Gresham College Lectures

The Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law, was a landmark moment in British legal history, with quasi-constitutional protection for fundamental rights. Meanwhile, the national constitutions of the Commonwealth Caribbean contain fundamental rights provisions which are often inspired by, but diverge significantly from, the European Conven...

The entire Atlantic economy in the 17th and 18th centuries was based on the enslavement of (mostly) non-Christian Africans. As this lecture will show, slavery was at first a practice which many missionaries hoped to mitigate; then a vast reality with which they felt they had to work, and in which they were deeply implicated; until, finally, it became an intolerable obstacle. Spiritual and worldly...

The most commonly used computer in the world is surely the one in your hand. Mobile or cellular telephony is nowadays hardly about telephony at all, but about communication in its broadest sense. Companies and governments have fallen and risen due to the use of mobile phones and in many countries without a phone you cannot transact with society. The smartphone is therefore a, if not the, pivotal i...

If, as displeased reviewers and readers sometimes complain, coincidences mar good plots, why do so many novels turn on them? From Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, to Sebastian Barry and David Nicholls, novelists have relied on coincidences.  While these can reveal the weaknesses of a novel’s design, they can also be put to creative use: as we will see, novelists, like Charles Dickens, Evelyn Wau...

What will the characteristics of successful innovators and entrepreneurs be in a wellbeing economy?  In this lecture, we look at how the Wellbeing Economy is shaped by the co-creation of value through co-design and co-production processes, and how this promises to make success look very different from what we’ve been used to.  This lecture will challenge what success looks like and give examples f...

What was life like in 1649-1660, Britain's only decade as a republic?  This lecture explores the immense changes of the period through the personal experiences of prominent figures. It argues that, despite the failure of the republican project and the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, the decade forged the British Isles and created the conditions for the commercial and colonial prosperity...

Coral reefs are transforming under climate change. What is the nature of this change and the major influences upon it? The role of common management approaches is also changing. Seabird nutrient inputs through guano can benefit coral and fish growth, and have potential to help coral reefs recover from disturbances. Finally, fisheries are responding to coral reef degradation in unpredictable ways,...

Risk is one of the most powerful and dangerous concepts in finance – powerful because it allows individuals and companies to earn huge returns, but dangerous because it can cause their bankruptcy. How do you measure financial risk, what is the relationship between risk and return, and how can you – surprisingly – reduce your investment risk without sacrificing any returns?  This lecture will expla...

Magnetic fields have mysterious effects that can be dramatically counterintuitive, and they are ubiquitous throughout the Universe and can have influence on large scales.  This lecture will explore how some of the exotic and energetic phenomena in the Universe can only be explained in terms of these magnetic fields that pervade space. A lecture by Katherine Blundell OBE The transcript and download...

In the late nineteenth century, highly contentious debates about prostitution were central to broader questions about women’s status within society, including their rights to property, entitlement to suffrage, and claims over their own bodies. Political scandals such as those over the 1860s Contagious Diseases Acts (which criminalized sex workers, not their customers) and the 1885 Maiden Tribute o...

In the late nineteenth century, highly contentious debates about prostitution were central to broader questions about women’s status within society, including their rights to property, entitlement to suffrage, and claims over their own bodies. Political scandals such as those over the 1860s Contagious Diseases Acts (which criminalized sex workers, not their customers) and the 1885 Maiden Tribute o...

Professor Eleanor Stride will discuss the history and development of cancer therapy from its origins in Ancient Egypt - when surgery was the only option to remove a tumour, to the more recent developments of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. She will end by looking at present-day clinical trials that aim to harness the body’s own immune system to eliminate disease (immunotherapy). A lecture by Eleano...

The Deep Sea is Earth’s last great frontier. After almost 150 years of exploration and research we understand it is deep, dark and definitely different; but there remain large gaps in our knowledge that hinder progress in sustainable management of this vast system. New technology – from manned submersibles, to satellite measurements, acoustic systems, and artificial intelligence – is key to future...

This lecture will follow the tortuous path of Prokofiev’s transformation into a Soviet artist. Prokofiev had pursued his career abroad and returned to (Soviet) Russia as a major international celebrity. Even though he was willing, in principle, to write “music for the people”, he found it very difficult to meet the precise demands of the state. Prokofiev was one of the most highly honoured Soviet...

The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 led to international disruption and a crisis in the post-war order. Domestically, weaker productivity growth, the squeeze on profits, and de-industrialisation led to conflict between capital and labour. Public finances came under strain and led to major changes associated with Thatcher and Reagan. The result was an intellectual revolution: a shift to neo-liberalism...

Tristan & Isolde, Romeo & Juliet, Pelléas & Mélisande are three pairs of lovers who have fired composers’ imaginations. Films like Love Story, Love Actually, and Shakespeare in Love are made all the more poignant by their musical scores. And where would The Beatles, 10cc, or Queen have been without All you need is love, I’m not in love, and Love of my life? This lecture shows how there...

From the Ancient Greeks onwards, proportion and mathematics has been central to our ideas of form and beauty.  This lecture looks at the famous golden ratio, from Greek temples to spiral seashells, discussing where it appears in nature (and why), and how people have tried to pinpoint the 'perfect' proportions of the human body and face. It will also look at why A4 paper is the shape it i...

Since the 1981 Brixton riots, many things have changed in British policing. However, Black people are still nine times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people, and three times more likely to be arrested; Black people are far more likely to be searched, arrested and prosecuted for using drugs, and yet are no more likely to use drugs than white people. This lecture explores the pers...

COVID-19, pandemic influenza and tuberculosis are examples of the remarkable ability of infections to use the respiratory route of transmission. Infections which use this route can often spread very quickly, especially in crowded indoor environments. Human behaviours and engineering should be seen as much a part of our defences against respiratory infections as drugs and vaccines. A lecture by Pro...

Protestant settlers in the Americas believed it was their duty to convert indigenous peoples to the true Gospel. Yet the task proved unexpectedly difficult. The effort revealed and challenged deep European assumptions about culture and the nature of Christianity itself. From Massachusetts to Chile, Protestant would-be missionaries took roads that were paved mostly, but not entirely, with good inte...

When was the last time you opened a file and noticed a computer glitch? “Never” is the usual answer. Yet the underlying hardware makes continual errors: disks make errors, the internet loses packets of data, wifi signals get corrupted and so on. This lecture is about the secrets of the mysterious invulnerability that is Error Control Coding: a way of storing or transmitting information such that i...

Measuring distances to astronomical objects outside our Galaxy is a surprisingly hard challenge: it wasn't until 1923 that Edwin Hubble obtained proof that Andromeda is indeed a galaxy in its own right. Today, astronomers extend distance measurements in the cosmos to the edge of the visible Universe, building up a 'cosmic distance ladder' made of several rungs. This talk will explor...

What has Brexit come to mean? This lecture will explain how the Brexit deal the UK and the EU ended up with came to be. It will then investigate the new relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union, put in place by the Trade and Cooperation Agreement of December 2020. Finally, the lecture will look to the future, to elucidate what Brexit will go on to mean for politics and public...

The Revolutionary tribunals in 1790s Paris; the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s; and the prosecution of conspirators in the assassination attempt on Hitler by the so-called “People’s Court”, are well-known examples of the way the law and its processes can be misused in totalitarian societies. These were trials designed to terrorize the population and solidify the power of the state. This lect...

Christianity’s centre of gravity has shifted to the Global South. Prosperity churches, 'born again' politicians, prophets, healers and exorcists are now typical expressions of Christianity worldwide. What do these changes mean for our understanding of the world’s largest religion, in particular with regard to secularism, politics, and international development? Drawing on examples from A...