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

Nov 6 @ 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm Jacqueline du Pre Music Building
Sarah Weir OBE, Chief Executive, Design Council, will lecture on ‘Designing the Future: Who is doing it?’ She will consider the question of what design is – a mindset and skillset; critical thinking and creativity[...]
Nov 11 @ 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm Ashmolean Museum
Pompeii Rediscovered A talk with Massimo Osanna, Director General, Parco Archeologico di Pompei Mon 11 Nov, 6.30–7.30pm This event will be followed by drinks in the museum and a private view of the Last Supper[...]
Nov 12 @ 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm Oxford Martin School
Migration is present at the dawn of human history – the phenomena of hunting and gathering, seeking seasonal pasture and nomadism being as old as human social organisation itself. The flight from natural disasters, adverse[...]
Nov 13 @ 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm Pitt Rivers Museum
Some 45,000 years ago, a group of around 1500 humans who were genetically similar left Africa for Asia. Successive generations of their descendants were the first members of H.sapiens to explore the earth, apart from[...]
Nov 14 @ 5:15 pm – 6:45 pm Shulman Auditorium
Join Galician poet Chus Pato and Canadian translator Erín Moure for a reading from Chus Pato’s new book of poems, Un libre favor. The event marks the completion of their residency with The Queen’s College[...]
Nov 19 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm Wolfson College - Leonard Wolfson Auditorium
Biographer and critic Lucasta Miller will give this term’s lecture in memory of Harry M Weinrebe, philanthropist and founder of the Dorset Foundation. A former visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and Beaufort[...]
Dec 2 @ 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm Wolfson College
Join us for a reception to celebrate Elleke Boehmer’s new short story collection, with a reading of the story, ‘The Biographer and the Wife’, and a discussion of the biographer as a source of creative[...]
Jan 15 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Blackwell's Boookshop
Blackwell’s is thrilled to be welcoming Jenny Hartley, author of ‘Charles Dickens: A Very Short Introduction’ to explore all elements of one of our most popular authors. Why not make 2020 the year you pick[...]
Jan 23 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Blackwell's Bookshop
Make 2020 the year when you delve into Crime Fiction with this talk from best-selling author, Sophie Hannah, on her new book, Haven’t They Grown as part of our For Learning, For Life series. Synopsis:[...]
Jan 31 @ 5:45 pm – 7:00 pm Simpkins Lee Theatre, Lady Margaret Hall
Claire Tomalin was born in 1933 in London to an English mother, the composer Muriel Herbert (linnrecords.com), and a French father. After a somewhat disorganised wartime childhood she studied at Cambridge, married the journalist Nicholas[...]
Feb 4 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm Oxford Brookes University, Union Hall John Henry Brookes Building, Headington Campus
Discover how art can inflict both harm and harmony in this special live performance of Iris Murdoch’s Art and Eros. A panel discussion will follow a 45 minute play acted by Oxford Brookes University drama[...]
Feb 4 @ 3:30 pm – 5:30 pm Oxford Brookes University, Student Union Gallery
What’s it like to be haunted? Writer Jay Bernard’s augmented reality installation explores this question – unpicking how we can be haunted by our histories and our everyday lives. Listen to a reading while exploring[...]
Feb 5 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm Union Hall, John Henry Brookes Building, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes University
Hear a whole phD in just three minutes! Can you understand a whole phD in just three minutes? Perhaps you are an Undergraduate or Masters student who is aiming for a future PhD? Join Humanities[...]
Feb 13 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm Lecture Theatre, St Cross College
Speaker: Dr Neil Armstrong (Stipendiary Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Magdalen College) This paper uses ethnographic material of NHS mental healthcare to raise some questions about autonomy, risk and personal and institutional responsibility.[...]
Feb 25 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm Wolfson College, Leonard Wolfson Auditorium
James Joyce by Richard Ellmann was described by Anthony Burgess as “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” After making a case in support of this claim, I shall tell the story of the[...]
Feb 27 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm Lincoln College, Oakshott Room
Lincoln Leads is a series of seminars tackling a different theme every week. All are warmly invited to attend this year’s Shakespeare Seminar on February 27th which will explore the question ‘Can Editing Influence a[...]
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 14 @ 10:00 am – 4:30 pm Pitt Rivers Museum
This year’s Kenneth Kirkwood Memorial Lecture Day focuses on the always fascinating subject of death and last rites in different cultures. The day will consist of four very varied talks from a panel of eminent[...]
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 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.
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 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 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 11 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm Pitt Rivers Museum (Online)
This is the first in a series of conversations that engage with the concept of Radical Hope and recent critical changes related to decoloniality at the Pitt Rivers Museum and in the wider sector. This[...]
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,[...]
Jan 6 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm Pitt Rivers Museum
An online discussion about Zimbabwean objects in the Pitt Rivers & their links with archaeology, music & heritage