Some face-to-face events are returning. Check carefully for any requirements.

Feb 28 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
Rembrandt and the Crying Boy: A Question of Method An After Hours Talk with Martin Royalton-Kisch, former Curator of Dutch and Flemish drawings, British Museum Fri 28 Feb, 6–7pm Ashmolean Museum Lecture Theatre Join Martin[...]
Mar 2 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm Martin Wood Lecture Theatre
Join us as we hear from Prof Martin Bureau (University of Oxford) about his research on Supermassive black holes. ‘Supermassive black holes are now known to lurk at the centre of most galaxies. They are[...]
Mar 6 @ 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
Music has taken many forms during China’s long cultural history and many traditions have endured to this day. In this talk, Paul Bevan will look at a selection of the paintings in the Ashmolean collection[...]
Mar 10 @ 1:15 pm – 3:00 pm Wolfson College, The Buttery
Blake Gopnik’s definitive biography digs deep into the radical genius of Andy Warhol. Based on years of archival research and on interviews with hundreds of Warhol’s surviving friends, lovers and enemies, Warhol traces the artist’s[...]
Mar 10 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
Explore the work of Dame Paula Rego, who is revered for her unflinching images of women, often living under oppressive political conditions. She draws upon the real and imagined, using her own experiences and references[...]
Mar 16 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm Wolfson College, Leonard Wolfson Auditorium
Please note that this event has been cancelled. Join novelist Sarah Moss and historian Sarah Knott in conversation with critic Merve Emre.
Mar 18 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
The Scythians were warlike nomadic horsemen who roamed the steppe of Asia in the first millennium BC. Using archaeological finds from burials and texts, Barry Cunliffe reconstructs the lives of the Scythians, exploring their beliefs,[...]
Mar 19 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
The Phoenicians were famously great traders who, from their base in modern-day Lebanon, traded their wares around the Mediterranean and beyond. Learn about their culture, art, achievements, and cities at home in the Levant and[...]
Mar 21 @ 11:00 am – 12:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
Moran’s ‘Autumn Afternoon, the Wissahickon’ pictures 19th-century America at its most bucolic and pastoral. It was painted, however, amidst a conflict that threatened to tear the young country apart. Examine Moran’s landscape as an allegory[...]
Mar 26 all-day Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies
The Rediscovery & Reception of Gandharan Art Gandhara Connections 4th International Workshop Thursday 26th and Friday 27th March 2020 Ioannou Centre, 66 St Giles’, Oxford OX1 3LU The workshop abstract and provisional programme are available[...]
Mar 26 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
Learn about the vast trade network of the Phoenicians, the goods traded and their trading partners, who included the Greeks and Etruscans, as well as people in Sardinia and southern Spain. The Phoenicians Phoenicia Part[...]
Mar 27 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
Both worked on the outskirts of Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism, tackling ambitious subjects of love, spirituality, and time, to create beautiful artworks. Join De Morgan Curator, Sarah Hardy, to discover the previously ignored professional and personal[...]
Mar 28 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm The Sheldonian
A conversation about life-writing and the Lives of Houses. With Hermione Lee, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.
Apr 7 @ 9:30 am – 6:00 pm Rewley House
An exploration of the work of prolific writer Jenny Diski, with a keynote lecture from Blake Morrison.
Apr 15 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
The city of Hereford stands a couple of hours from Oxford along one of the most scenic train rides in England. Follow the Medieval Pilgrim trail, discovering a landscape alive with holy wells, sacred shrines,[...]
Apr 22 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
One of the great triumvirate of High Renaissance masters, Raphael is famous for his calm serenity in even the most dramatic of his paintings. This year marks the 500th anniversary of his death, and Alice[...]
Apr 24 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
Learn about the young Rembrandt’s rise to fame. A major breakthrough happened when the Prince of Orange, Frederick Henry, began to commission works from the artist, some of which are on display in the Young[...]
May 1 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
A window into the intimate world of their makers, users and collectors, 18th- and 19th-century Greek embroideries have many stories to tell. Explore some of them through a selection of highlights on display in Gallery[...]
May 2 @ 11:00 am – 12:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
Towards the end of the 15th century, Florence had become a centre of artistic achievement. Ghirlandaio, a master of both the fresco and innovative oil techniques, ran a prestigious workshop in which the young Michelangelo[...]
May 4 @ 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm Ashmolean Museum
The Story of a Neglected Book: Hokusai’s Illustrated Tang Poetry of 1880 Mon 4 May, 5–6pm Ashmolean Museum Lecture Theatre With Dr Ellis Tinios, Visiting Researcher, Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University Learn about a deluxe[...]
Oct 13 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Online
In this talk Natasha Randall explores the task of biographical research into the figure of the literary translator Constance Garnett. Translators notionally produce non-original text but are there aspects of their work, their semantic tendencies[...]
Oct 13 @ 5:00 pm – 7:30 pm Online
Life-Writing Beyond Words is a research network and termly series of public events, hosted by Felix Appelbe, the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and Ocean Ambassadors, that explores how we move between words and the non-verbal.[...]
Oct 15 all-day Online
Narrative Futures is an interactive podcast featuring interviews with leading authors and editors in the speculative genre and writing prompts designed to support the imagination of better futures. Narrative Futures is the capstone podcast project[...]
Oct 27 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Online
Lt. Major Cecilia Diaconeasa was a Cold War secret police informant who in March 1983, several weeks after the birth of her baby daughter, was assigned to extract confessions from a woman suspected of collaborating[...]
Nov 3 @ 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm Online
This is the Weinrebe Lecture in Life-Writing for Michaelmas Term 2020. Hermione Lee, whose biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber on 1 October, talks about his life and work, and the challenges for[...]
Nov 7 @ 7:00 pm – 11:00 pm The Great Hall
Come along to the long-awaited Night Sky Show at the fantastic Great Hall in Cholsey. It will certainly be a night to remember! Facts, fiction, laughter and more in a fantastic place, for one night[...]
Nov 10 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Online
In her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy, the Dunblane Primary School shooting. Through poems about landscape and loss, the poems in her third collection, Return by[...]
Nov 17 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Online
Following her Research Forum talk in Trinity 2020, ‘The Elusive Subject: Biographies of Exiles’ Soledad Fox Maura returns to the OCLW programme for the launch of her first novel, Madrid Again (Simon & Schuster), in[...]
Dec 2 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm Pitt Rivers Museum (Online)
The ethnographic museum is full. Clothes, objects and tools fill the walls and floors. But where is the love? The three speakers take the exhibition ‘Losing Venus’ as their starting point to discuss how emotion,[...]
Dec 11 @ 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm Kellogg College
Lecture by Jane Owen, preceded by OGT’s Christmas drinks party. Jane Owen, Founder Member of OGT, avid gardener, garden historian and previously Deputy Editor of the Financial Times, gives us her personal take on garden[...]