Gresham College Lectures

The Brothers Grimm's tale of Snow White has been retold dozens of times in print and the cinema over the past two centuries. A central character is the Evil Queen, Snow White's malevolent stepmother, who tries to kill her with the help of the occult. Aging women have often been portrayed as Evil Women.

What do portrayals of the Evil Queen tell us about witchcraft, fears of the power of aging women, and the valorisation of youth, beauty, and domesticity?

A lecture by Joanna Bourke 19 November

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/evil-witches

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
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How has Covid-19 re-shaped our ideas about what we owe society? The lockdown has had a terrible impact on the economic prospects of young people - and the elderly have suffered from high mortality in care homes. Choices have to be made between the generations. Should people save and pay for their own pensions, care in ill-health and old age as an individual responsibility? Or is it a societal duty that should be funded by compulsory payment of taxes?

The role of collective versus individual responsibility has shifted across time and between societies around the world according to different cultural understanding, political calculation, and pragmatic necessity. Might Covid-19 mark a further shift in the balance?

A lecture by Martin Daunton 10 November

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/owe-society

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

The 2020 Alfred Wiener Holocaust Memorial Lecture Series

2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the most lethal of all Nazi camps.

This lecture looks back at its final months, from the time the camp reached its murderous peak, after the mass deportations of Jews from Hungary, to the arrival of Soviet soldiers in January 1945. But liberation did not put an end to Nazi murder - it continued elsewhere, until the final German defeat in spring 1945.

The lecture follows the fate of former Auschwitz prisoners forced to other camps and the crimes of former Auschwitz SS staff in camps like Bergen-Belsen.

This lecture is presented in partnership with the Wiener Holocaust Library, the Holocaust Research Institute (Royal Holloway), The University of Huddersfield, and the Holocaust Survivors' Friendship Association.

A lecture by Nikolaus Wachsmann 18 November

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/auschwitz-ww2

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

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Accounts of occasional celestial spectacular events in past centuries have provided crucial information for modern-day astrophysicists. One such example is the so-called Great Eruption of Eta Carinae which was for a time in the mid 19th century the third brightest object in the night sky.

Interpretation of the spectacular structure of this so-called supernova imposter would be hard without information from eye-witnesses of days gone by.

A lecture by Katherine Blundell OBE 18 November

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/witnessing-fireworks

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

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What is meant by ‘love’ between human and nonhuman animals? Why is sex with animals such a taboo? It is only in very recent years that some people have begun to undermine the absolute prohibition on zoosexuality.

Are their arguments dangerous, perverted, or simply wrongheaded? What does it mean to love nonhuman animals? More pertinently: what does it mean to love?

This book launch will look at the history of debates about human sexual encounters with other species.

A lecture by Joanna Bourke 9 November

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/loving-animals

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

It has been known since antiquity that there are simple "harmonic" relationships between notes that sound appealing together.

This lecture introduces the mathematics of pitch, scales, and just temperament. The pitch of a sound is not its only important property. The same note, played on different instruments, can have a very different quality of sound. We will explore the mathematics governing the relationships between these qualities of sounds, and the shape and dimensions of the instruments used to produce them.

A lecture by Sarah Hart 17 November

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/maths-sound

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

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Father and son, William and Robert Cecil, not only dominated politics for much of Elizabeth I and James I reign but dominated architectural fashion. Building a series of spectacular houses, they, and not the monarchy, were the great palace builders of their age.

Burghley and Hatfield remain, but those that are lost were even more extraordinary in both their form and in how they were used.

A lecture by Simon Thurley CBE 4 November

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/cecil-architecture

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Air pollution, the usefulness of trees, ideas for a green belt are not concerns we associate with the 1600s. But John Evelyn, writer, diarist and gardener, was unusual. His thinking in Fumifugium (1661) about air quality, and Sylva (1664) about trees, seems astonishingly close to our own today.

Evelyn’s preoccupation with apparently contemporary environmental problems, and his suggested solutions, are a remarkable legacy and one to be celebrated in 2020.

A lecture by Gillian Darley OBE 29 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/john-evelyn

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

THE 2020 PETER NAILOR MEMORIAL LECTURE

Drones, or unmanned air systems, are changing the face of war in the 21st century, for combatants and civilians. We are used to a history of the RAF based on a narrative of the 'bravery of the few' with fighter pilot missions in the Battle of Britain seeing a mortality rate of 20% and a staggeringly higher rate for 'the many' of Bomber Command (over 50% of aircrew died on operations). But in the UK over the last fifteen years, an increasing number of air missions have been carried out remotely by drone.

The tasks these drones can carry out include targeted assassinations, bombings and intelligence-gathering, and the forces that deploy them claim to minimise the loss of life on both sides. These drones still have operators, who can be based thousands of miles away from the field of battle, but in future they may not need operators at all. What does operating drones mean for the mental health of the operators? What does it mean for the concept of bravery in battle? How does distance affect the chances of operations going wrong? What are the ethical challenges of unmanned warfare today? And how much harder will those challenges become in a future era of autonomous drones? Ultimately, how are the risks and realities of unmanned air power changing those that fight, those who command them, and those they target?

A lecture by Dr Sophy Antrobus MBE 11 November

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/drone-warfare

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

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How does fiction make itself seem like fact?

Professor John Mullan begins where novels begin: with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which showed every novel that followed how to make a ‘strange surprising’ story seem entirely ‘probable’ (the word that eighteenth-century pioneers of fiction liked to use). He will explore the tradition of factuality in the English novel, ending with the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro and examples of recent auto-fiction.

A lecture by John Mullan 28 October

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/convincing-fiction

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege