 2012.

William Kelly: Artist of Conscience
Thursday 8 May 2014, 6.30-7.30pm (drinks from 6.15pm)

Ashmolean Museum Education Centre
(Evening entrance via St Giles)

Internationally acclaimed US artist William Kelly talks about his life and work. Kelly’s varied career has seen him work as a taxi driver and a welder, before he went on to become a Fulbright Scholar and Dean at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. Today Kelly is known as a painter and printmaker and an artist of conscience, committed to a humanist approach in his creative practice. Part of the Why Art Matters series.

Booking essential – £8/£7
http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ticketsoxford/#search=Conscience

It’s easy to think of pseudoscience existing in a glass case at a museum – something to be examined and critiqued from a safe distance, but not something to touch and to play with. Using examples taken from his own personal experiences in skepticism, Michael Marshall will show what happens when you begin to crack the surface of the pseudosciences that surround us – revealing the surprising, sometimes-shocking and often-comic adventures that lie beneath.

Michael Marshall is the Vice President of the Merseyside Skeptics Society and Project Director of the Good Thinking Society. He regularly speaks with proponents of pseudoscience for the Be Reasonable podcast. His work with the MSS has seen him organising international homeopathy protests and co-founding the popular QED conference. He has written for the Guardian, The Times and New Scientist.

7.30PM start at St. Aldates Tavern, and entry is free, although we do suggest a donation of around £3 to cover speaker expenses. Come along and say hello! All welcome.

Please join the facebook event and invite your friends: https://www.facebook.com/events/767965019903092/

http://oxford.skepticsinthepub.org/Event.aspx/2062/Lifting-The-Lid-Ongoing-adventures-in-the-world-of-pseudoscience

speakers:
William Kelly, Artist and Humanist

Dr. Rama Mani, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies at the University of Oxford and Councillor of the World Future Council

Between the artist and the museum

Friday 9 May 2014, 5-6.30pm (doors will open at 4.45pm)

Ashmolean Museum Headley Lecture Theatre

A symposium with Michael Govan (Humanitas Visiting Professor in Museums, Galleries & Libraries at Oxford University) and Vik Muniz (Artist). Chaired by Paul Hobson (Director, Modern Art Oxford).

Free admission but booking is essential.
http://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/humanitas/museums-galleries-libraries

India: A Short History
With Andrew Robinson, author

Saturday 10 May, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

India is the world’s largest democracy and a fast-growing economy. It is also a civilization with roots more than four thousand years old, including the technically advanced cities of the Indus Valley, the Buddha, Hindu dynasties, the Mughal Empire, and the British Raj. This lecture looks at individuals, ideas, and cultures, as well as the rise and fall of kingdoms, political parties, and economies.

Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

A view from the Pacific: re-envisioning the art museum

Tuesday 13 May 2014, 5-6.30pm (doors will open at 4.45pm)

Ashmolean Museum Headley Lecture Theatre

A lecture by Michael Govan (Humanitas Visiting Professor in Museums, Galleries & Libraries at Oxford University). Chaired by Professor Christopher Brown (Director, Ashmolean Museum). The event will be followed by a drinks reception to which members of the audience are warmly invited.

Free admission but booking is essential.
http://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/humanitas/museums-galleries-libraries

This is a joint event with the Oxford Martin School and the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology

Dr Joanna Bryson, Reader, Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, will ask is artificial intelligence an existential threat to humanity? If so when?

In this talk she will argue that what Dewey, Goertzel and others have described as an intelligence explosion is an accurate description of the impact the socio-technical system of humanity and its culture has had on this planet since the dawn of writing, arguably the first form of AI. This pattern is accelerating with new communication and computation technology creating an ever-more powerful and dynamic system.

Nevertheless, understanding this system is not necessarily beyond the capacity or remit of theoretical biology. Further, she will suggest that controlling the system may be possible by altering the moral agents that compose it, that is, by providing useful abstractions to the general population and/or policy makers. The EPSRC Principles of Robotics (possibly the only national-level general-purpose AI ethics policy statement, although presently completely non-binding) calls this process “transparency” and mandates it.

Speaker:
Professor James Sweeney, Professor of International Law, University of Lancaster