Gresham College Lectures

Our nearest star, that is the engine sustaining life on Earth, will one day run out of fuel. When this happens, the Sun will start expanding dramatically, forming a red giant and engulfing much of the solar system including the inner planets, vaporizing oceans; formerly icy planets will become habitable. A lecture by Professor Katherine Blundell OBE The transcript and downloadable versions of the...

Polio has a major role in the cultural history of the West. The early symptoms – which were often mild flu-like symptoms – would end in paralysis. Vaccinations against the disease proved controversial, given their trials on incarcerated prisoners and the use of “poster children”. Epidemics of the disease illustrate the uneven transmission of ideas about health and sickness. They show how the perio...

Our health and susceptibility to disease are not wholly written in our genes. They are influenced throughout our lives by the environments in which we live, through our exposures to chemical agents, the infections we experience, to the psychosocial stresses of daily life. This appreciation of the role our environment plays in shaping our health and wellbeing is encompassed in the concept of the ex...

Adultery became the subject of some of the greatest European novels of the nineteenth century, including Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. English novels of the period needed adultery for their plots, yet flinched from treating the subject openly. Through the twentieth century to the present – from Ulysses and A Handful of Dust to recent fiction by Zadie Smith, Tessa Hadley and Sally Rooney – adult...

The 2022 Royal Historical Society Colin Matthew Memorial Lecture The partition of British India in 1947 was the world’s largest migration outside war and famine. It may feel like a distant historical event, but 75 years on its impact continues to resonate in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and in Britain. Many of those who lived through that tumultuous time migrated to Britain. In this lecture, which...

What exactly is the Metaverse? And is it really that new? This talk will explore our emotional connections to cyberspace, our feelings of presence and immediacy in online environments, and what this means for the intensity of our experiences, good and bad. As technology promises ever more immersive, embodied experiences involving 360 degree vision, touch, and even taste, how might this merging of...

The English courts have wrestled with challenges to the restrictions on euthanasia and assisted suicide for years, while the government has resisted calls to liberalise the law. Meanwhile, terminally ill people continue to travel overseas to clinics such as Dignitas, to end their lives. Assisted dying raises fundamental questions about respect for individual autonomy, protection of the vulnerable...

1960 was the year of Africa. Over seventeen countries rid themselves of colonial rule and a new sense of pride in being Black and African was expressed through myriad artforms, notably via the fashioning of the body. Using objects in the V&As ‘Africa Fashion’ exhibition this lecture explores how fibre and fabric carried meaning in the moment of independence and carries meaning now in the cutti...

What is a “valid mathematical proof”? To inquire into such a hotly debated question we might want to look at how past mathematicians tackled this question. This lecture will provide examples outside of what has been called a “colonial library”, using in particular Sanskrit sources, to argue that mathematical texts from all over the world contained not only proofs but also many other types of mathe...

In practice, mathematicians have been 'proving' their results in many ways, in many places, for thousands of years. In principle, however, what is a proof? Usually, we look to geometry, specifically the geometry of Euclid. But what are the fundamental building blocks of a Euclidean proof?  Until quite recently, the Renaissance, this question remained open—due to uncertainties about who E...

This talk considers mathematical proofs through an analogy to cooking recipes: that proofs give recipes for mathematical actions to be carried out by the reader. We will see linguistic evidence that written proofs often include explicit instructions in the imperative mood, just like recipes. This will lead to philosophical insights about mathematical diagrams, reading and writing proofs, and why m...

The 2022 Peter Nailor Memorial Lecture For 40 years Britain's national strategy rested on two main pillars: close partnership with the United States, and a leading role in Europe. Both remain important, but the dramatic shifts in global geopolitics of recent years must make us re-appraise Britain's diplomatic priorities. How has Russia's aggression in Ukraine changed the focus of ou...

Toussaint Louverture (the “Black Spartacus”), was one of the main leaders of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), which overthrew slavery and led to the proclamation of the world’s first independent post-colonial state. The lecture discusses his extraordinary life and legacy, as well as the international impacts of the Haitian Revolution across the 19th and 20th centuries, and how its ideals of equ...

The major triad is considered the foundation of tonal music, its privileged position owed to its presence in the harmonic series of acoustics. The minor triad lacks this acoustic foundation, which led to it being treated as less stable, and even pieces in a minor key usually ended on the major form of the same triad. From the late 18th century onwards, major was paired with joy and minor with sorr...

What will it take to stop global warming and how long have we got? These are huge questions for humanity, nature, society and geopolitics. Understanding our changing weather and its impacts is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time. But understanding how to stop changing it turns out to be surprisingly simple. You don’t need to be a scientist or policy wonk to appreciate what it wil...

The coast of Kenya has a series of impressive medieval ruins. Amongst the monuments are tombs, grand houses, mosques, and palaces. East African archaeologists date the high point of this heritage to the 13th century. The Kenyan museums contain impressive, reconstructed artefacts that animated the urban life of these lost cities. In this lecture, Robin Walker will present this heritage and put it i...

People have used money – and made counterfeits - for thousands of years. Archimedes came up with a clever way of finding out if you’ve been cheated by a goldsmith. Making coins with the right proportions of the right metals presented a huge mathematical challenge for Fibonacci and other mathematicians in the middle ages. This lecture will discuss mathematical elements of coin design, denominations...

Tuberculosis (and especially drug resistant strains) is a major global health problem, with over nine million people developing the disease annually and 1.5 million dying from it. The history of TB reveals the complex and often contradictory meanings assigned to this disease. The terms used to talk about TB – phthisis, consumption, the “white plague”, and the “wasting disease”, for example – revea...

Single-celled microbes underpin all life on Earth, and even complex organisms like humans retain a surprising amount of their microbial heritage. Life began when free molecules became encapsulated in a lipid membrane and transformed into a self-replicating entity. Subsequently, multiple cells came together, forming a remarkable symbiosis that ultimately led to all complex, eukaryotic, cells and la...

Imaging is used every day in medical healthcare, and the likelihood is that if you go to hospital that you will receive an X-ray, ultrasound or CT scan. With increasing reliance on complex imaging and the NHS now at breaking point, this lecture asks whether we have become too reliant on imaging and if so, how that manifests in today’s healthcare. This lecture assesses the potential advantages and...

Financial intermediaries, like banks, mutual funds and brokers, who connect investors to firms (who need finance), have existed for thousands of years. Because they control a scarce resource, information, these intermediaries are expensive. Platforms, like crowdfunding platforms (organised meeting places for investors to meet firms) offer an alternative. Today's technological revolution is al...

This lecture looks at the development of juries in the common law world, addressing key questions about the role of juries in England and Wales today.  Juries in modern English law are mainly used in criminal trials, civil trials, and coroners’ inquests, and the English jury system differs from other common law jurisdictions, some of which use juries more, less, or not at all. What are the strengt...

Planet Venus is a hellish place and seemingly hostile to life, although recent measurements claimed the detection of biogenic signatures. Less than a billion years ago, Venus’s atmosphere underwent a dramatic runaway greenhouse effect rendering it likely to be uninhabitable. This lecture will consider what can be learned about the possibility of catastrophic climate change on Planet Earth, in the...

How can we understand the war in Ukraine in the light of European history over the past century? Is Putin a '20th-century Hitler' as some have called him? What are his aims, and how do they compare with those of the Nazis during the Second World War? Why are the Ukrainians resisting the Russian invasion so fiercely? This lecture attempts to explain the nature of the current conflict by s...

Britain has one of the richest of all pagan heritages in Europe, defined as the textual and material evidence for its pre-Christian religions. The island is possessed of monuments, burial sites and a range of other remains not only from several distinct ages of prehistory, but also from three different major historic cultures. This lecture will look at what we know of prehistoric worship, focusing...