Panel:

Professor Charles Godfray, Director, Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food and author of the chapter How can 9-10 Billion People be Fed Sustainably and Equitably by 2050?
Professor Ian Goldin, Director, Oxford Martin School, Editor of Is the Planet Full? and author of the chapter Governance Matters Most
Professor Sarah Harper, Director, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, Oxford Martin School and author of the chapter Demographic and Environmental Transitions
Professor Yadvinder Malhi, Director, Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests, Oxford Martin School and author of the chapter The Metabolism of a Human-Dominated Planet
Dr Toby Ord, James Martin Fellow, Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology and author of the chapter Overpopulation or Underpopulation?
The panel will discuss whether our planet can continue to support a growing population estimated to reach 10 billion people by the middle of the century.

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

This panel discussion will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFIqDQP1Vjc

About the Book:
What are the impacts of population growth? Can our planet support the demands of the ten billion people anticipated to be the world’s population by the middle of this century?

While it is common to hear about the problems of overpopulation, might there be unexplored benefits of increasing numbers of people in the world? How can we both consider and harness the potential benefits brought by a healthier, wealthier and larger population? May more people mean more scientists to discover how our world works, more inventors and thinkers to help solve the world’s problems, more skilled people to put these ideas into practice?

In this book, leading academics with a wide range of expertise in demography, philosophy, biology, climate science, economics and environmental sustainability explore the contexts, costs and benefits of a burgeoning population on our economic, social and environmental systems.

Senia Paseta (Associate Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford) will discuss her new book with:

Roy Foster (Carroll Professor of Irish History, University of Oxford)
Desmond King (Andrew Mellon Professor of American Government, University of Oxford)
Tara Stubbs (University Lecturer in English Literature, OUDCE)

There will be plenty of time for audience questions. Free, all welcome and no booking required.

About the book:

A major new history of the experiences and activities of Irish nationalist women in the early twentieth century, from learning and buying Irish to participating in armed revolt. Using memoirs, reminiscences, letters and diaries, Senia Pašeta explores the question of what it meant to be a female nationalist in this volatile period, revealing how Irish women formed nationalist, cultural and feminist groups of their own as well as how they influenced broader political developments. She shows that women’s involvement with Irish nationalism was intimately bound up with the suffrage movement as feminism offered an important framework for women’s political activity. She covers the full range of women’s nationalist activism from constitutional nationalism to republicanism, beginning in 1900 with the foundation of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) and ending in 1918 with the enfranchisement of women, the collapse of the Irish Party and the ascendancy of Sinn Fein.

Public Seminar: Thinking About the Brain

With speakers: Professor Chris Kennard; Professor Glyn Humphreys; Professor David Lomas; Dr Joshua Hordern; Dr Ayoush Lazikani; Dr Matthew Broome; Dr Chrystalina Antoniades

Thursday 20 November, 5.30-8.30pm
Ashmolean Education Centre

The evening will offer an opportunity to explore current research into the brain and the mind from a wide range of perspectives, from medieval literature to contemporary art and neuroscience.

Thinking About the Brain is a public seminar, forming part of the developing collaboration between the Ashmolean Museum’s University Engagement Programme and Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. It is being co-organised by Dr Jim Harris, Andrew W Mellon Foundation Teaching Curator at the Ashmolean, and Dr Chrystalina Antoniades, Lecturer in Medicine at Brasenose College and Senior Research Fellow in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences.

Open to all and free of charge. To ensure a place, please follow this link to e-mail Dr Jim Harris (at jim.harris @ ashmus.ox.ac.uk), or telephone 01865 288 287.

A History of Ancient Greece in Fifty Lives
With David Studdard, historian

Saturday 22 November, 2–3pm
Ashmolean Museum Lecture Theatre

David Studdard creates a vivid picture of life in all arenas of the Ancient Greek world. Delve into the worlds of mathematics, geography, rhetoric, historiography, painting and sculpture; explore the accounts of historians, mystics, poets, dramatists, political commentators and philosophers; and travel through the ancient realms of Sicily, Afghanistan, Macedonia and Alexandria.

Tickets are £5/£4 concessions and booking is recommended as places are limited.
Visit: http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

Join us for a critical review of the extent to which businesses promote HR in practice. Talk of corporate responsibility, pro-bono schemes and language of sustainability and accountability continues to increase but in reality are businesses doing enough to promote and protect Human Rights? There will be the chance to talk more informally with the speakers after the event over drinks and nibbles.

Panel Speakers: Rae Lindsay (Clifford Chance), Peter Frankental (Amnesty International)

Chair: Dr Lawrence Hill-Cawthorne, University of Reading

Dr Robin Darwall-Smith, Magdalen College Archivist, will discuss the impact of the First World War on Magdalen College, and among the themes he will consider are: the College in the summer of 1914; how Magdalen functioned during the war and who was there during this time; what happened to its members on the front; and how the College chose to remember the war afterwards.

Including a chance to see a related exhibition in our Old Library, which was curated by Robin and our Archives Assistant, Ben Taylor.

All welcome.

The Anglo-Scottish Border: a Photographic Tour
With Tim Porter, lecturer

Medieval Scotland Afternoon Tea Lecture Series

Tuesday 25 November, 2–4pm
At the Ashmolean Museum (Lecture Theatre)

With the 2014 referendum for Scottish independence, the historic relationship between Scotland and England has recently been a prevalent topic of political discussion. This year also marks the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn, a significant Scottish victory in the First War of Scottish Independence. These lectures explore three key aspects of the Anglo-Scottish relationship during the Middle Ages.

Tickets are £9/£8 concessions (includes tea & cake), and booking is recommended as places are limited.
Visit: http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

Magic Textiles (In association with the Oxford Asian Textiles Group)
With Dr Susan Conway, Research Associate, School of Oriental and Asian Studies

Wednesday 26 November, 6–8.30pm
Ashmolean Museum Education Centre

Dr Conway studies the culture, arts and crafts of Asia, specialising in Thailand and the Shan States of Burma. Following the September launch of her new book, ‘Tai Supernaturalism’, at the Royal Geographical Society, she will speak about textiles with supposed mystical and magical properties.

Tickets are £3 on the door, no advance booking is required. OATG members go free. Entry via St Giles Street.

Unlocking Archives is a series of lunchtime talks about current research in Balliol College’s special collections. Today, Naomi Tiley and Fiona Godber of Balliol Library will speak about ‘Buried Treasure? Hidden Early Printed Books at Balliol.’ Friday of 7th week (28 November) at 1pm.

All welcome! Feel free to bring your lunch. The talks will last about half an hour, to allow time for questions and discussion afterwards and a closer look at some of the Balliol MSS discussed. All Unlocking Archives talks take place at Balliol’s Historic Collections Centre, St Cross Church, Manor Road OX1 3UH (next door to Holywell Manor). Map & directions: http://archives.balliol.ox.ac.uk/Services/visit.asp#f

C.R.W. Nevinson in the 21st Century
With Jan Cox, art historian

Friday 28 November, 2–3pm
At the Ashmolean Museum

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889‒1946) was one of the most famous British war artists working during the First World War. Art historian Jan Cox examines the way that Nevinson, also a renowned etcher and lithographer, has been depicted more recently in television programmes and books.

Tickets are £5/£4 concessions and booking is recommended as places are limited.
Visit: http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

Alison Light will discuss her new book Common People: The History of An English Family, which has been shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, with:

Laura Marcus (Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford)
Selina Todd (Lecturer in Modern British History, University of Oxford)
Lyndal Roper (Regius Professor of History, University of Oxford).

There will be time for general discussion and audience questions. Please join us for a sandwich lunch from 12:45, with discussion from 13:00 to 13:45.

About the book:

Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times, but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond. Epic in scope and deep in feeling, Common People is a family history but also a new kind of public history, following the lives of the migrants who travelled the country looking for work. Original and eloquent, it is a timely rethinking of who the English were – but ultimately it reflects on history itself, and on our constant need to know who went before us and what we owe them.

Why Poetry Matters
Part of the Why Philosophy Matters Series

With Professor Max de Gaynesford, University of Reading

Wednesday 3 December, 6‒7.30pm, Education Centre

Join esteemed scholars to talk about the hot topics in contemporary culture and philosophical thought. In partnership with Oxford Brookes University and sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Free, no booking required, seats allocated on a first-come first-served basis. Entry via St Giles’ Street, drinks from 5.45pm.

Medieval Scottish Gothic: Glory and Excess
With Tim Porter, lecturer

(ticket includes tea & cake!)
Friday 5 December, 2–4pm
Ashmolean Museum Lecture Theatre

With the 2014 referendum for Scottish independence, the historic relationship between Scotland and England has recently been a prevalent topic of political discussion. This year also marks the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn, a significant Scottish victory in the First War of Scottish Independence. These lectures explore three key aspects of the Anglo-Scottish relationship during the Middle Ages.

Tickets are £9/£8 concessions (includes tea & cake), and booking is recommended as places are limited.

Part of a Medieval Scotland Afternoon Tea Lecture Series.
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

William Blake: Apprentice & Master
With Professor Michael Phillips, exhibition curator

Saturday 6 December, 11am‒12pm, Ashmolean Lecture Theatre

Exhibition curator Professor Michael Phillips explains how some of Blake’s best-known works were created and individually produced. This lecture also looks at how Blake developed personally and artistically from an apprentice engraver to a master printmaker.

Tickets are £5/£4 concessions and booking is recommended as places are limited.

This is a William Blake exhibition event. To find out more about our William Blake exhibition, and see a full list of exhibition events, see http://www.ashmolean.org/williamblake/

Special Printing Demonstrations
On a 19th century printing press
With Professor Michael Phillips, exhibition curator

Tuesday 9, Wednesday 10 and Thursday 11 December
11am–12pm & 2–4pm

Join Professor Michael Phillips, guest curator of the exhibition, as he prints on a 19th-century printing press, demonstrating the different stages of the print process. Originally trained as a printmaker, Professor Phillips has a unique insight into William Blake’s printing techniques and has been researching and recreating Blake’s method of relief etched copper plates.

Free with the price of exhibition admission and no additional booking is necessary.
http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/williamblake/events/

Special Printing Demonstrations
On a 19th century printing press
With Professor Michael Phillips, exhibition curator

Tuesday 9, Wednesday 10 and Thursday 11 December
11am–12pm & 2–4pm

Join Professor Michael Phillips, guest curator of the exhibition, as he prints on a 19th-century printing press, demonstrating the different stages of the print process. Originally trained as a printmaker, Professor Phillips has a unique insight into William Blake’s printing techniques and has been researching and recreating Blake’s method of relief etched copper plates.

Free with the price of exhibition admission and no additional booking is necessary.
http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/williamblake/events/

Special Printing Demonstrations
On a 19th century printing press
With Professor Michael Phillips, exhibition curator

Tuesday 9, Wednesday 10 and Thursday 11 December
11am–12pm & 2–4pm

Join Professor Michael Phillips, guest curator of the exhibition, as he prints on a 19th-century printing press, demonstrating the different stages of the print process. Originally trained as a printmaker, Professor Phillips has a unique insight into William Blake’s printing techniques and has been researching and recreating Blake’s method of relief etched copper plates.

Free with the price of exhibition admission and no additional booking is necessary.
http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/williamblake/events/

Anglo Saxon Christmas
With Professor M. J. Toswell, University of Western Ontario

Thursday 11 December, 2–3pm, Ashmolean Lecture Theatre

Aelfric was the most prolific writer of sermons in late Anglo-Saxon England; amongst his many sermons, three were about the birth of Christ. This lecture takes these sermons as a starting point to explore the Anglo-Saxon Christmas and considers the earlier traditions of midwinter festivals and how they merged with Christian nativity stories. Professor Toswell will discuss food, holiday, liturgy and how the days of Christmas would have been spent in a local eorl’s household.

Tickets are £5/£4 concessions and booking is recommended as places are limited.

The Sir David Piper Lecture 2015

Time at the Museum
With Dr Alexander Sturgis, Director of the Ashmolean

Saturday 10 January, 11am–12pm, Taylor Institute
(next door to the Ashmolean Museum)

The Ashmolean’s collections span millennia from about 500,000 years ago to the present day. In this talk, the new Director of the Ashmolean, Dr Alexander Sturgis, considers the role of museums in making the past relevant and looks at the way in which the immediacy of museum objects can both help and hinder historical understanding.

Free, but booking is essential. Visit: http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ticketsoxford/#event=19455

This is a monthly free meeting. This week we have two main talks, one on creating 360degree tours of buildings using Google business, (basically using street view you can walk in and tour round certain buildings) and another creating a title sequence with After Effects & Photoshop. Guest speakers: Guy Henstock and Sathya Vijayendran

Towards a New Era in Printmaking: Innovation in the 18th Century

With Dr Ad Stijnman FRHistS, private researcher

Friday 16 January, 2‒3pm, Ashmolean Lecture Theatre

Printmaking changed dramatically after 1700 with the introduction of new plate-making and plate-printing processes, coloured inks and state of the art print presses. Dr Stijnman looks at this era in which artists, printers, engravers and publishers produced work that astonished audiences. This is a William Blake exhibition event.

Tickets £5/£4 concessions. Booking is essential.

An introductory talk on the Antikythera Mechanism, the first known computer – an astronomical device created by the ancient Greeks

SPEAKER

Professor Peter Heather (Kings College London)

p to the mid-fourth century AD, the language of refuge regularly appears in Roman sources in the context of frontier management. It is employed both of high status individuals, but also – more strikingly – of very much larger groups: certainly several tens of thousands of individuals, and sometimes apparently a hundred thousand plus-strong. The basic political economy of the Empire – powered by unmechanised agricultural production in a world of low overall population densities – meant that there was always a demand for labour, and, in the right circumstances, refugees could expect reasonable treatment. Provided that their arrival posed no military or political threat to imperial integrity, refugees would receive not only lands to cultivate on reasonable terms, but might also be settled in concentrations large enough to preserve structures of broader familial and even cultural identity. In other circumstances, however, imperial control was enforced by direct military action and survivors were sold into slavery and might themselves redistributed as individuals in adverse socio-economic conditions over very wide geographical areas.

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, a distinct change becomes apparent in imperial policy. Some very large refugee groups – particularly those that were Gothic – were granted lands within the Empire on terms which broke with long-established Roman norms. These groups were so large and retained so much autonomy that they posed a distinct threat to the continued integrity of imperial rule over the particular regions in which they were settled. Over time, some of the settlements eventually became the basis of independent successor kingdoms as the power of the west Roman centre unravelled. This transition poses an obvious question. Why did traditional Roman policy towards refugees change so markedly in the late imperial period?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Professor Heather joined the History Department at Kings College London in January 2008 as the Chair of Medieval History. He was educated at Maidstone Grammar School, before moving to New College Oxford to complete his undergraduate degree and doctoral work. Prior to joining King’s, Peter Heather worked at University College London, Yale University and Worcester College, Oxford.

His research interests lie in the later Roman Empire and its successor states. He is widely published in these matters, with a focus on the Goth and Visigoth kingdoms of the Medieval period and publications including The Goths (Oxford, 1996) and (with D. Moncur), Politics, Philosophy, and Empire in the Fourth Century (Liverpool, 2001). In recent years, his research has looked at propaganda in the late Roman elite, and issues of migration and ethnicity among the groups who dismantled the western half of the Roman Empire. Future work is likely to centre on developing legal systems of the Roman Empire and its successor states, and the evolution of particularly Christian authority structures in the same contexts.

Public meeting. Twenty minute talk, one hour discussion. You’re welcome to come along just to listen, or participate actively in the discussion. Free entry, no need to book.

Reading in the Spirit of Blake

With Saree Makdisi, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UCLA

Friday 23 January, 4.30‒5.30pm, Lecture Theatre

Grounded in an exploration of the relationship between words and images in Blake’s illustrated books, this lecture will use his work as the basis of learning to read in the spirit of Blake. Part of the Ashmolean Museum and Blackwell’s Bookshop ‘Inspired by Blake’ Festival.

Tickets £5/£3 concessions. Booking is essential.

The Weinrebe Lectures in Life-Writing:
Roy Foster, Carroll Professor of Irish History at Hertford College, Oxford, will speak on ‘The Making of Saints: Politics, Biography and Hagiography in Modern Irish History.’ Professor Foster is one of Britain’s most eminent historians; he is also a world-renowned biographer and an accomplished and prolific critic, reviewer, and broadcaster. His books include Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and His Family (1976); Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life (1981); Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1988); The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (2001), which won the 2003 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism; W.B. Yeats, A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 (1997), which won the 1998 James Tait Black Prize for biography, and Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939 (2003); and Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances, derived from his Clark Lectures at the University of Cambridge.

SPEAKER

Professor Dawn Chatty (Refugee Studies Centre)

Refugee studies rarely address historical matters; yet understanding ideas about sanctuary, refuge and asylum have long roots in both Western and Eastern history and philosophy. Occasionally the Nansen era of the 1920s is examined or the opening years of, say, the Palestinian refugee crisis are addressed. But by and large the circumstances, experiences and influences of refugees and exiles in modern history are ignored. This article attempts to contribute to an exploration of the past and to examine the responses of one State – the late Ottoman Empire – to the forced migration of millions of largely Muslim refugees and exiles from its contested borderland shared with Tsarist Russia into its southern provinces. The seminar focuses on one particular meta-ethnic group, the Circassians, and explores the humanitarian response to their movement both nationally and locally as well as their concerted drive for assisted self-settlement. The Circassians are one of many groups that were on the move at the end of the 19th century and their reception and eventual integration without assimilation in the region provide important lessons for contemporary humanitarianism.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Professor Dawn Chatty is a social anthropologist whose ethnographic interests lie in the Middle East, particularly with nomadic pastoral tribes and refugee young people. Her research interests include a number of forced migration and development issues such as conservation-induced displacement, tribal resettlement, modern technology and social change, gender and development and the impact of prolonged conflict on refugee young people.

Professor Chatty is both an academic anthropologist and a practitioner, having carefully developed her career in universities in the United States, Lebanon, Syria and Oman, as well as with a number of development agencies such as the UNDP, UNICEF, FAO and IFAD. After taking her undergraduate degree with honours at UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles), she took a Master’s degree in Development Studies from the Institute of Social Studies, the Hague, Netherlands. She returned to UCLA to take her PhD in Social Anthropology under the late Professor Hilda Kuper.

Following the award of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, Dawn spent the period October 2005–September 2007 researching and writing a manuscript on Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Middle East. The volume was published by Cambridge University Press (May 2010) with the title Dispossession and Displacement in the Modern Middle East.

Professor Chatty was Director of the Refugee Studies Centre from 2011-2014.

Berwick to Bannockburn: Why England Went to War with Scotland
With Tim Porter, lecturer

Friday 30 January, 2–4pm, Ashmolean Lecture Theatre
Ticket includes tea & cake

With the 2014 referendum for Scottish independence, the historic relationship between Scotland and England has recently been a prevalent topic of political discussion. This year also marks the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn, a significant Scottish victory in the First War of Scottish Independence. These lectures explore three key aspects of the Anglo-Scottish relationship during the Middle Ages.

Tickets are £9/£8 concessions (includes tea & cake), and booking is recommended as places are limited. http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

The Weinrebe Lectures in Life-Writing:
Peter Hennessy, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield and Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary, University of London, will give a lecture entitled ‘The Importance of Being Personal: Political History and Life’. Lord Hennessy is the country’s foremost historian of government, a regular contributor to the press, and the award-winning author of books including Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (1992); The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution (1995); Distilling the Frenzy: Writing the History of One’s Own Times (2012); Cabinets and the Bomb (2007); Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (2006); The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (2002); and Establishment and Meritocracy (2014).

Ever more people are interested in the social impact that organisations are creating beyond their contributions to the economy (gross value added, employment, etc.). Despite an existent tradition of cost-benefit analyses and other types of evaluations, a genuine interest in assessing ‘social effects’ rigorously is only about to manifest itself. Yet, available methods for assessing social impact often leave social aspects like the strengthening of social cohesion, the enhancement of participation or the reduction of conflict relatively unaddressed.

The talk will outline how we can grasp such perceptibly unfathomable social effects, both conceptually and empirically.

Gorgi Krlev is a DPhil student at Kellogg College and a research associate at the Centre for Social Investment (CSI) at the University of Heidelberg.