Warburg Memorial Lecture – Joint with BBOWT
Bryophytes in Cambridgeshire have been recorded continuously since 1927 and with increasing intensity in recent decades. A detailed analysis of the records reveals the remarkably dynamic nature of the bryophyte flora of lowland England.

‘Triboreacted materials as functional interfaces in internal combustion engines and medical implants’

Reducing CO2 and particulate emissions to halt global warming and improve the air cleanliness in developed and developing nations is urgent. A similarly large challenge is the provision of medical implants that will serve the ageing population. Both challenges are underpinned by the need to understand important functional interfaces.
This talk will focus on the engine and the hip and will present how an understanding of the interactions between tribology and chemistry/corrosion play a crucial role in the interfacial friction, wear and integrity. The integration of state-of-the-art surface science with engineering simulations in both of these areas enables engineers to create optimised systems with improved performance

Newspapers often feature studies that sound too good to be true and often they aren’t – they are myths.

Some myths may be harmless but the phenomenon affects most kinds of research within evidence-based science. The good news is that there’s a new movement tackling misleading and unreliable research and instead trying to give us results that we can trust.

Using his research in to human pheromones as an example, Tristram will discuss how and why popular myths, including power-posing, are created and how efforts have been made to address the ‘reproducibility crisis’.

Tristram Wyatt is an emeritus fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford and formerly Director of Studies in Biology at OUDCE. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. He’s interested in how animals of all kinds use pheromones to communicate by smell. His Cambridge University Press book on pheromones and animal behaviour won the Royal Society of Biology’s prize for the Best Postgraduate Textbook in 2014. His TED talk on human pheromones has been viewed over a million times. His book Animal behaviour: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Open to all. The talk is designed for researchers from all disciplines and is open to the public.

A lecture exploring the therapist’s use of Spiritual and Religious Interventions.

The lecture will delve into questions such as “what is the most helpful way for God to be present in the counselling room?”, “what Spiritual and Religious Interventions are best used for which mental health disorders?” Does prayer work for stress?

Following the lecture and questions there will be the opportunity to explore setting up a ‘local’ Oxford BACP Spirituality group.

Alistair Ross (Director of Studies in Psychodynamic Studies and Psychology at Oxford University Department for Continuing Education),
Shannon Hood (Counsellor, Clinical Supervisor, Educator, Researcher)
Maureen Slattery-Marsh (Chair of BACP)

In conjunction with BACP Spirituality

Please RSVP to penny.wheeler@conted.ox.ac.uk if you are planning to attend.

In this alternative Valentine’s Day event Dr María del Pilar Blanco (University of Oxford) discusses the art of geriatrics and degeneration in Spanish America at the end of the 1800s, and how it entered the cultural imagination.

Abingdon Area Archaeological & Historical Society members will give FREE talks at Abingdon County Hall Museum every third Saturday of the month starting in February 2019. Each will last 30 minutes and be about a different subject or object in the museum collection.

Talks Schedule:

11am: ‘The Crossley Engine’, by Ruth Weinberg.
This talk will take you back in time to the first half of the twentieth century when Abingdon’s water supply relied on two gas engines and a pump situated in the basement of the County Hall, now Abingdon County Hall Museum. After the refurbishment of the County Hall in 2012, the pump and the water inlet are still in their exact original places and today part of the Museum’s displays.

1pm: The Abingdon Monks’ Map’, by Manfred Brod
The “Monks’ Map” as an example of early English map-making is probably the most important single artefact in the museum. Its origin has long been obscure, but recent work has shown when and why it was made, and by whom.
This talk will discuss the evidence, and consider what the map teaches us about local affairs at the time of its production.

3pm: THE ABINGDON OPHTHALMOSAUR: The Discovery of a Jurassic Sea Beast’ by Jeff Wallis.
Why do archaeologist spend cold and wet winter afternoons trudging around muddy gravel pits? On one particular visit to a quarry near Abingdon just before Christmas 1982 pale grey tell tale signs of weathered rib bones from a 155 million year old marine reptile led to the excavation of a two thirds complete skeleton.
We will describe the process of how this wonderful fossil from the age of Dinosaurs arrived into its current home in Abingdon Museum. We may then proceed to the archaeology showcases downstairs crossing 155 million years ago into the ages of Ice and the first visits by early Humans to what is now Abingdon.
We can look at some of the earliest stone tools to be found in the UK and view a unique flint tool made by some of the last surviving Neanderthal hunters or one of the first modern human groups to range across the Upper Thames Valley.

FREE TALKS
No booking required

Stories for Our Times: Retelling the Norse Myths

The Norse Myths, published by Quercus in 2018, is the latest in a long line of retellings of the myths and legends of medieval Scandinavia; tales that, as the publisher’s blurb rightly points out, ‘have captured the imagination of storytellers and artists for centuries’. Reworking the Norse myths for a commercial press offered an opportunity to reflect on both the longstanding creative appeal of the myths and also the extraordinary resurgence of interest in recent years: what exactly is it about the Vikings and the stories of the Norse gods that resonates with our current cultural climate? This talk will draw out some of the points of connection, and fracture, that a popular retelling rests upon, and suggest some of the ways that a reworking of traditional material can be used to speak to contemporary concerns – including environmental change, gender politics, and the resurgence of the far-right – whilst also seeking to remain faithful to the medieval sources and to the contradictions and plurality of the myths that have come down to us.

About Dr Tom Birkett

Tom Birkett is a graduate of Oxford and St Cross College, where he completed his MA in 2008 and PhD in 2011. He has held a lectureship in Old English at University College Cork since 2012, where he has also introduced Old Norse to the curriculum. He publishes on Old English and medieval Icelandic textual and literary culture, and has recently led two IRC-funded projects in Cork on the translation of medieval poetry, and on the popular perception of the Vikings (the World-Tree Project). His illustrated retelling of the Norse myths was published by Quercus in December.

In mammals the cell-autonomous circadian clock pivots around a transcriptional/post-translational feedback loop. However, we remain largely ignorant of the critical molecular, cell biological, and circuit-level processes that determine the precision and robustness of circadian rhythms: what keeps them on track, and what determines their period, which varies by less than 5 minutes over 24 hours? The origin of this precision and robustness is the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the basal hypothalamus, the principal circadian pacemaker of the brain. The SCN sits atop a circadian hierarchy that sustains and synchronises the innumerable cell-autonomous clocks of all major organs to solar time (and thereby to each other), by virtue of direct retinal innervation that entrains the transcriptional oscillator of the 20,000 or so component cells of the SCN. I shall describe real-time imaging approaches to monitor circadian cycles of gene expression and cellular function in the SCN, and intersectional genetic and pharmacological explorations of the cell-autonomous and circuit-level mechanisms of circadian timekeeping. A particular focus will be on “translational switching” approaches to controlling clock function and the surprising discovery of a central role for SCN astrocytes in controlling circadian behaviour.

Join us at Teddy Hall next week for a fantastic event on the ‘Neuroscience of Dance’ brought to you by the Centre for the Creative Brain!

Science, dance and wine – what more could you want for a Saturday afternoon?

A few (free) tickets are still available, so be quick!

https://www.seh.ox.ac.uk/discover/research/centre-for-the-creative-brain

The beginnings of a celebrity or star culture in the theatre of Shakespeare’s time.
How many women went to Shakespeare’s plays? This talk explores the evidence and significance of female theatre going in the early modern period.

Professor Smith will discuss the beginnings of a celebrity or star culture in the theatre of Shakespeare’s time, discussing notable actors and, in particular, their appeal to women spectators. She’ll look at the evidence, often negative and satirical, about how women at the theatre were perceived, and trace their changing place in audiences as theatre went upmarket in the seventeenth century. Drawing on histories of consumerism and of celebrity, Smith will identify women theatregoers as crucial to the development of the playhouses within the early modern experience economy.

Professor Smith has been a Fellow of Hertford College and Lecturer in the Faculty of English since 1997. She teaches part of the first year paper ‘Introduction to Literary Studies’, the Renaissance paper to second years and Shakespeare. She lectures in the English Faculty on these topics with some of these lectures available as free podcasts from iTunesU. She also teaches on the English Faculty MSt course 1550-1700 and supervises research students on early modern topics.

Schedule:
12:15 – On-site registration & buffet lunch
12:30 – Talk commences
13:30 – Event close

The seminar is open for anyone to attend, registration is essential so please use the register button to confirm your attendance.

Talk followed by questions and discussion

Currently limited tools exist to accurately forecast the complex nature of disease spread across the globe. Dr Moritz Kraemer will talk about the dynamic global maps being built, at 5km resolution, to predict the invasion of new organisms under climate change conditions and continued unplanned urbanisation.

This book talk is co-organised with the Oxford Martin Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease

Vaccination raises ethical issues about the responsibilities of individuals, communities, and states in preventing serious and potentially life-threatening infectious diseases. Such responsibilities are typically taken to be about minimising risks for those who are vaccinated and for those around them. However, there are other ethical considerations that matter when defining the responsibilities of different actors with regard to vaccination. Such ethical considerations are not often given due considerations in the debate on vaccination ethics and policy.

Thus, in this talk Dr Alberto Giubilini aims at offering a defence of compulsory vaccination taking into account not only the importance of preventing the harms of infectious diseases, but also the value of fairness in the distribution of the burdens entailed by the obligation to protect people from infectious diseases. He will offer a philosophical account of the key notions involved in the ethical debate on vaccination, of the types of responsibilities involved, of the possible types of vaccination policies ranked from the least to the most restrictive, and of the reasons why compulsory vaccination is, from an ethical point of view, the best policy available, as it is the most likely to guarantee not only protection from infectious diseases, but also a fair distribution of the burdens and responsibilities involved.

The talk will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

DANSOX presents a one-day conference on the life and work of the great 20th-century choreographer, Sir Kenneth MacMillan (1929-1992). MacMillan stands among the great innovators of his time in theatre, film, art, and music. The conference will discuss his work, the challenges of preserving the record, explore little known early work, his literary and musical choices, design, and choreographic method.

Guest speakers include: the artist and widow of Sir Kenneth, Lady MacMillan; the former Principal and Director of the Royal Ballet, Dame Monica Mason; the music expert, Natalie Wheen; and choreologist, Anna Trevien. Dancers, artists, and filmmakers who worked with Kenneth will join the conversation. A performance/lecture of the reconstruction of ‘Playground’ with Yorke Dance will be held in the JdP at the end of the conference.

Dung beetles in the British Isles are a vital part of their associated ecosystems but have been historically rather overlooked probably due to their chosen habitat. Now our native dung beetles are finally beginning to get some of the invertebrate limelight due to an emphasis on ecosystem services and a much more environmentally friendly farming future. However we are lacking on a great deal of base data about these vitally important species and surveying is the one of the best ways to get information. This means getting into dung and discovering these unsung heroes

St Hilda’s Writers’ Day 2019 marks its 10th year as the only College to hold its own day of lectures at the Oxford Literary Festival. All authors are College members or alumnae.

CLAIRE HARMAN – Murder By The Book: A Sensational Chapter In Victorian Crime. chaired by Claire Armitstead (The Guardian and the Observer)
When the accused murderer of Lord William Russell blamed the crime on his reading, he fueled an ongoing debate about the appalling damage ‘low’ books could do. This fascinating study details the controversy around William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, the murder of Russell and the way it affected many of the leading writers of the day, including Dickens and Thackeray. Harman unpacks the evidence, reveals the gossip and the surprisingly literary background to this gory crime.

Chair: Claire Armitstead (The Guardian and the Observer)

Brookes Philosophy Department presents Fiona Woollard speaking on her latest project ‘What a Mother’s Got to Do’.

What role does the imagination play in science? Do our notions of scientific genius rest on ideas about the creative imagination? How do we know when the imagination has overreached itself and entered the realm of fanciful speculation — of science fiction?
Professor Rob Iliffe explores these questions, and how ideas about imagination have shaped science and scientists.

Rob will be available to sign copies of his book ‘Newton: a very short introduction’ after the talk. The Museum’s shop will stock copies of the book.

Emily Wilson will be at Blackwell’s to discuss her best selling translation of Homer’s The Odyssey.

Jennifer Eberhardt, associate professor at Stanford University, joins us for the next in our Let’s Discuss series. She will be discussing unconscious racial bias in the context of her new book Biased. The talk will be followed by an extended time for audience Q&A so that you can really become part of the debate.

From one of the world’s leading experts on unconscious racial bias comes a landmark examination of one of the most culturally powerful issues of our time.

We might think that we treat all people equally, but we don’t. Every day, unconscious biases affect our visual perception, attention, memory and behaviour in ways that are subtle and very difficult to recognise without in-depth scientific studies.

Unconscious biases can be small and insignificant, but they affect every sector of society, leading to enormous disparities, from the classroom to the courtroom to the boardroom.

But unconscious bias is not a sin to be cured, but a universal human condition, and one that can be overcome.

In Biased, pioneering social psychologist Professor Jennifer Eberhardt explains how.

Past Times, Blackwell’s series of free history talks, continues with Mark Honigsbaum discussing his new book The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris.

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From pneumonic plague in LA and ‘parrot fever’ in Argentina to the more recent AIDS, SARS and Ebola epidemics, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated outbreaks and scares. Like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its place. The Pandemic Century exposes the limits of science against nature, and how these crises are shaped by humans as much as microbes.

A presentation by Professor Irad Malkin of Tel-Aviv University: What does it mean to be “fair” in circumstances of taking possession of land, often by conquest, and settling it? And how did Archaic city-states (ca 750-500 BCE) apply the lot as the means of implementing what they understood to be equality and fairness? There will be discussion and drinks after the presentation.

The ecology and history of one of the largest atolls in the world. Aldabra, situated in the South West Indian Ocean, supports the largest population of giant tortoises worldwide. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is a stronghold for wildlife in a region that is besieged by threats.

Professor Dave Carter reveals how understanding intercellular communication could improve healthcare.

This term’s topic of the popular St Hilda’s ‘Brain and Mind – from concrete to abstract’ series of workshops is ‘Dementia and the Brain’.
Dr Sana Suri (Oxford University), Dr Marinella Cappelletti (Goldsmiths, University of London), and Professor Tim Thornton (University of Central Lancashire) will address this topic from the points of view of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, respectively.

In our first of two seminars on the future of work after automation Dr Brendan Burchell will investigate the potential for a five-day weekend society.

Machine-learning and robotics technologies promise to be able to replace some tasks or jobs that have traditionally been performed by humans. Like previous technologies introduced in the past couple of centuries, this possibility has been met with either optimism that will permit liberation from the tyranny of employment, or pessimism that it will lead to mass precarity and unemployment.

This presentation will draw upon both qualitative and quantitative evidence to explore the possible societal consequences of a radical reduction in the length of the normal working week. Drawing upon the evidence for the psychological benefits of employment, we look at the evidence for the minimum effective dose of employment. The paper also considers why the historical increases in productivity have not been matched with proportionate reductions in working time.

About Brendan Burchell:

Dr Brendan Burchell is a Reader in the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Dr Burchell is director of graduate education for the Department of Sociology and director of the Cambridge Undergraduate Quantitative Research Centre. He was recently Head of Department for Sociology, as well as a Director of Studies and a Tutor at Magdalene College.

Dr Burchell’s main research interests centre on the effects of labour market conditions on wellbeing. Recent publications have focussed on unemployment, job insecurity, work intensity, part-time work, zero-hours contracts, debt, occupational gender segregation and self-employment. Most of his work concentrates on employment in Europe, but current projects also include an analysis of job quality, the future of work and youth self-employment in developing countries. He works in interdisciplinary environments with psychologists, sociologists, economists, lawyers and other social scientists.

Dr Burchell’s undergraduate degree was in Psychology, followed by a PhD in Social Psychology. His first post in Cambridge was a joint appointment between the social sciences and economics in 1985, and he has been in a permanent teaching post in at Cambridge since 1990.

Register:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/future-of-work-after-automation-towards-a-five-day-weekend-society-tickets-61028132788

Every third Saturday of the month come and listen to local experts talk about interesting topics around the museum galleries. Each talk will last 30 minutes and will be about different subjects about Abingdon’s history or chosen objects in the museum collection.

Talks schedule:

11:30 am – ‘The Spinney Dig: Uncovering a Lost Cottage in Sunningwell’ by Robert Evans.

A few years ago we rediscovered the remains of a substantial old cottage in the grounds of Sunningwell School. Since then we have been excavating the site, trying to find out what the place looked like, and how the people who occupied it would have lived. So far that work has yielded lots of evidence for the past 150 years or so; more and older items may still be hidden below the ground. It’s not rare stuff – no precious coins, or ship-burials, or oriental glassware; just bric-a-brac that tells us about the world of ordinary villagers.
I’ll bring along some of our finds to show, and present an illustrated report on the project.

1 pm – ‘Abingdon in the Second World War’ by Bob Frampton.

During the war years 1939 to 1945, the small town of Abingdon, like so many of England’s rural settlements, experienced the conflict in a way quite different from the major cities. While the town escaped the attention of concentrated heavy bombing raids, it still made a major contribution to the war, making tanks, aircraft engines and wing-parts. It sent 1,000 of its people to the war. The local RAF station trained bomber crews.
This short talk will highlight some of the events of those difficult years, the struggles and the sacrifices and some of the personal stories of the town in this harrowing episode in its recent history.

FREE talks, no booking required.
All donations welcome.