TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

Breach Theatre's Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens in conversation with Dr Hannah Simpson and Dr Sos Eltis

Oxfordshire Local historian, Mark Davies, takes a look at the history of Medley Manor and its connections to empire as well as his own family history.

Keynote lecture in the Diversity and the British String Quartet Symposium, day 3, held on 16th June 2021. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Chair: Dr Nina Whiteman

Speaker: Dr Des Oliver

On our final day, we begin with a keynote lecture from composer Dr Des Oliver on his ‘Diasporic Quartets’ projects.

You can learn more here https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/diversity-and-the-british-string-quartet-0#/

Keynote lecture in the Diversity and the British String Quartet Symposium, held on 14th June 2021. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Lecture by Professor Laura Tunbridge (University of Oxford)

Chair: Dr Wiebke Thormählen (Royal College of Music)

We will hear from Beethoven and string quartet expert Prof Laura Tunbridge on the history of performing quartets working in UK universities.

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In his autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (2018), award-winning poet, lyricist, musician, and activist Benjamin Zephaniah speaks out candidly about the writer’s responsibility to step outside the medium of literature and engage in political activism: “You can’t just be a poet or writer and say your activism is simply writing about these things; you have to do something as well, especially if your public profile can be put to good use.” In conversation with Elleke Boehmer and Malachi McIntosh, he will address the complex relationship of authorship and activism in a celebrity-driven media culture and the ways in which his celebrity persona relates to his activist agenda. The conversation will tie in with contemporary debates about the role of literature and the celebrity author as a social commentator.

Pre-recorded introduction:

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the author and editor of over twenty books, including Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial: Resistance in Interaction (2002), Stories of Women (2005), Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (2015), Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-century critical readings (2018), and a widely translated biography of Nelson Mandela (2008). She is the award-winning author of five novels, including Bloodlines (2000), Nile Baby (2008), and The Shouting in the Dark (2015), and two collections of short stories, most recently To the Volcano, and other stories (2019). Boehmer is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing and principal investigator of Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds.

Speakers:

Benjamin Zephaniah is one of Britain’s most eminent contemporary poets, best known for his compelling spoken-word and recorded performances. An award-winning playwright, novelist, children’s author, and musician, he is also a committed political activist and outspoken campaigner for human and animal rights. He appears regularly on radio and TV, literary festivals, and has also taken part in plays and films. He continues to record and perform with his reggae band, recently releasing the album Revolutionary Minds. His autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (2018), was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award.

Malachi McIntosh is editor and publishing director of Wasafiri. He previously co-led the Runnymede Trust’s award-winning Our Migration Story project and spent four years as a lecturer in postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Emigration and Caribbean Literature (2015) and the editor of Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon (2016). His fiction and non-fiction have been published widely, including in the Caribbean Review of Books, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, The Guardian, The Journal of Romance Studies, Research in African Literatures, and The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature.

Q and A Chaired by Professor Wes Williams, TORCH Director.

The event is organised in association with the Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds project and The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) and forms part of the webinar series Art and Action: Literary Authorship, Politics, and Celebrity Culture.

Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. About the book:

The emancipatory promise of liberalism - and its exclusionary qualities - shaped the fate of Jews in many parts of the world during the age of empire. Yet historians have mostly understood the relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism as a European story, defined by the collapse of liberalism and the Holocaust. This volume challenges that perspective by taking a global approach. It takes account of recent historical work that explores issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, but which has done so without taking much account of Jews. Individual essays explore how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender, religion, race functioned differently in European Jewish heartlands, in the Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman empire, and in the North American Atlantic world.

Speakers:

Professor Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at Brasenose College, Oxford. Her recent work focuses on international Jewish history and transnational humanitarian activism. She is currently completing a three year Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship, working on a new book on liberalism and the Jews, tentatively titled Children of 1848: Liberalism and the Jews from the Revolutions to Human Rights. Working in partnership with colleagues in the heritage sector, she is also leading a major four year AHRC-funded project on Jewish country houses.

Professor Simon Levis Sullam is Associate Professor of Modern History at Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, Italy. His fields of interest include the history of ideas and culture in Europe between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth century, with a particular focus on nationalisms and fascism; the history of the Jews and of Anti-Semitism; the history of the Holocaust; the history of historiography, and questions of historical method. His many publications include, most recently, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy.

Professor Adam Sutcliffe is Professor of European History and co-director of the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s College London. His research has focused on in the intellectual history of Western Europe between approximately 1650 and 1850, and on the history of Jews, Judaism and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Europe from 1600 to the present. Professor Sutcliffe’s most recent publication, What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood and Purpose, is a wide-ranging look at the history of Western thinking on the purpose of the Jewish people.

Dr Kei Hiruta is Assistant Professor and AIAS-COFUND Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research lies at the intersection of political philosophy and intellectual history, with particular interest in theories of freedom in modern political thought. His book Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity will be published from Princeton University Press in autumn 2021.

Ethics in AI Seminar - presented by the Institute for Ethics in AI Chair: Peter Millican, Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Professor of Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford University

What role should the technical AI community play in questions of AI ethics and those concerning the broader impacts of AI? Are technical researchers well placed to reason about the potential societal impacts of their work?

What does it mean to conduct and publish AI research responsibly?

What challenges does the AI community face in reaching consensus about responsibilities, and adopting appropriate norms and governance mechanisms?

How can we maximise the benefits while minimizing the risks of increasingly advanced AI research?

AI and related technologies are having an increasing impact on the lives of individuals, as well as society as a whole. Alongside many current and potential future benefits, there has been an expanding catalogue of harms arising from deployed systems, raising questions about fairness and equality, privacy, worker exploitation, environmental impact, and more. In addition, there have been increasing incidents of research publications which have caused an outcry over ethical concerns and potential negative societal impacts. In response, many are now asking whether the technical AI research community itself needs to do more to ensure ethical research conduct, and to ensure beneficial outcomes from deployed systems. But how should individual researchers and the research community more broadly respond to the existing and potential impacts from AI research and AI technology? Where should we draw the line between academic freedom and centering societal impact in research, or between openness and caution in publication? Are technical researchers well placed to grapple with issues of ethics and societal impact, or should these be left to other actors and disciplines? What can we learn from other high-stakes, ‘dual-use’ fields? In this seminar, Rosie Campbell, Carolyn Ashurst and Helena Webb will discuss these and related issues, drawing on examples such as conference impact statements, release strategies for large language models, and responsible research innovation in practice.

Speakers

Rosie Campbell leads the Safety-Critical AI program the Partnership on AI . She is currently focused on responsible publication and deployment practices for increasingly advanced AI, and was a co-organizer of the NeurIPS workshop on Navigating the Broader Impacts of AI Research . Previously, Rosie was the Assistant Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI) , a technical AI safety research group at UC Berkeley working towards provably beneficial AI. Before that, Rosie worked as a research engineer at BBC R and D, a multidisciplinary research lab based in the UK. There, she worked on emerging technologies for media and broadcasting, including an award-winning project exploring the use of AI in media production. Rosie holds a Master’s in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s in Physics, and also has academic experience in Philosophy and Machine Learning. She co-founded a futurist community group in the UK to explore the social implications of emerging tech, and was recently named one of ‘100 Brilliant Women to follow in AI Ethics.’

Dr Carolyn Ashurst

Carolyn is a Senior Research Scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute and Research Affiliate with the Centre for the Governance of AI . Her research focuses on improving the societal impacts of machine learning and related technologies, including topics in AI governance, responsible machine learning, and algorithmic fairness. Her technical fairness research focuses on using causal models to formalise incentives for fairness related behaviours. On the question of responsible research and publication, Carolyn recently co-authored A Guide to Writing the NeurIPS Impact Statement , Institutionalizing Ethics in AI through Broader Impact requirements , and co-organised the NeurIPS workshop on Navigating the Broader Impacts of AI Research . Previously, she worked as a data and research scientist in various roles within government and finance. She holds an MMath and PhD from the University of Bath.

Dr Helena Webb

Helena is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Oxford. She is an interdisciplinary researcher and specialises in projects that bridge social science and computational analysis. She is interested in the ways that users interact with technologies in different kinds of settings and how social action both shapes and is shaped by innovation. She works on projects that seek to identify mechanisms for the improved design, responsible development and effective regulation of technology. Whilst at Oxford she has worked on projects relating to, amongst others, harmful content on social media, algorithm bias, resources in STEM education, and responsible robotics. Helena is the Research Lead at the newly formed Responsible Technology Institute in the Department of Computer Science. She also co convenes student modules in the Department on Computers in Society and Ethics and Responsible Innovation.

Chair

Professor Peter Millican

Peter is Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Professor of Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford. He has researched and published over a wide range, including Early Modern Philosophy, Epistemology, Ethics, Philosophy of Language and of Religion, but has a particular focus on interdisciplinary connections with Computing and AI. He founded and oversees the Oxford undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Philosophy, which has been running since 2012.

Part of the Colloquium on AI Ethics series presented by the Institute of Ethics in AI. This event is also part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. What, if anything, can the ancient Greeks teach us​ about robots and AI? Perhaps the answer is nothing, or nothing so straightforward as a correct 'solution' to the problems thrown up by robots and AI, but instead a way of thinking about them. Join us for a fascinating presentation from Adrienne Mayor, Stanford University, who will discuss her latest book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. This book investigates how the Greeks imagined automatons, replicants, and Artificial Intelligence in myths and later designed self-moving devices and robots.

Adrienne Mayor, research scholar in the Classics Department and the History and Philosophy of Science program at Stanford University since 2006, is a folklorist and historian of ancient science who investigates natural knowledge contained in pre-scientific myths and oral traditions. Her research looks at ancient "folk science" precursors, alternatives, and parallels to modern scientific methods. She was a Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, 2018-2019. Mayor's latest book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, investigates how the Greeks imagined automatons, replicants, and Artificial Intelligence in myths and later designed actual self-moving devices and robots. Mayor's 2014 book, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World, analyzes the historical and archaeological evidence underlying myths and tales of warlike women (Sarasvati Prize for Women in Mythology). Her biography of King Mithradates VI of Pontus, The Poison King, won the Gold Medal for Biography, Independent Publishers' Book Award 2010, and was a 2009 National Book Award Finalist. Mayor’s other books include The First Fossil Hunters (rev. ed. 2011); Fossil Legends of the First Americans (2005); and Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (2009, rev. ed. forthcoming).

Commentators:

Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer - Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics and the Program in Gender Studies. Professor Bartsch-Zimmer works on Roman imperial literature, the history of rhetoric and philosophy, and on the reception of the western classical tradition in contemporary China. She is the author of 5 books on the ancient novel, Neronian literature, political theatricality, and Stoic philosophy, the most recent of which is Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural (Winner of the 2016 Goodwin Award of Merit). She has also edited or co-edited 7 wide-ranging essay collections (two of them Cambridge Companions) and the “Seneca in Translation” series from the University of Chicago. Bartsch’s new translation of Vergil’s Aeneid is forthcoming from Random House in 2020; in the following year, she is publishing a new monograph on the contemporary Chinese reception of ancient Greek political philosophy. Bartsch has been a Guggenheim fellow, edits the journal KNOW, and has held visiting scholar positions in St. Andrews, Taipei, and Rome. Starting in academic year 2015, she has led a university-wide initiative to explore the historical and social contexts in which knowledge is created, legitimized, and circulated.

Armand D'Angour is Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. Professor D'Angour pursued careers as a cellist and businessman before becoming a Tutor in Classics at Jesus College in 2000. In addition to my monograph The Greeks and the New (CUP 2011), he is the author of articles and chapters on the language, literature, psychology and culture of ancient Greece. In 2013-14 he was awarded a British Academy Fellowship to undertake research into ancient Greek music, and in 2017 was awarded a Vice Chancellor’s Prize for Public Engagement with Research. Professor D'Angour has since co-edited with Tom Phillips Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece (OUP 2018), and in addition to numerous broadcasts on radio and television, a short film on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hOK7bU0S1Y) has reached over 650,000 views since its publication in December 2017. His book Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher was published in April 2019, and How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creating Change is due from Princeton University Press in 2021.

Chaired by John Tasioulas, the inaugural Director for the Institute for Ethics and AI, and Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. Professor Tasioulas was at The Dickson Poon School of Law, Kings College London, from 2014, as the inaugural Chair of Politics, Philosophy and Law and Director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law. He has degrees in Law and Philosophy from the University of Melbourne, and a D.Phil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He was previously a Lecturer in Jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow, and Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he taught from 1998-2010. He has also acted as a consultant on human rights for the World Bank.

Launch of the Institute for Ethics in AI with Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Joshua Cohen and Hélène Landemore. Part of the Colloquium on AI Ethics series presented by the Institute for Ethics in AI Introduced by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Louise Richardson and chaired by Professor John Tasioulas.

Speakers Professor Joshua Cohen (Apple University), Professor Hélène Landemore (Yale University), and Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt (Computer Science, Oxford)

Speakers:

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is Principal of Jesus College Oxford and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. He has researched and published on topics in artificial intelligence, cognitive science and computational neuroscience. In 2009 he was appointed along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee as Information Advisor to the UK Government. This work led to the release of many thousands of public sector data sets as open data. In 2010 he was appointed by the Coalition Government to the UK Public Sector Transparency Board which oversaw the continued release of Government open data. Nigel continues to advise Government in a number of roles. Professor Shadbolt is Chairman and Co-founder of the Open Data Institute (ODI), based in Shoreditch, London. The ODI specialised in the exploitation of Open Data supporting innovation, training and research in both the UK and internationally.

Professor Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen is a political philosopher. He has written on issues of democratic theory, freedom of expression, religious freedom, political equality, democracy and digital technology, good jobs, and global justice. His books include On Democracy; Democracy and Associations; Philosophy, Politics, Democracy; Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals; and The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays. He is co-editor of the Norton Introduction to Philosophy. Cohen taught at MIT (1977-2005), Stanford (2005-2014), is currently on the faculty at Apple University, and is Distinguished Senior Fellow in Law, Philosophy, and Political Science at Berkeley. Cohen held the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Professorship in 2002-3; was Tanner Lecturer at UC Berkeley in 2007; and gave the Comte Lectures at LSE in 2012. Since 1991, he has been editor of Boston Review.

Professor Hélène Landemore (Yale) is Associate Professor of Political Science, with Tenure. Her research and teaching interests include democratic theory, political epistemology, theories of justice, the philosophy of social sciences (particularly economics), constitutional processes and theories, and workplace democracy. Hélène is the author of Hume (Presses Universitaires de France: 2004), a historical and philosophical investigation of David Hume’s theory of decision-making; Democratic Reason (Princeton University Press: 2013, Spitz prize 2015), an epistemic defense of democracy; and Open Democracy (Princeton University Press 2020), a vision for a new kind, more open form of democracy based on non-electoral forms of representation, including representation based on random selection.

Chaired by Professor John Tasioulas, the inaugural Director for the Institute for Ethics and AI, and Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. Professor Tasioulas was at The Dickson Poon School of Law, Kings College London, from 2014, as the inaugural Chair of Politics, Philosophy and Law and Director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law. He has degrees in Law and Philosophy from the University of Melbourne, and a D.Phil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He was previously a Lecturer in Jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow, and Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he taught from 1998-2010. He has also acted as a consultant on human rights for the World Bank.

A TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on ‘Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France’ by Professor Neil Kenny. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all.

About the book:

It is easy to forget how deeply embedded in social hierarchy was the literature and learning that has come down to us from the early modern European world. From fiction to philosophy, from poetry to history, works of all kinds emerged from and through the social hierarchy that was a fundamental fact of everyday life. Paying attention to it changes how we might understand and interpret the works themselves, whether canonical and familiar or largely forgotten. But a second, related fact is much overlooked too: works also often emanated from families, not just from individuals.

Speakers:

Professor Neil Kenny is a Professor of French at Oxford University, a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College and Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy. He specialises in early modern French literature and thought, especially from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Professor Kenny’s current focus is on the relation of literature and learning to social hierarchy and previous projects have investigated different kinds of knowledge and belief.

Professor Caroline Warman is a Professor of French Literature and Thought at Oxford University, and President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She specialises in the circulation of ideas and materialist thought and has recently completed a book on Diderot called The Atheist’s Bible: Diderot and the ‘Eléments de physiologie’.

Professor Ceri Sullivan is a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University and the author of five books on the literary features that structure early modern texts about religion, trade, bureaucracy, and rhetoric. She is the general editor of the English Association's series Essays and Studies and her most recent publication is Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer.