Wolfson College Humanities Society
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Wolfson College Humanities Society
A collection of lectures organised by the Wolfson College Cambridge Humanities Society.
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Laura Zucconi: Transgendered Copper Mining in the Levant
The description of Esau’s family in Genesis 36 and I Chronicles 1 has the figure of Timna change gender in the span of a few verses. She is a concubin...
Robert Koepp - George Elliot and the Religion of Favourable Chance
Professor Robert Koepp examines how Eliot's characters struggle with the profoundly human inclination to trust in luck by worshiping at the altar of '...
Bjorn L. Basberg: Maynard Keynes and his Whaling Adventures
The economist John Maynard Keynes’ activities on the stock market are well known. One company in which he bought stocks in the late 1920s was the Hect...
Jennifer Davis: Trade (mark) Wars, 1860-1920: Sweatshops, the Retail Trade and the Meaning of Trade Marks
A registered trade mark acts an indication of origin for goods but tells us nothing specific about the circumstances under which the goods originated....
Simon Szreter: Social Security in Britain -cost or benefit ? A historical perspective on a 2015 general election issue
Prof Szreter will discuss the costs and benefits of the long-term history of a national social security system in Britain. He will argue that such a p...
Professor Warren Dockter - Churchill and the Islamic World
In this anniversary year – 50 years since the death of Winston Churchill and 70 years since the end of WWII – Warren Dockter will look at Churchill’s...
Dr Justin Colson on London Bridge
Dr Justin Colson talks about London Bridge which has existed in one form or another since the fourteenth century. He explores the social world of the...
Dr Rowan Williams - Mysticism and politics; some thoughts about St Teresa of Avila
This year is the 500th anniversary of the birth of Teresa, one of the foremost ‘mystical’ writers of the Christian tradition. Research in the last fif...
Dr Robert Amundsen - Ibsen's women on and off the stage
There were two categories of women in Henrik Ibsen’s life: the women in his dramatic universe and the women in his own life. Ibsen’s attitude to women...
Professor Julius Lipner - Hinduism: the challenges of a polycentric approach to shaping our world
Hinduism is by far the majority culture of India, which is set fair to become a superpower in the next few decades. How then does the polycentric, dec...
Professor David Feldman - Israel and Antisemitism
When does criticism of Israel become antisemitic? This longstanding debate was revived last summer in the context of British and European responses to...
Adriana Alexander - The Honour of Sharing : the Sharing of Honour
How does a Lovari extended family enact the sharing of material resources, and of intangible gifts conveyed through gesture, dance, song and speech? H...
Professor Nigel Morgan: The Oldest Illustrated Book in Cambridge - a reconsideration of the St. Augustine Gospels
Corpus Christi College possesses one of the oldest extant illustrated manuscripts, the St Augustine Gospels from the sixth century. This lecture discu...
Hugh Gault: C.R.Fay: The Differences between Making History and Writing It
The economic historian Charles Ryle Fay (1884-1961) was a staunch advocate of workers’ and women’s rights, and also became one of the leading British...
Dr Alexi Baker: Technology, Tools, and Toys of Early Modern Science
Dr Alexi Baker’s research over the past decade has revealed how ‘scientific instruments’ before the rise of modern science included everything from cu...
Dr Nick Saville - Communications in a Globalised World: English is necessary but not sufficient
Cambridge English Language Assessment tests more than 5 million learners of English in over 100 countries every year and this constitutes a major asse...
Professor Jerry White - Dickens during the Great War
The novels of Charles Dickens reached new heights of popularity during the First World War, symbolising for many the quintessence of Englishness and t...
Professor Robin Cormack: “The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres”. Re-visiting the Greek Past
How do artists and poets create dialogues with the past? Prof. Robin Cormack explores the way in which the artists feature in the exhibition 'Myths, M...
Dr Patricia Fara - Erasmus Darwin: Poet of Progress
rasmus Darwin – Charles’s grandfather – was well-known among his eighteenth-
century contemporaries, highly respected by many but reviled by ot...
Dr Mary Laven: Wax, wood and narrative: the miraculous culture of Renaissance Italy
From the late fifteenth century, the walls of Italian shrines became crowded with tavolette dipinte – small painted wooden boards recording instances...
J. Lee Thompson: Un-Righteous Neutrality: Theodore Roosevelt and the Great War, 1914-1917
By the time neutral America officially joined WWI in April 1917 as an “Associate” of the Allies, Theodore Roosevelt had for two and a half years been...
Professor David Runciman: Climate Change and Conspiracy Theory
Arguments about climate change are rife with conspiracy theories. There are those who think the whole thing is a giant hoax: a scam cooked up by envir...
Professor Sir Richard Evans: Gender and Sexuality in Victorian England
This lecture was given in place of the advertised lecture by Professor Sir David Cannadine who was unable to attend.
David Jacques: Blick Mead: The Cradle of Stonehenge?
The discovery of a spring complex, adjacent to Vespasian's Camp and just over a mile from Stonehenge, with well preserved and substantial Mesolithic d...
Bill Lubenow: Intellectual Societies: Intimacy and Knowledge in the 19th Century
E.M. Forster’s famous phrase, ‘Only Connect’, is not only a guide to a successful emotional life; it is also a guide to cognition. The universities w...
Dr Ben Griffin: Fidgets, Scoundrels and Mummy's Boys: Performing Masculinity in the Victorian House of Commons
This talk examines the gendered political culture of the Victorian House of Commons by looking at the efforts that politicians made to appear ‘manly’....
Professor Tony Lentin: Rogue Judges - Rebels or Reformers? The Case of Sir Henry McCardie
The recent forced resignation of Mr Justice Coleridge prompts questions about rogue judges and the boundaries of judicial misconduct. How far may a ju...
Dr Suvi Salmenniemi: Neoliberalism, Socialism, and the Politics of Knowledge
This paper argues that neoliberalism offers a highly productive site to excavate the ways in which Cold War power/knowledge formations have shaped, an...
Philip Allott: 'The True Function of Education'
Plato began the discussion about the purpose of education. Each succeeding age has given its own answers. Now it is our turn.
Dr Dan Carter: Reform, Revolution, Reaction. Land and the indigenous question in Allende's Chile
This talk explores the familiar topic of Chile under the Popular Unity Government (1970-1973) from a less familiar angle: the indigenous heartlands of...
Dr David Taylor: Spectators at the Print Shop Window: Caricature and the Rhetoric of the Gaze
This paper offers a close reading of the grammar of the gaze offered in eighteenth-century prints that depict crowds of people looking at the window d...
Louise Foxcroft : Calories and Corsets: 2000 years of diets and dieting
The media’s obsession with weight is perceived as a recent phenomenon but we have been struggling with what, when, and how we eat ever since the Greek...
Professor Sir Tony Wrigley: Energy and the industrial revolution: opening Pandora's box
The two most fundamental transformations of economic life in human history were the Neolithic food revolution and the industrial revolution. It is no...
Dr Anna Upchurch: The Arts and Humanities Today: Re-framing the ‘value’ debate
How can the arts and humanities meet the challenges of contemporary society without relying on notions of socio-economic impact? This talk contributes...
Prof. Simon Goldhill: Sappho, Lincoln, & the American Senate: Picturing Female Desire in the 19th Century
Why did Lincoln prompt a discussion of Sappho in the American Senate? And how does this lead us to explore why Sappho was good to represent for ninete...
Professor David Maxwell: Zimbabwe since Independence
The talk will examine the history of Zimbabwe since Independence in 1980, paying particular attention to the origins and nature of the country’s econo...
Professor Bruce Berman: Culture, Politics, identity: how we know who we think we are
The production of culture is an open-ended and highly political process that demarcates the experience of daily life and its continuity and change wit...
Dr Amira Bennison: Architecture & Design in Medieval Morocco: the building strategies of the Marinid sultans
This talk explores the ways in which the Marinid dynasty in Morocco exploited architecture and display to legitimise themselves before their subjects,...
Dr Lauren Arrington: Art, Empire, and Revolution: the Lives of Constance and Casimir Markievicz
Constance Markievicz (nee Gore-Booth, 1868-1927), was born to the privileged Protestant upper class in the west of Ireland. She embraced suffrage and...
Professor Sir Richard Evans: Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen and his "Diary of a Man in Despair": a conservative rebel in Hitler's Germany
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen’s “Diary of a Man in Despair” has long been known as a searing indictment of Hitler and the Nazis, written in secret in a B...