Gresham College Lectures

How did the cosmos transition into space characterised by galaxies in a plethora of different shapes of great beauty? This lecture will consider what happens when groups of galaxies interact with one another and what happens when these galaxies collide and merge. A lecture by Katherine Blundell OBE The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College websi...

Individuals and businesses make financial decisions all the time – whether to go to university, buy a house, build a factory, or train one’s workforce. All these decisions involve spending certain money now for uncertain benefits in the future.  This lecture will provide a simple framework for deciding whether or not to take an investment. It will also highlight the mistakes that people frequently...

This lecture focuses on one of the watershed moments of Soviet music history: the censure of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and the composer’s path through reform to rehabilitation.  The Shostakovich story was only the tip of the iceberg, and almost all Soviet composers had to adjust their aesthetic and style at this point, unless they were prepared to languish in obscurity and pove...

Do we own our own body parts? What can we do with them? Can we sell them and control what others do with them? People often say, "it’s my body", but the law is much more complex.  This lecture explains the law on body part ownership, tracing it from the early legal cases through the body-snatching years of the Victorian period, to the present day. Should we use the law of property to reg...

Does nature have a universal value? Can we consider natural capital as equivalent to financial capital? This lecture gives a brief history of value, exploring the similarities between historical arguments as to why the value of housework and nature are not reflected either in theory or in the system of national accounts and GDP. It will explore the difficulties with putting a value on nature, for...

Some diseases are specialised in using sexual behaviour for transmission. Major pandemics including HIV and syphilis have been transmitted via this route, along with the cancer-causing infections Hepatitis B and HPV. Along with these are highly transmissible diseases such as gonorrhoea and herpes. Another way people share bodily fluids is via needles, and several diseases can be transmitted this w...

Pornography reflects as well as creates sexual norms and practices. The period from the 1960s to the mid-1980s has been called the 'Golden Age of Porn'. An unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover was openly published in the UK and Linda Lovelace’s pornographic film Deep Throat (1972) went mainstream. Vigorous debates about morality, consent, and feminism erupted.  The “porn wars” continue i...

This lecture takes a trip down Christmas's unique and emotionally complex memory lane via the Christmas Carol. Carols paint a colourful picture of the Christmas story itself, frequently by adapting pre-existing material. The crowded stable at Bethlehem appears simultaneously ancient and modern, as do the carols that commemorate the Nativity. Christmas is indelibly associated with our own chil...

Judges, who are typically drawn from privileged backgrounds, wield vast power over the lives of the most marginalised people in society. This lecture will explore the role of judicial racism in perpetuating injustice and inequality in the legal system. The Lammy Review found gross disparities sentencing for Black and white defendants - while also finding no systematic racial bias in juries' d...

This lecture explores the destruction of libraries, archives and other knowledge, from Babylonian times until now, and its implications for society today. What are the motivations for destroying knowledge, and how have libraries and archives responded to these threats? What must we do now that knowledge is digital, and controlled by a small number of very powerful companies? A lecture by Richard O...

European Protestant and evangelical Christians did not have to look far to find 'infidels' in the 16th and 17th centuries: as well as the 'pagans' of northern Scandinavia, Jews were scattered across the continent and Muslim powers were all too close. This lecture will consider the repeated, and repeatedly failed, attempts to convert these peoples: some naively well-intentioned,...

For thousands of years, some men assumed that the original or ideal human type was male, with women being pictured as weaker or imperfect men. This ancient prejudice inspired fictions from E.T.A. Hoffman's The Sandman (1816) to Ira Levin's novel The Stepford Wives (1972). This lecture looks at fantasies of artificial women (usually seen by their male creators as superior to biological wo...

Many major diseases are transmitted by food or drink. Cholera (water), brucellosis (milk), BSE/nvCJD, typhoid and many parasites are ingested as part of a normal diet. The more exotic the diet, the greater the range of possible infections. Water technology, sanitation, pasteurisation and animal husbandry can substantially reduce but not eliminate these diseases. A lecture by Chris Whitty The trans...

When you tune into Netflix you might not be aware that the box in your living room starts a complex set of negotiations with servers on moving 563 Gbytes of information into your residence. That is equivalent to having 15,000 copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica dumped into your home! So, why is watching a Netflix film not the equivalent of the Amazon-delivery from hell? Compression, which this...

The law has been used to impose religious and moral conformity and uniformity of thought at many times in history, perhaps most (in)famously in the trial of Socrates and the heresy trials of Giordano Bruno and Galileo. More recently the obscenity laws and equality legislation have challenged the limits of free speech. This lecture will explore how law has been used to respond to and try to delimit...

People have always found symmetry aesthetically pleasing and examples of it are seen in the earliest art. The Platonic solids have been known to humanity for millennia, some possibly even to Neolithic man, as can be seen in the carved stone balls found by archaeologists. This lecture will look at how we can understand symmetry using mathematics, and explore how the rules of symmetry can deepen our...

This lecture will investigate the genesis of the Socialist Realism doctrine, which was imposed in 1934. The 'proletarian music' trend of the 1920s had offered some solutions to the task of creating 'music for the people', but because it had alienated the most accomplished professional musicians it was now abandoned. A new art music was called for, with potential mass appeal thr...

For the second Annual Alfred Wiener Holocaust Memorial Lecture, Professor Jan Grabowski will discuss how scholars of the Holocaust find themselves confronted with the hostile reactions of various states pursuing the policies of Holocaust distortion.  This situation has acquired particular importance and urgency in Poland, where the authorities have introduced a series of measures intended to freez...

How can nature be accounted for? How can we track how we are using nature and ensure we are not destroying the environment? Natural Capital is becoming a central theme in national accounting systems. This lecture follows a series of entertaining exercises on how to assemble the evidence and undertake the accounting lying behind natural capital. A lecture by Jacqueline McGlade The transcript and do...

When Albert Einstein tweaked his newly invented equations of General Relativity in 1917, he had one goal in mind: to find a solution that described a closed, static, eternal universe. He therefore minted a new universal constant to make it work. After Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the universe in 1929, Einstein reportedly declared it his "greatest blunder". In 1998 observat...

What is a perversion? This talk starts by exploring psychiatric and sexological debates about perverted sexual desires from the late nineteenth century textbooks to diagnostic manuals in the twenty-first century. It looks at the role of law, morality, and medicine. Who has the power to decide what sexual acts are 'normal' or 'abnormal'? By what mechanisms do sexual practices mo...

Although Mesopotamian civilisations had assembled texts, the ancient Greeks brought the idea of the universal book collection to its near-legendary consummation in the Library of Alexandria, which edited and housed thousands of papyrus rolls on every subject and attracted brilliant scholars from all over the ancient world. But there were many other libraries, serving also as scientific laboratorie...

Most of us would consider Islam to be a religion, while we would generally view secularism as requiring the limiting of religion to the private sphere. But many scholars (and ideologues) beg to differ. Social scientists are divided over the definitions of religion and secularism, while Islam's indigenous portrayal of itself as a 'dīn' is not easily translatable into English. This le...

The Great Depression posed a serious threat to democratic capitalism as economic nationalism flourished and Communism and Fascism offered alternative models. In response, democratic capitalism was remade. Domestically, inequalities of wealth were reduced and social welfare extended to create a social contract between capital and labour. Internationally, new organisations created a rules-based inte...

Subsequent to the Hot Big Bang, as the Universe expanded and cooled, atoms formed and, later still, decoupled from radiation. This lecture will cover the intellectual revolutions in relatively recent history that paved the way to our modern understanding of the formation, existence and interactions of atoms. A lecture by Katherine Blundell OBE The transcript and downloadable versions of the lectur...