Gresham College Lectures

Immense curiosity exists about the lives of people who lived in the past. Portraits and biographies play a major role in bringing the dead to life, but they may mislead and distort as much as they illuminate. Using writings about nineteenth-century British figures alongside images of them, Professor Ludmilla Jordanova will explore the intertwined roles of biography and portraiture in public histor...

After the ravages of the First World War there was a widespread desire for 'sustainable security'. Contemporaries were preoccupied with hungry children and their impoverished environment, and worked on a wave of institution building intended to promote 'positive security'. The 1920s search for human security and the 1930s road to war pointed to Europe's common challenges,...

The Malian city of Timbuktu is one of the world's oldest seats of learning and has an intellectual legacy of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, coming from three great West African desert empires: Ancient Ghana, medieval Mali, and the Songhai Empire. These manuscripts offer a unique window into their history. Many remain unread. This lecture will look at how their study can be used to adva...

Elaborate plotting is the novelistic skill least often valued by critics, even if relished by readers. This lecture will look at novelists who raise plot to a literary art. We begin with Henry Fielding, the first great novelist to delight in cunning narrative design. Then Dickens's complex plot making, including the half-finished and tantalizing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Finally, the lectur...

This lecture will explore our financial system. Why do banks exist, and what do they do with the money that savers lend to them? We'll explore what risks they face and how they can go bust - even if they make completely safe investments. How does the stock market work - what happens when you trade shares, and why do some companies raise money on the stock market and others don't? Can ord...

How does the law consider children in cases involving medical consent? This lecture will look at how doctors (and parents) should talk their children about illness. It will also consider what should happen when parents and doctors disagree about what a child should be told. The overall law on consent has changed markedly in England and Wales since Montgomery (2015), and requires doctors to share a...

The skeleton of King Richard III was discovered beneath a Leicester car park in 2012. Modern forensic techniques were used to analyse the injuries to the skull, rib and pelvis. The talk will discuss what computed and micro-computed tomography reveal about the injuries that were inflicted on him, and his probable cause of death; and how well the findings align with the historical record. A lecture...

This event will focus upon mathematics as expressed in different languages and cultures. A lecture by Karine Chemla The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/numbers-cultures Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five...

This event will focus upon mathematics as expressed in different languages and cultures. A lecture by Karine Chelma The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/numbers-cultures Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five...

This event will focus upon mathematics as expressed in different languages and cultures. A lecture by Manuel Medrano The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/knot-just-numbers Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our fiv...

Dr Anuj Misra will discuss Sanskrit Mathematics in the Language of Poetry (4pm). A lecture by Dr Anuj Misra The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/sanskrit-mathematics Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or s...

How do Shakespeare's familiar plays Othello and Romeo and Juliet reflect the early modern preoccupation with race and emerging concepts of colour-based racism? How do these ideas play out in early modern as well as in contemporary performance? A lecture by Farah Karim-Cooper The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gre...

The Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi, designer of the dome of Florence cathedral, is also known for developing the rules of linear perspective. In a famous experiment, viewers looked alternately from a vantage point at his perspective painting of the Florence Baptistery, and then the real building, to appreciate the realism made possible by the technique. This lecture explores the maths of p...

What do we mean when we refer to the State of Israel as 'the Jewish State'? What does it mean for the politics of the state to be identified as 'Jewish'? And what does it mean for an academic and intellectual field to study Israel as a Jewish state? The lecture will trace the contours of a wide-ranging debate on these issues, that shapes both Israeli and Middle Eastern politics...

Many of the major diseases of humans are transmitted by insect vectors. Malaria, sleeping sickness, typhus, dengue, Zika and plague are examples where mosquitoes, flies, fleas or ticks transmit. The advantage to the infection is that you can be infected by someone you have never met, often over wide distances. The advantage to humans is that we can act on the insect vector and break the cycle of t...

In 1977 or thereabouts a collection of scientists huddled around a secret radio receiver in the US desert. This was the start of GPS, Glonass, Gallileo and the whole navigation industry. A GPS chipset now costs, in bulk, a few dollars so your watch, your phone, your computer all have GPS receivers and everyone knows where they are all the time. But how does this technology work? And are there situ...

Sex manuals can incite revolution. In the early 1970s a feminist collective released Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970) while 'free love' proponent Dr. Alex Comfort published The Joy of Sex (1972). Both manuals have been read and updated and republished many times. What do changes in the advice given in these and other manuals tell us about the way sexual mores and practices have shifted betwe...

Africans have been present in England for more than two thousand years, but we rarely see them or hear about them. And often their existence is dismissed as a figment of 'political correctness' or 'wokism.' This lecture will critically assess the myth of England's story as a 'sacred white space' and examine the evidence for diversity in medieval and early modern...

How can we help human society flourish without destroying nature? The Wellbeing Economy and Natural Capital are linked strategies that can help achieve this. The Wellbeing Economy provides design principles to ensure that our planet serves both humanity and the planet's ecosystems. Natural capital provides design parameters to track the quality and quantity of ecosystems and resources, includ...

Commonwealth citizens once enjoyed the right to live, work and settle in the UK without any restrictions. But a racist backlash against Black and Asian immigration led to legislators introducing immigration controls in the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, which were broadened by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 to deprive East African Asians of the right to settle in the UK. Its shameful succ...

This lecture will examine the evidence for and the significance of events that unfolded in the early Universe. "Early" here refers to within the first few seconds after the Hot Big Bang. These very early developments give rise to fundamental characteristics of the nature of the Universe. A lecture by Katherine Blundell OBE The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are avail...

Because apes seem most like humans, science fiction has used them as a mirror in which to view ourselves. The philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau saw in orangutans the original, natural man, uncorrupted by society. Meanwhile most of his contemporaries used apes to embody racially charged fantasies of bestial brutality. These conflicting views shaped the numerous versions of King Kong and the Planet...

The most outrageous Russian modernist composers of the 1920s were Dmitry Shostakovich in Leningrad, and Alexander Mosolov in Moscow. They were not merely following European avant-garde trends, and their work was genuinely pioneering. Russian culture was undergoing a vigorous renewal at the time, and these composers worked across several arts: Shostakovich's absurdist opera The Nose extends th...

It's usually said that Protestant and evangelical Christians made very little missionary effort in the 16th-18th centuries. In fact, there was much more than we remember. But they used strategies that look very alien to modern eyes: whether trying to spread 'civilisation' as a prerequisite for conversion, or seeing these efforts as part of a global apocalyptic conflict. This lecture...

This lecture will explore the essentials of financial planning. What are the different ways to save and invest, such as bank accounts, bonds, shares, and mutual funds, and how do they differ in returns and risk? What does owning bonds and shares give you, both in normal times and in bankruptcy? We'll explore how both inflation and taxes erode investment returns - and how to invest in a tax-ef...