Thoughtlines

In this episode we join the dots on the global story of abolition with Dr Bronwen Everill, 1973 lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Why was the Cambridge connection so central to those campaigning to end the slave trade in Britain? What did these abolitionists have in common with those in West Africa and in the United States? What was the product that both drove slavery and helped early ethical consumers do their bit for the abolitionist cause? And how do we acknowledge the different types of ‘labour’ that make an academic life possible today?

Learn more:

Bronwen Everill's book 'Not Made By Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition' is available here and in all good bookshops: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674240988

Hear Bronwen Everill talking further about the Zong massacre on BBC Radio 4.

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Zong Massacre: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pqbz

Read Bronwen Everill's blog article about buying ethically, and its limitations "Shopping for Racial Justice" (https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2020/06/shopping-for-racial-justice.html) and her research during her CRASSH fellowship here:

- a journal article in History of Science (https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320945117) on Freetown, Sierra Leone, as a ship-building and repair hub in the nineteenth century

- and an African Economic History working paper on measuring the standard of living in nineteenth century Freetown (https://www.aehnetwork.org/working-papers/on-the-freetown-waterfront-household-income-and-informal-wage-labour-in-a-nineteenth-century-port-city/)

The plaque to Anna Maria Vassa, discussed at the beginning of this episode, can be found at St Andrew's Church, Chesterton, Cambridge: https://www.standrews-chesterton.org/

St Andrew's Church, Chesterton's Wikipedia entry which discusses the plaqu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Andrew%27s_Church,_Chesterton

In this episode, presenter and broadcast journalist Catherine Galloway talks youth, ageing, research time, and timelessness with Professor Simon Goldhill, a former director of CRASSH, and Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Classics.

We also spend time considering the life-changing power of the moment. As chair of the Nine Dots Prize Board, Professor Goldhill makes the phone call to the winner of this lucrative and prestigious biennial international essay competition, telling the astonished recipient that their ‘out of the box’ thinking has netted them $100,000, a publishing contract with Cambridge University Press, and the chance to come to CRASSH for a term to work on turning their essay answer into a book. The latest recipient was announced this month, and we’ve got the scoop on the idea that won.

Thoughtlines is produced by Carl Homer at Cambridge TV.

Learn more:

- Find more on Professor Simon Goldhill here: https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/directory/simon-goldhill

- To discover the identity of the 2021 winner of the Nine Dots Prize mentioned in this episode click here: https://ninedotsprize.org/

- An open access copy of the first Nine Dots Prize book, Stand Out Of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance In The Attention Economy, by James Williams, is available here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stand-out-of-our-light/3F8D7BA2C0FE3A7126A4D9B73A89415D

- An open access copy of the second Nine Dots Prize book, Bread, Cement, Cactus: A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation, by Annie Zaidi, is available here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/bread-cement-cactus/75DCB40487D5CD8DCB772761555CF10C

Simon Goldhill is the Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Classics and a Fellow of King's College Cambridge.

Professor Simon Goldhill's forthcoming book on time, discussed in this episode, will be released in 2022 by Cambridge University Press, and is titled The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity.

Two of his recent books are A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain (The University of Chicago Press, 2016)https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo24550846.html

In this episode we talk wisdom, forgetting, and what we all have in common, with Dr Inanna Hamati-Ataya, the Founding Director of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies at CRASSH.

What do the things we share, across all human history, tell us about who we really are? What are we missing? Why does the way we farm our planet need a re-think? And what on earth does the humble potato have to do with it all?

(This episode was recorded remotely, during Covid-19 lockdown restrictions)

Dr Inanna Hamati-Ataya is Principal Research Associate and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project ARTEFACT (http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/artefact) as of March 2018, and founding director of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies or gloknos (http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/centre-for-global-knowledge-studies-gloknos), since September 2017. Inanna answers questions about the project here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/post/global-epistemics-6-questions-to-inanna-hamati-ataya. She is the founding editor of the book series Global Epistemics (http://gloknos.ac.uk/media/book-series) at Rowman & Littlefield International.

In this episode we talk to archaeologist Professor Martin Millett about the ground-breaking changes in how we search, and respond to, the landscape of the past.

We hear what happens when sound artists and radar technicians start really listening to the earth beneath our feet. What it means – on both sides - to be part of an Empire. And why nothing really beats the academic excitement of getting your hands dirty.

For more on Professor Millett's radar discoveries in Falerii Novi in Italy, mentioned in this episode, please click here:

The city rises: Cambridge archaeologists reveal an entire Roman city without digging - https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/roman-city-rises

And for more on Professor Millett's Roman town project in Aldborough, England, also mentioned in this episode, please click here:

https://aldboroughromantown.wordpress.com/

In this episode we talk tech with Digital Democracy expert Dr Marcus Tomalin.

Can our computing systems be better and do better? How can we – everyday users and professional coders - spot the hidden biases and fleeting programming decisions that make a lasting difference in ‘real’ life?

And can we even imagine what we’ll be asking Alexa ten years from now?

(This episode was recorded before Covid-19 lockdown restrictions and when face to face teaching at the University of Cambridge was still occurring)

LEARN MORE:

To hear Marcus Tomalin talking more about Artificial Intelligence and Social Change please click here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhcKL7pb180&ab_channel=CRASSHCambridge

To read Marcus Tomalin's journal article on 'Quarantining Online Hate Speech', discussed in this episode, please click here:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-019-09516-z

In this episode we talk food with cultural historian Dr Melissa Calaresu. The need to nourish ourselves is an eternal, daily preoccupation for all of us, but what we eat, and why, is an altogether meatier subject.

Food is pleasure, performance, politics and even panic.

Which fruit was a full-blown fashion craze in the 1600s? What did an undergraduate Isaac Newton feel guilty about buying? And why are our own early food memories so powerful?

(This episode was recorded before Covid-19 lockdown restrictions)

LEARN MORE:

For a short film on Melissa Calaresu's 'Feast and Fast' exhibition featured in this episode, please click here https://feast-and-fast.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/film/.

For an academic introduction to food culture in Europe from 1500-1800 by Melissa Calaresu please click here https://brill.com/view/journals/jemh/24/1/article-p1_1.xml.

And for more of Melissa Calaresu's research on the Neopolitan food experiences of Welsh painter Thomas Jones, featured in this episode, please click here https://brill.com/view/journals/jemh/24/1/article-p84_5.xml.

Welcome to Thoughtlines, a podcast celebrating the best of academic thinking outside the box, from CRASSH at the University of Cambridge.