Wolfson College Humanities Society

By the time neutral America officially joined WWI in April 1917 as an “Associate” of the Allies, Theodore Roosevelt had for two and a half years been carrying on a quixotic and unpopular struggle at home. This domestic crusade was fought against what he considered the craven neutrality of Woodrow Wilson, whose very presence in the White House TR blamed on himself. This talk examines these years in the multiple, intertwined, contexts of Roosevelt’s post-presidential political career, the preparedness movement, and the “Special Relationship” he fostered between America and Britain which helped define his perceptions of the war in Europe.

Arguments about climate change are rife with conspiracy theories. There are those who think the whole thing is a giant hoax: a scam cooked up by environmentalists and left-wing scientists to empower governments and rip off consumers. But there are equivalent suspicions on the other side: a belief that the sceptics and denialists are just the front for an oil industry-funded plot to bamboozle voters and keep the fossil fuels flowing. The prevalence of these kinds of conspiracy theories is one reason why the debate has become so fractious and polarised. This talk will explore why the climate debate seems so susceptible to conspiracy theories and what that tells us about the current state of mistrust in democracy: mistrust of experts, mistrusts of corporations, mistrust of government itself. Why on an issue like this – of such enormous importance – do we find it so hard to believe what we are told?

This lecture was given in place of the advertised lecture by Professor Sir David Cannadine who was unable to attend.

The discovery of a spring complex, adjacent to Vespasian's Camp and just over a mile from Stonehenge, with well preserved and substantial Mesolithic deposits, potentially transforms our understanding of the Mesolithic use of the pre Stonehenge landscape, and the establishment of its later ritual landscape. This talk outlines the newly discovered local landscape history of the Vespasian's Camp area, the field interventions, and concludes with a review of the site and its wider significance and context for the later development of the Stonehenge ritual landscape.

E.M. Forster’s famous phrase, ‘Only Connect’, is not only a guide to a successful emotional life; it is also a guide to cognition. The universities were reformed in the nineteenth century but despite this they still lacked curiosity, imagination and originality, in short, what we might call research. Consequently the cultivation of knowledge was thrust out into those colonies of learned societies which emerged in this period: the Royal Society, the Metaphysical Society, the Philological Society, the Royal Asiatic Society and many others. This talk takes up the inner history of these societies and shows the ways in which knowledge formation was a social process. Learning was spawned in the interstices of conviviality and sociality.

This talk examines the gendered political culture of the Victorian House of Commons by looking at the efforts that politicians made to appear ‘manly’. This culture had very real political significance: it shaped the interactions between politicians, it shaped their public images, and it underpinned the opposition to admitting women as members of parliament.

The recent forced resignation of Mr Justice Coleridge prompts questions about rogue judges and the boundaries of judicial misconduct. How far may a judge express controversial opinions? How far may his personal convictions influence his decisions? Clashes with the Executive and with his fellow judges characterised the judicial career (1916-1933) of Mr Justice McCardie -`rebel judge who feared nobody’. Did his iconoclasm help or hinder reform of the law? Maverick or hero?

This paper argues that neoliberalism offers a highly productive site to excavate the ways in which Cold War power/knowledge formations have shaped, and continue to shape, sociological thinking, and suggest that post-socialism can make similar critical intervention into sociological thought as postcolonial and feminist scholarship, since it challenges us to rethink some key epistemological and ontological issues in sociological knowledge production.

Plato began the discussion about the purpose of education. Each succeeding age has given its own answers. Now it is our turn.

This talk explores the familiar topic of Chile under the Popular Unity Government (1970-1973) from a less familiar angle: the indigenous heartlands of the south. Here, unresolved territorial conflicts between European settlers and the Mapuche people accentuated the political divisions of a nation-state in denial about its indigenous heritage. Through the history of the Araucanía region, we can understand the obstacles to Allende’s “Chilean road to Socialism”, the hopes of Che Guevara-inspired revolutionaries and why a supposedly stable democracy gave way to a 17-year-long military dictatorship.