Spring 2014 | Public lectures and events | Video

Contributor(s): Professor Diane Elson, Professor Ruth Lister | With the arrival of The Women’s Library at LSE, the Gender Institute will be running a series of 'Conversations' for which audience participation is invited. Money and material resources are unequally distributed throughout the world. This conversation discusses the part that gender plays in this universal pattern and the ways in which gendered financial inequality can be challenged. Diane Elson is professor of sociology at the University of Essex. Ruth Lister is emeritus professor of social policy at Loughborough University and a member of the House of Lords.

Contributor(s): Christine Whitehead, Kath Scanlon | LSE London's 2014 Lent term seminar series begins on the 20th of January. Speakers from within and beyond LSE will focus on London's current economic and political environment London, covering relevant issues such as the private rented sector, the distribution of poverty and the densification effects of international migrants. Presenters include academics and practitioners from relevant fields. Each seminar is chaired by one of the members of LSE London, while speaker’s presentations, available podcasts and any other related documents are posted here regularly after each session.

Contributor(s): Tobias Hill, Michael Longley, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Louisa Young | One hundred years after the outbreak of the Great War, Sebastian Faulks, whose novel Birdsong has sold over 2.5 million copies, introduces four writers, and the pieces of First World War literature that mean most to them. The poet and fiction writer Tobias Hill, described by A.S. Byatt as one of the ‘most original and interesting’ novelists writing in Britain today, looks at Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. The Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, whose father was awarded the Military Cross for Gallantry during the First World War, reads from the poetry of Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas. Timberlake Wertenbaker, whose most recent play, Our Ajax, looks at the trauma of modern warfare, explains how she was marked by Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. And Louisa Young, author of the bestselling First World War novel My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, considers The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West. Tobias Hill has been selected as one of the country’s Next Generation poets and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. What Was Promised is his fifth novel. Michael Longley is one of Northern Ireland’s foremost contemporary poets, awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2001. Timberlake Wertenbaker is a British playwright, screenplay writer and translator. Her plays include most recently Our Ajax which looks at the trauma of modern warfare. Louisa Young (@rileypurefoy) is author of the bestselling First World War novel My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You. Peter Parker is the author of The Last Veteran, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos and biographies of J.R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood. This event is organised in association with the Royal Society of Literature (@RSLiterature). This event forms part of the LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2014, taking place from Monday 24 February - Saturday 1 March 2014, with the theme 'Reflections'.

Contributor(s): Professor Josh Cohen, Dr Ellen Helsper, Professor Andrew Murray | This panel will discuss where our modern understanding of privacy has come from, what our rights to privacy are in a digital age, and what effect this is having on younger generations, who seem to live their lives in the public domain. Josh Cohen is professor of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the author of books and articles on modern literature, cultural theory and psychoanalysis, including How to Read Freud and The Private Life: why we remain in the dark. Ellen Helsper (@EllenHel) is an associate professor in the Media and Communications Department of the LSE. She has been consulted widely by UK and EU governments, the commercial and the charitable sector. She has held the roles of academic advisor for the Media and Communications Department of the PUC in Chile, external member of the BCS Ethics Board, and specialist advisor on digital inclusion for the Welsh Affairs Committee. She is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and has had visiting scholar positions at the NYU Steinhardt's department of Media, Culture and Communications, USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and the Communications Department at the University of Twente. Andrew Murray (@AndrewDMurray) is professor in law at LSE and a fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA). He joined the LSE Law Department in September 2000. Andrew’s principal research interests are in regulatory design within Cyberspace, particularly the role of non-State actors, the protection and promotion of Human Rights within the digital environment and the promotion of proprietary interests in the digital sphere, encompassing both intellectual property rights and traditional property models. This event forms part of LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2014, taking place from Monday 24 February - Saturday 1 March 2014, with the theme 'Reflections'.

Contributor(s): Professor Trevor Cox, Caroline Devine, Aleksander Kolkowski | In a world dominated by the visual, we can all benefit from opening our ears to the glorious cacophony around us, which can enrich our understanding of ourselves and our environment. Trevor Cox (@trevor_cox) is professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford and president of the Institute of Acoustics. He has presented numerous science radio documentaries and has written for the New Scientist. He is an associate editor for an international journal of acoustics and author of Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound. Caroline Devine is a composer and sound artist whose practice investigates the boundary between sound and music, encompassing electroacoustic composition, sound installation, radio and theatre. Born in London in 1969, she studied Sound Arts and Design at London College of Communication. Caroline’s works explore voices and sounds that are ordinarily imperceptible, silenced or in some way absent, such as natural radio transmissions, solar resonances, electromagnetic signals or hidden voices. She has a particular interest in the use of space as a compositional parameter and her site-specific sound installations include an outdoor parabolic dome structure, a lift, The Open University campus grounds and Alan Turing Hut 8 at Bletchley Park. Caroline's soundwork documenting derelict buildings at Bletchley Park featured on BBC Radio 4 Today Programme. Recent commissions include Space Ham, Between the Ears for BBC Radio 3, Oscillations, for ICA SOUNDWORKS and 5 Minute Oscillations of the Sun, an outdoor multi channel sound installation that was shortlisted for a BASCA British Composer Award. Throughout 2014, Caroline will undertake a period as Leverhulme Artist in Residence with the Solar and Stellar Physics Group in the School of Physics and Astronomy at University of Birmingham. Aleksander Kolkowski is a violinist, composer and sound artist who uses historical sound recording and reproduction apparatus and obsolete media to make contemporary mechanical-acoustic music. His work invites us to listen to the present through the audio technologies of the past, often by rendering sounds into physical objects and through live historical re-enactments. His numerous international projects in this field have combined wax cylinder phonographs, wind-up gramophones and antique disc recording machines together with live musicians and even singing canaries. A major project to date has been his archive of contemporary musicians, artists and writers recorded exclusively on wax cylinders. Begun in 2006 and continuing, the entire Phonographies collection may be accessed online. In 2012, Aleks was appointed as the first sound artist-in-resident at the Science Museum, London, and he has since held research associateships at the Science Museum and the Royal College of Music. His latest installation, In Search of Perfection, features a giant, newly reconstructed exponential horn loudspeaker from the 1930s and will open at the Science Museum’s Media Space in May 2014. David Hendy (@DavidjHendy) is professor of media and communication at the University of Sussex, and author of Noise: a Human History, a 30-part series for BBC Radio 4, broadcast in 2013. The series traced the role of sound and listening in social life from prehistory to the present-day. This event forms part of the LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2014, taking place from Monday 24 February - Saturday 1 March 2014, with the theme 'Reflections'.

Contributor(s): Michael Rosen | How on Earth did we fix upon our letters, what do they really mean, and how did we come to write them down in the first place? In Alphabetical Michael Rosen takes you on an unforgettable adventure through the history of the alphabet in twenty-six vivid chapters, fizzing with personal anecdotes and fascinating facts. Starting with the mysterious Phoenicians and how sounds first came to be written down, he races on to show how nonsense poems work, pins down the strange story of OK, traces our five lost letters and tackles the tyranny of spelling, among many, many other things. Michael Rosen (@MichaelRosenYes) was born in 1946 in North London. He is a former Children’s Laureate and the bestselling author of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, which won the Smarties Best Book of the Year Award, and many other books. He presents Word of Mouth on BBC Radio 4. Jennifer Richards is professor of early modern literature and culture in the School of English at Newcastle University, and author of Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (2003) and Rhetoric (2007). This event forms part of the LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2014, taking place from Monday 24 February - Saturday 1 March 2014, with the theme 'Reflections'.

Contributor(s): Adrian Searle | At a time when criticism fragments into a mosaic of the theoretical and the anaemic, into promotion, obscurantism and flim-flam, the extinction of the broadsheet critic looms ever closer. Yet there has never been more writing about art, and more of a readership for it. Nor has art ever had such a large audience. As mega-galleries rise, and auctions and art fairs parade a vulgar carnival of wealth and consumption, Searle asks who needs critics, who listens, why look, and why write and read. Adrian Searle (@SearleAdrian) has been writing art criticism for over 35 years, and has been art critic for The Guardian since 1996. In 2010 he edited The Writings of Juan Muñoz, and recently contributed to By and On Luc Tuymans, for the Whitechapel and MIT press. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including the first retrospective of Brazilian sculptor Lucia Nogueira, for the Serralves Museum in Portugal in 2007, and Julião Sarmento: Close Distance, at the Casa Encendida in Madrid in 2011. He has taught at many British and European art colleges and was until recently a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art. He also likes to dance. This event forms part of LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2014, taking place from Monday 24 February - Saturday 1 March 2014, with the theme 'Reflections'.

Contributor(s): Polly Courtney, Isabelle de Cat, Jonathan Gibbs | Fiction publishing has long held that an eye catching cover is key to successful sales. But academic publishing struggles to reflect complex contents through one stand-out image on a book cover. The growth of e-books and online publishing in many ways makes the cover design of a book more important, and sharing a cover on social media may give it more prominence than it has ever had. So this panel asks how crucial is how a book cover looks? And what can serious fiction and non-fiction publishing learn from its more populist cousins? Polly Courtney (@PollyCourtney) is the author of six published novels. She started out as an investment banker and wrote her first book, Golden Handcuffs, because she wanted to expose the reality of life in the Square Mile. Subsequent novels have covered sexism, racism, fame culture and the summer riots and her most recent novel, Feral Youth, is about disenfranchised youth in a summer of discontent. In late 2011, Polly famously walked out on her publisher, HarperCollins, for the ‘girly’ titles and covers assigned to her books – most notably, It’s a Man’s World, the hard-hitting take on the lads’ mag industry and its impact on society. Isabelle de Cat is art editor for the Press division of Penguin Books. She has over 12 years' experience working in the book industry. In her current role, she designs, commissions and sources cover artworks for a wide range of titles across Penguin's fiction and non-fiction imprints: Allen Lane, Penguin Classics, Modern Classics and Particular Books. Jonathan Gibbs (@Tiny_Camels) is a books journalist and writer living in London. He writes a weekly blog on book design for The Independent as well as writing more widely on books for The Independent, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Times Literary Supplement. His debut novel, Randall, or The Painted Grape, will be published in 2014 by Galley Beggar Press. He teaches undergraduate modules at the University of East Anglia on Creative Writing and The Writing of Journalism. Toby Lichtig is assistant editor at the Times Literary Supplement. He is also a freelance journalist, editor and writer. The LSE Review of Books (@LSEReviewBooks) publishes daily reviews of academic books across all the social science disciplines. We also produce podcasts where you can hear academics discussing the ideas behind their latest books. We will be producing a special podcast in the run up to the festival asking academics about the art and literature that inspires them. This event forms part of the LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2014, taking place from Monday 24 February - Saturday 1 March 2014, with the theme 'Reflections'.

Contributor(s): Giovanni Frazzetto | Is neuroscience better than philosophy to cope with anxiety in the face of the world’s economic crisis? What can a brain scan or a Caravaggio painting reveal about the deep seat of guilt? Can ancient remedies fight sadness more effectively than anti-depressants? What do poetry and joy have in common? And how can experiments in mice teach us how to find a partner? We live at a time when neuroscience is unlocking the secrets of our emotions. But can the neural script of the brain indeed tell us how we feel? Giovanni Frazzetto takes us on a journey through our everyday lives and most common emotions. He mixes his scientific knowledge with art, literature, philosophy and personal experience to offer a set of stories that contend rationality and sentiment, science and poetry. Giovanni Frazzetto (@BravePassion) was born and grew up in Sicily. In 1995, after high school, he moved to the UK to study science at University College London and in 2002 he received a PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. Since he was a student he has worked and written on the relationship between science, society and culture, publishing in journals such as EMBOreports and Nature. While he was a researcher at the LSE, he was one of the founders of the European Neuroscience & Society Network and the creator of the transdisciplinary Neuroschools. Giovanni has also written short stories and plays and curated science-inspired art exhibitions. For his transdisciplinary efforts he was awarded the 2008 John Kendrew Young Scientist Award. He now lives between London and Berlin where he works at the Institute for Advanced Study. His first book How We Feel: What Neuroscience Can -and Can't- tell us about our emotions was published by Doubleday in August 2013. This event forms part of LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2014, taking place from Monday 24 February - Saturday 1 March 2014, with the theme 'Reflections'.

Contributor(s): James Owen | In this session, historian and journalist James Owen will look at ways of approaching different types of non-fiction writing. Do you want to research or write your family’s story? Or your own? Are you a budding biographer or diarist? Find out how to begin and how to get the most out of the new resources available to would-be writers. James Owen is an author and journalist. His first book, A Serpent in Eden (Little, Brown, 2005), told the story of a famous unsolved murder committed in the Bahamas during the wartime governorship of the Duke of Windsor. It was nominated for the CWA Gold Dagger and adapted for television by Channel 4. Since then, he has written: Nuremberg: Evil on Trial (Headline, 2006), a re-examination of the cases conducted against the leading Nazis which drew on his own training as a barrister; Danger UXB (Little, Brown, 2010), a history of the early days of bomb disposal; and Commando (Little, Brown, 2012). In 2004, with Guy Walters, he published an anthology of writing about the Second World War, The Voice of War (Viking/ Penguin). James previously worked for the Daily Telegraph, mainly as a writer of obituaries, and continues to contribute articles and book reviews regularly to the national press. He is also a trustee of the London Library. Although based in London, he has spent much time in Rome and Venice and is fluent in Italian. This event forms part of LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2014, taking place from Monday 24 February - Saturday 1 March 2014, with the theme 'Reflections'.