Deconstruction as Old Testament midrash, with New Testament implications.

Valentine Cunningham is a University Lecturer (CUF) in English, Professor of English Language and Literature and Vice-President of Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. He has previously served as Dean of Corpus as well as Chair of the Oxford English Faculty, and was made a titular Professor of English Language and Literature in 1996. He works widely across literary-historical-cultural periods, areas and genres, as well as in literary theory. Originally and still a Victorianist, he has edited the Blackwells Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetics, Adam Bede (Oxford World Classics) and Reading Victorian Poetry Now (forthcoming, 2011). He maintains a strong interest in fiction, especially more recent fiction including Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch. A main research interest has been and remains the literature of the 1930s, not least the writing of the Spanish Civil War. In more recent times, he has published extensively on musico-literary topics, on Theology- and Bible-and-Literature, as well as in literary theory.

Upstairs, in the function room, at the Mitre. 7:30pm with drinks and nibbles served from 7pm.

Please share the event with anyone who might be interested.

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.

Professor of Caribbean Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths University, Joan Anim-Addo brings us her voice on Black Women’s Writing and the place of the Black figure in the Humanities. This event will be hosted in connection with Oxford ACS.

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a persistent interest in technology emerged in both avant-garde and mainstream literature, and this multimedia presentation by Dr Eric White (Oxford Brookes University) and collaborators examines how radical reading and writing pushed the boundaries of technology into fascinating, and sometimes disturbing, new spaces (ages 12+).
Part of the Oxford Brookes University OutBurst festival at Pegasus, 6-10 May 2014. #OutBurst2014

We are delighted to welcome Anushka Asthana to Oxford on the 6th of May!

She is the Political Correspondent for Sky News, the Policy Editor at The Observer and was formerly the Chief Political Correspondent at The Times. In 2006 she won the Lawrence Stern fellowship for journalism.

This will be an incredibly interesting event for anyone interested in journalism, politics or media.

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.

Professor Roger Griffin (Oxford Brookes University), author of ‘Terrorist’s Creed’, will draw upon actual examples of terrorist attacks and a number of films in this talk to help explain why ‘ordinary’ individuals carry out violent attacks, and what possibilities might exist for deradicalization (for years 14+).
As part of the Oxford Brookes University Festival, Outburst, at Pegasus, 6-10 May 2014. #OutBurst2014

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

The spiritual and second-order sense of scripture, according to which, for example, the crossing of the Red Sea denotes Baptism, and Jacob’s ladder denotes the cross, presents at least two epistemological challenges. First, the history of interpretation suggests that some kind of collective judgment has been made between acceptable and unacceptable interpretations, but the rules for making these judgments are unclear. Second, for a variety of reasons, spiritual interpretations of specific persons, objects or events in scripture cannot add to theological knowledge through argumentation. A further challenge, that the spiritual sense depends on belief in providential special divine action (SDA), ought not to exclude the study of this interpretation according to its own principles but may have contributed to a comparative neglect of this topic. Despite its historical popularity and influence, recent academic work on the spiritual sense has therefore been limited.

In this seminar, I examine the spiritual sense in the light of recent work in neuroscience. I argue that although particular spiritual interpretations are dependent on a body of pre-existing theological propositions, and cannot add to these propositions directly, this does not mean that these interpretations lack cognitive value. On the contrary, the spiritual sense is the fruit of a kind of insight most commonly associated with the right hemisphere of the brain, associating embodied experiences with otherwise abstract theological statements and integrating such statements within shared narratives. I further examine work on partial brain dysfunction to underline the risks involved from a neglect of the spiritual sense, and consider practical implications for religious life.

Dr Pinsent is Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, a member of the Theology and Religion Faculty at Oxford University and a research fellow of Harris Manchester College. He was formerly a physicist at CERN, has degrees in philosophy and theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University and a second doctorate, in philosophy, from St Louis University. He is the author of The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics: Virtues and Gifts, and a wide range of other publications on virtue ethics, neurotheology, science and religion, the philosophy of the person, divine action, and the nature of evil.

THIS SEMINAR WILL BE HELD AT THE SUTRO ROOM, TRINITY COLLEGE AT 8:30PM, PRECEDED BY DRINKS AT 8:15PM.

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

Led by David Aldridge, an academic philosopher, educationalist and experienced role-playing enthusiast, this evening is intended for curious or experienced gamers alike to sample Dungeons and Dragons, celebrating collaborative storytelling and raising serious questions about ethics, metaphysics, and our own potential as human beings (ages 16+).
Part of the Oxford Brookes University festival, Outburst, at Pegasus, 6-10 may 2014. #OutBurst2014

A collaboration between the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre and the Archway Foundation (an Oxford-based mental health charity), this event will feature writing produced by the Archway Foundation’s services during workshops with Brookes’ creative writing students.

In this lecture series, Naomi Richman explores the evolution of the ideas central to major global belief-systems such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Marxism, and their status in the modern world from a social-scientific and secular perspective.

6 Lectures run on Mondays starting the 12th May.
6-7pm, Roy Griffiths Room. ARCO Building, Keble College.
Free, open to all, and followed by discussion.

Weeks 1 and 2: Christianity and Secularisation. Week 3: Buddhism. Week 4: Judaism. Week 5: Islam. Week 6: Marxism, Nationalism and Scientific Humanism

For more information, contact Dr Bea Prentiss,

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.

Why is laughter such an important human social tool? Neuroscientist and stand-up comedian Prof Sophie Scott will discuss her research on laughter (and apparently rats laugh too!).

Magnificence, Love and Scaffolds: Politics at the Court of Henry VIII, With Dr Suzannah Lipscomb
Saturday 17 May, 11am–12pm, Ioannou Centre

Historian, author, and broadcaster Dr Suzannah Lipscomb will speak on the politics of spectacle, persuasion, magnificence, and the politics of love at the court of Henry VIII. The court revolved around the splendid person of the king himself. And although politics was the only game worth playing, it was a dangerous game, ‘for the most part’, Sir Thomas More observed, ‘played on scaffolds’.

Tickets £8/£7
http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ticketsoxford/#search=Magnificence

How does the brain work?
And how can we switch on and off specific neurons?
Join us for a Pint of Science with top academics from Oxford University.

You ever wanted to understand more about climate change? Is it real? what are the consequences?
Come join us for an expert panel from Oxford University who will shed some light on this highly debated subject

When is a volcano going to erupt and how do you measure that?
What is Magma and how can we start studying it?

These questions and more will be explained by top academics from Oxford University.
More details on our website.

In “The Soul of the World”, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today’s fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. Join us for what is sure to be a fascinating, thought provoking evening with one of our most high profile philosophers.

How can we rewild animals to today’s environment?
How does the future of lethal viruses is going to be? Are they going to stick around with us as long as humanity exists

Self-confessed social media anorak Catherine Warrilow of Seriously PR will discuss why some brands stand out online and how you can use social media to make sure you’re noticed – and remembered. Catherine will provide an introduction to social media for craft businesses, giving you tips and advice to build your brand online as an independent creative. Before the talk begins at 19.00, you are invited to grab a glass of wine and get networking!

event is free

You are warmly welcome to attend a film showing and after-talk about a spiritual community in Germany, living life with a focus on meditation, and the true nature of our reality as human beings. You are invited with any questions or sharings to put to residents of this community who are making a UK tour this month.
We would love to see you there.