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In Concert and Conversation with Imogen Cooper

Imogen Cooper CBE is an internationally renowned pianist. She will be performing a programme of music by Leos Janacek, Manuel de Falla, Claude Debussy and Isaac Albeniz and will then be in conversation with the Principal about her extraordinary life and career. The evening will finish with a drinks reception. Tickets cost £25.00 per person.

Dr Steven Parissien: In celebration of ‘Capability’ Brown

2016 marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, a designer who changed the national landscape and created a style which has shaped our view of the classic English countryside and which includes the grounds of Compton Verney. Compton Verney sits in 120 acres of ‘Capability’ Brown-designed Grade II* listed parkland and has received funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to preserve, restore and celebrate the park as part of the tercentenary celebrations for his birth. Dr Steven Parissien, Director of Compton Verney, will talk about the man, the landscape and the history of the house and its gardens.

Dr Steven Parissien is, in addition to being the Director of Compton Verney, an author on architectural and cultural history. His recent projects include exhibitions on Canaletto in Britain and on Britain in the 1950s, and books on Oxford architecture and English railway stations.

This event is part of the series A Festival of Anniversaries.

Felicity Cobbing, Palestine Excavation fund (PEF): John Garstang’s excavations at Jericho

John Garstang began his academic career in mathematics at Jesus College, Oxford, but while still an undergraduate turned his attention to archaeology. His first fieldwork was done in Egypt, where, at the age of twenty-three, he joined Flinders Petrie. From 1930 to 1936 he carried out a major excavation at Jericho, funded by Sir Charles Marston. Although this excavation was poorly published, and although Garstang’s views of Jericho regarding the accounts in Exodus and regarding the Israelite conquest are no longer accepted, his work there provided the first information about the existence of an aceramic Neolithic culture. Felcity Cobbing will discuss Garstang’s excavations, his methodology, and why he came to the conclusions he did – and why he was unhappy with some of those conclusions, hence his approach to Kathleen Kenyon to look again at the site.

Felicity Cobbing, Executive Secretary and Curator, Palestine Exploration Fund, is an expert on the collections of the PEF, and the role the PEF played in the development of archaeology, historical geography, and ethnography in late 19th and early to mid- 20th century Palestine.

This event is part of the series A Festival of Anniversaries.

Nora Khayi: The Secrets of St Hugh’s Library

Originally located in a small room in Norham Gardens, St Hugh’s Library moved to the Main Building in 1916 and then to its current location in 1936. Packed with treasurers such as John Gould’s The Birds of Great Britain and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, The Howard Piper Library tells a hidden story of Women and Oxford at the dawn of the twentieth century. This guided tour will unlock its secrets and offer a unique glimpse into a long-lost world.

Ms Nora Khayi was Assistant Librarian at St Hugh’s College in 2009 before becoming Librarian in 2013. She previously worked at the Taylor Institution Library and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and a member of various library committees in the South East of England.

Dr Jon Parkin: Hobbes’s Frontispieces

Using some of the College’s early editions of the works of celebrated British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Dr Parkin will offer insights into the history of Hobbes’s frontispieces and show audiences how books can be seen not just as a collection of words but as objects whose images can offer clues as to the meaning of those words. Focusing on Hobbes’s masterpiece Leviathan (1651) as well as other works, such as De cive (1642) and Behemoth (1681), this lecture will be a unique opportunity for adults and kids to see some of the world’s most precious early printed works written by an Oxford alumnus up close.

Dr Jon Parkin is an alumnus (Modern History 1988) of and Tutorial Fellow in History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He has published widely on different aspects of early-modern British intellectual history and political thought. His second book, Taming the Leviathan (Cambridge, 2007), explores the reception of Hobbes’s ideas in England between 1640 and 1700.

This event is part of the series A Festival of Anniversaries.

Professor Joshua Getzler: Financial and Political Crisis Made in Oxford: From the Glorious Revolution to the South Sea Bubble

Our present laws attacking conflict of interest and corruption came into existence during years of blistering financial and political corruption scandals in early Hanoverian England, notably the 1720 South Sea Bubble. But there was also a lot corruption surrounding war finance and the buying of offices and elections. Were the anti-corruption laws made in the 1720s a clean-up effort in the wake of breakdown and crisis? If political-legal change worked like that today, we would by now have a highly regulated financial industry in the United Kingdom and highly honest and ethical politicians and political media. In the early 18th century, and perhaps in all times in British legal history, crisis might be a trigger for legal reform, but the reform process was always played out on a wider canvas of domestic politics, religious conflict, international affairs, and personal rivalries within an elite. In this lecture I tell the story of conflicts in the realm of politics, finance and family life in the early reign of the Hanoverians, looking at a colourful caste of characters including many miscreants from Oxford.

Professor Joshua Getzler is Professor of Law and Legal History at St Hugh’s College. His book A History of Water Rights at Common Law (Oxford, 2004) won the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2005. He is interested in modern property and commercial law, and the interconnections of legal, financial, political, religious and economic history.

Helen Ghosh: The House of Sir Isaac Newton

Helen Ghosh will talk about the challenge of bringing to life, at Woolsthorpe Manor, Newton’s childhood home, the importance of the work he did there in 1666, his “Annus Mirabilis.”

Dame Helen Ghosh DCB is Director General of the National Trust. She was formerly a senior civil servant and, until November 2012, was Permanent Secretary at the Home Office having moved from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) at the end of 2010. At the time of her appointment to Defra, she was the only female permanent secretary to head a major department of the British Government.

This event is part of the series A Festival of Anniversaries

Professor Anthony Watts: Light and Sir Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton realised the importance of light to all living creatures, but he was at odds with a local Oxford scientist of the time, Robert Hooke. Despite their differences, we now know that both of them were correct in their perception of what light is. Both were interested in how living creatures exploit light to maintain their very existence. But it took another 400 years until the amazing way in which nature has evolved very similar ways of converting light into a source of energy to fuel primitive bacteria-like cells, and also to act as a sensory response for survival in higher life forms. Here, Newton and Hooke’s ideas and this fascinating evolutionary connection will be explained pictorially.

Professor Anthony Watts is Professor of Biochemistry, Fellow and Vice Principal of St Hugh’s College. He is the Director of the Biological Solid State NWR Laboratory at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Editor of the European Biophysics Journal and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Physics and Royal Society of Biology.

Elain Harwood: The Kenyon Building and Modernist University Architecture

Elain Harwood will look at David Roberts’s work in Cambridge and Oxford, and will place it in the context of the growth of higher education in the 1950s and 1960s, and the development of a modern style for university buildings.

Elain Harwood is Historic England’s specialist on post-war architecture and an acknowledged expert on and champion for Modernist architecture.

This event is part of the series A Festival of Anniversaries.