TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

Contemporary poets read from their translations of the Purgatorio and from their poems about Dante. After Dante: Poets in Purgatory, edited by Nick Havely with Bernard O'Donoghue, was published by Arc Poetry in July and marks the 700th anniversary of the poet's death in exile at Ravenna on 14 September 1321. This new complete version of Dante's Purgatorio is by sixteen contemporary poets who enter into dialogue with the original by rendering it into a variety of Anglophone voices: American, Australian, British, Irish, Jamaican,Scottish, Singaporean. The video of the launch (on 10 November 2021) includes nine of the poets reading parts of the cantos they have translated and some of their poems about Dante's Purgatory; it also features poems by a predecessor and a contemporary of Dante. The programme begins with an introduction to another book on Dante's work: John Dickson Batten: Illustrations for Dante's 'Inferno', edited by Pater Hainsworth, also published this year (by Panarc International). The event was supported by TORCH, the Oxford Dante Society and Lady Margaret Hall. Speakers/contributors (alphabetical order): Jane Draycott; Steve Ellis; Andrew Fitzsimons; Lorna Goodison; Peter Hainsworth; Nick Havely; Angela Jarman; Jan Kemp; Jamie McKendrick; Bernard O'Donoghue; A.E. Stallings; Patrick Worsnip.

A Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences event. Shifting the question from ‘how should climate change be put into the curriculum?' to ‘how does it transform the curriculum?' opens up the subject in new ways across the world. How does it change the way in which each subject (including humanities) is conceptualised, taught and related to other subject areas? What education do students need to equip them with the information, critical abilities and practical adaptability to build liveable futures? How can they develop the skills and vocabularies to deal with emotions around instability, uncertainty and loss? In the coming decades, what will employers want from their employees? What will drive sustainability and innovation in the world of work? What effects will choices embedded in curricula have on the capacity of societies to adapt to change and to manage it in ways that are just and productive? Educators and makers of education policy need a clear picture of the purpose of education in these contexts as well as a nuanced sense of what roles educators can and should play. Countries like the UK have been slow to introduce these issues into education systems, so what can be learned from educators in countries and regions that have been at the forefront of this thinking? Participants: Rahul Chopra (IISER, Pune; TROP ICSU project) Kim Polgreen (Wytham Woods/Oxford teachers) Amanda Power (History, Oxford) Steve Puttick (Education, Oxford) James Robson (SKOPE, Oxford) Arjen Wals (Wageningen, NL; UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development) Chair: William Finnegan (OUCE, Oxford) Learn more about the Climate Crisis Thinking i the Humanities and Social Science here: torch.ox.ac.uk/climate-crisis-thinking-in-the-humanities-and-social-sciences

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.

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.

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City by Durs Grünbein, translated by Professor Karen Leeder. 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: Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein's hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and “declaration of love” to the famed “Venice on the Elbe,” so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city's destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the “white gold” porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Published in English for the first time, this translation by Professor Karen Leeder marks the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing. Panel includes: Professor Karen Leeder is a Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. She has published widely on modern German culture and is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature, most recently winning the English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig. She was a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre from 2014-15 and she currently works with MPT, Poet in the City, and The Poetry Society on her project Mediating Modern Poetry. Durs Grünbein was born on 9 October 1962 in Dresden. He is one of the most important and internationally powerful German poets and essayists. After the opening of the Iron Curtain, he traveled through Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States. He was a guest of the German Department of New York University and The Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Georg Büchner Prize, the Friedrich Nietzsche Prize, the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize and the Polish Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. His books have been translated into several languages. He lives in Berlin and Rome. Edmund de Waal is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place. His interventions have been made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide, including The British Museum, London; The Frick Collection, New York; Ateneo Veneto, Venice; Schindler House, Los Angeles; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and V&A Museum, London. De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), and The White Road (2015). His new book, Letters to Camondo, a series of haunting letters written during lockdown was published in April 2021. He was made an OBE for his services to art in 2011 and awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University in 2015. Born 1964 Nottingham. He lives and works in London. Professor Patrick Major is Professor of History at the University of Reading, where he is also an associate of the East German Studies Archive. His research interests are primarily the political, social and cultural history of divided Germany in the Cold War. He has published on the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall and Hollywood's depictions of 'bad Nazis' and 'good Germans', and is currently researching the bombing of Berlin in the Second World War.

A TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on ‘China's Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism' by Professor Rana Mitter. 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: For most of its history, the People's Republic of China limited public discussion of the war against Japan. It was an experience of victimization - and one that saw Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek fighting for the same goals. But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. Professor Rana Mitter argues that China's reassessment of the World War II years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home. China's Good War begins with the academics who shepherded the once-taboo subject into wider discourse. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, they researched the Guomindang war effort, collaboration with the Japanese, and China's role in forming the post-1945 global order. But interest in the war would not stay confined to scholarly journals. Today public sites of memory—including museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social media—define the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China. Wartime China emerges as victor rather than victim. The shifting story has nurtured a number of new views. One rehabilitates Chiang Kai-shek's war efforts, minimizing the bloody conflicts between him and Mao and aiming to heal the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Another narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order that emerged from the war—an order, China argues, under threat today largely from the United States. China's radical reassessment of its collective memory of the war has created a new foundation for a people destined to shape the world. Speakers: Professor Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford. His books include China's War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist, and China's Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics "Meanwhile in Beijing" is available on BBC Sounds. He is a regular presenter of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking/BBC Arts and Ideas Podcast. Professor David Priestland is Professor of Modern History at St Edmund's College Oxford. His research specialises in communism and market liberalism, especially in the communist and post-communist worlds. His publications include a comparative history of communism, The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World, and Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power, a study of the history of market liberalism and its place in global history. Professor Vivienne Shue is Professor Emeritus of Contemporary China Studies and Emeritus Fellow of St Anthony's College Oxford. Her current research examines certain distinctively 21st century Chinese governance techniques and practices, including high-tech national development planning. Her publications include The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic, and most recently To Govern China, co-edited with Professor Patricia Thornton. She is the former director of Oxford's Contemporary China Studies Programme.

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. This panel discussion and conversation with artist Khaled Kaddal examines The Formula of Giving Heart as a piercing study of our contemporary socio-political environment. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and creative perspectives, the panellists variously explore such themes as the global increase in physical confinement(s), the rise of cybernetics and biodata, and the continued privileging of contemporary science/medicine as distinct from other historical practices of healing. Exploring these phenomena amid a backdrop of global precarity, The Formula for Giving Heart forges fascinating linkages between seemingly disparate phenomena. It demonstrates how spatial imprisonment exists in and through hyperlinked and technologized (global) networks, ancient Pharaonic languages map onto and exist as contemporary (computer) code, and apparently distinct socio-political events—from the Coronavirus pandemic to the 2011 Egyptian revolution—can feel familiar through the very extraordinary nature of their temporal and affective regimes. Exploring these themes through the world premiere of Kaddal's newest work, this panel broadly considers our present moment as well as the shifting nature of sonic and visual performance during a time of global crisis and ever increasing technologization. Christopher Haworth is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Birmingham. His scholarly interests lie in the broad areas of electronic music and sound art, which he researches using a mixture of historiographic, philosophical, and ethnographic research methods. He is currently researching the short-lived 'cyber theory' moment that accompanied mid-1990s hype for the internet and World Wide Web in Britain, and he was previously an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow on Music and the Internet: Towards a Digital Sociology of Music. He also composes computer music, often incorporating principles from psychoacoustics, music psychology, and cybernetics. Khaled Kaddal is a Nubian visual artist and sound performer, raised in Egypt and currently resident in London. Allaying science and politics, spirituality and technology, he works with two interdependent abstractions; ‘Immortality of Time' and ‘Sovereignty of Space', in search for the imperishable balance between intelligence, emotions and moral judgments. Recent solo show at Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst, Copenhagen; group exhibitions include ‘One the Edge' at Science Gallery, London; '10 Years of Production' at Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; ‘What do you mean, here we are?' at Mosaic Rooms Gallery, London; ‘Art Olympics' at Tokyo Metropolitan ArtMuseum, Tokyo; Performances at ‘Keep quite and Dance' at Cairotronica Symposium, Cairo; Zentrum der Kunster Hellerau, Dresden; and ‘Daily Concerns' at Dilston Grove Gallery, London. Kaddal has an upcoming show at 5th Biennale Internationale de Casablanca, Morocco; and a Resident Fellow at Uniarts Helsinki, Finland. He studied Computer Science at AAST (EG), and Sound Art at the University of the Arts London (UK). Darci Sprengel is an ethnomusicologist and Junior Research Fellow in Music at St John's College, University of Oxford. Her research examines contemporary music in Egypt at the intersections of technology, capitalism, and politics. She is currently completing her first book, 'Postponed Endings': Youth Music and Affective Politics in Post-Revolution Egypt, which examines Egyptian independent music in relation to conditions of military-capitalism. She has two additional research projects. The first analyses music streaming technologies in the global South using a feminist and critical race approach to digital media. The second explores the influence of sub-Saharan African culture in Egyptian popular culture. Christabel Stirling is a musicologist specialising in ethnographic approaches to music and sound art in contemporary urban environments. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC-funded project ‘Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism', based at the Music Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her research explores the social relations and coalitions that music and sound produce in their live forms, focusing particularly on the potential for such coalitions to transform or reinforce existing social and spatial orders. 

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Under the Rainbow: Voices from Lockdown will feature the author James Attlee in discussion with Marina Warner and Professor Pablo Mukherjee (Warwick University). Chaired by Professor Wes Williams, TORCH Director. This event is also in collaboration with Blackwell's of Oxford. Blackwell's of Oxford has been selling books on Broad Street for over 140 years making it Oxford's oldest bookshop. With over five miles of books in the Broad Street flagship, Blackwell's booksellers' passion for the putting right book into the right reader's hands is undiminished after over a century. Under the Rainbow: Voices from Lockdown is for sale at Blackwell's Bookshop on Broad Street. Call 01865 792792 for a copy signed by James Attlee and if you live within the Oxford ring road, Blackwell's will deliver it to you by bike. Alternatively, you can place an order online at Blackwells.co.uk. Speaker Panel: James Attlee is the author of Under the Rainbow:Voices from Lockdown; Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey; Guernica: Painting the End of the World; Station to Station, shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2017, and Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, among other titles. His digital fiction The Cartographer's Confession won the 2017 New Media Writing Prize. He works as an editor, lecturer and publishing consultant and his journalism has appeared in publications including The Independent, Tate Etc., Frieze and the London Review of Books. Marina Warner is an acclaimed polymath: a writer of fiction, criticism history, and mythography; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of art, myths, symbols and fairytales. She has written for many publications, from The London Review of Books, through the New Statesman, to Vogue, and is a Distinguished Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Professor Pablo Mukherjee teaches on the English and Comparative Literary Studies program at Warwick University, and is an expert on Victorian as well as contemporary imperial/colonial and anti-imperial/colonial cultures.

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Named after the original title of Richard Rathbone's book on Nana Ofori Atta I, the King of Akyem Abuakwa in Ghana, this talk will be the first that celebrates the paperback edition of Nana Oforiatta Ayim's celebrated novel The God Child. Both books have the kingdom as their centre, with Nana Oforiatta Ayim's book drawing on that of Richard Rathbone, as well as on her family's memories, for her fictional narrative. In this live event the two discuss the interplay of academia and fiction and how narratives are shaped and reshaped according to the telling. They also talk about the nuances of privilege, leadership, and of royalty within a West African kingdom and how this has evolved through time. Nana Oforiatta Ayim Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Writer, Filmmaker, and Art Historian who lives and works in Accra, Ghana. She is Special Advisor to the Ghanaian government on Museums and Cultural Heritage, leading the country's museums restructuring programme. She is also Founder of the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, through which she has pioneered a Pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, a Mobile Museums Project, and curated Ghana’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She published her first novel The God Child with Bloomsbury in 2019, and with Penguin in German in 2021. She has made award winning films for museums such as Tate Modern, LACMA and The New Museum, and lectures a course on History and Theory at the Architectural Association in London. She is the recipient of various awards and honours, having been named one of the Apollo ’40 under 40’; one of 50 African Trailblazers by The Africa Report; a Quartz Africa Innovator in 2017; one of 12 African women making history in 2016 and one of 100 women of 2020 by Okayafrica. She received the 2015 the Art & Technology Award from LACMA; the 2016 AIR Award, which “seeks to honour and celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work”; a 2018 Soros Arts Fellowship, was a 2018 Global South Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, is a Principal Investigator on the Action for Restitution to Africa programme, and was appointed to the Advisory Council of Oxford University’s Cultural Programme in 2020. Richard Rathbone Richard Rathbone was born in war-time London. His father and mother worked for the BBC but during the war his father was an RAF pilot and he was killed soon after my birth. His childhood was largely spent in and around London. In 1964 Richard began his research career at the School of Oriental and African Studies where he worked under the pioneer historian of Africa, Roland Oliver. He was appointed o teach in the history department at SOAS in 1969, where he worked until early retirement in 2003. During that time Richard served as Chairman of the University of London's Centre for African Studies and as SOAS' Dean of Postgraduate Studies and was promoted to a chair in modern African history in 1994. Life was episodically interrupted by a series of research trips to Ghana and a variety of fellowships to universities in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Harvard and Princeton as well as for shorter periods to Bordeaux, Lesotho and Toronto. Richard's current appointments include Emeritus professor and professorial research associate at SOAS and honorary professor in history at Aberystwyth University. He has also served on the Council of the Royal Historical Society, most recently as one of its vice-presidents. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Chaired by Dr. Laura Van Broekhoven Dr. Laura Van Broekhovenis the Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum and Professorial Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford. Previously she led the curatorial department of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures, was Senior Curator for Middle- and South America and was departmental lecturer in archaeology, museum studies and indigenous heritage at Leiden University. Laura strives to develop a more equitable decolonised praxis in museums including issues around shared and negotiated authority; restitution, reconciliation and redress and the queering of exclusionary binaries and boundaries with relation to social justice and inclusion. Her regional academic research has focused on collaborative collection research with Amazonian Indigenous Peoples and Maasai communities from Kenya and Tanzania; Yokot’an Maya oral history, Mixtec Indigenous market systems and merchant biographies, and Nicaraguan Indigenous resistance in colonial times. She serves on numerous advisory boards, is a member of the Women Leaders in Museums Network (WLMN) and the European Ethnographic Museum Directors Group and is co-chair of the Oxford and Colonialism Network.

Elise Busset, an undergraduate at Oxford University, reads an extract from Madam Bovary in french. Blog post by Professor Jennifer Yee. The heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel Madame Bovary, Emma, is the daughter of a farmer, who has been educated ‘above her station’ alongside aristocratic girls in a convent. She read Romantic novels, some of them smuggled into the convent illicitly, and her reading has filled her with vivid, unrealisable fantasies and less clearly defined aspirations to a more glamourous life. When Charles Bovary, a medical officer from a nearby village, comes to the farm to set her father’s broken leg, he falls in love with her. He is probably one of the first men Emma has met who is not a farmer, a priest, or her father. Naturally she accepts him. Theirs is a country wedding, rather more rustic than Emma would have liked (she would have preferred to be married at midnight, by the light of flaming torches). Emma’s wedding cake gives physical form to her Romantic dreams and half-formed aspirations. Clearly, Emma is not going to find satisfaction in her married life. Madame Bovary is one of the greatest French adultery novels, adultery being - of course! - one of the great themes of the French novel. Plot spoiler: it doesn’t end well. At the moment of her wedding, however, Emma still has, intact, the notion that she will find ‘la passion’ and ‘la félicité’ in married life. For the first chapters we are not given much access to her point of view. Instead, we see her mostly from outside through Charles’s gaze: her slim fingers, her sensuous gestures, and a sort of iridescence of her whole being, from the colour of her eyes to the light playing through her parasol. The wedding cake offers us a glimpse of things that we will learn later about Emma’s inner, fantasy life; and because it is a visually ridiculous object it also tells us about the impossibility of those fantasies. The cake is a joke - a grosse blague, such as Flaubert was very fond of. And yet it is not simply a way of mocking Emma’s Romantic dreams and social aspirations. Flaubert believed that irony at the expense of his characters did not reduce pathos (or the reader’s emotional response); on the contrary, it should increase it. Emma is a tragic figure in a very modern sense: she is caught in the gap between her inner life and the real world in which she lives. We are all potentially subject to this irony. Flaubert is reputed to have said ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ and many of us could say as much. Later in the century, a philosopher called Jules de Gaultier was to coin the term le bovarysme (Bovarysm) for what he saw as the essential human capacity to imagine that we are something we are not. Here is the description of Emma’s wedding cake, in French and in English. On avait été chercher un pâtissier à Yvetot, pour les tourtes et les nougats. Comme il débutait dans le pays, il avait soigné les choses; et il apporta, lui-même, au dessert, une pièce montée qui fit pousser des cris. À la base, d’abord, c’était un carré de carton bleu figurant un temple avec portiques, colonnades et statuettes de stuc tout autour, dans des niches constellées d’étoiles en papier doré; puis se tenait au second étage un donjon en gâteau de Savoie, entouré de menues fortifications en angélique, amandes, raisins secs, quartiers d’oranges; et enfin, sur la plate-forme supérieure, qui était une prairie verte où il y avait des rochers avec des lacs de confitures et des bateaux en écales de noisettes, on voyait un petit Amour, se balançant à une escarpolette de chocolat, dont les deux poteaux étaient terminés par deux boutons de rose naturelle, en guise de boules, au sommet. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857. Listen to the passage read in French by Elise, an undergraduate at Oxford University. The tarts and nougats had been ordered from a pastry-cook in Yvetot. As he was new to the area, he had gone to a great deal of trouble, and he himself brought to the table, at the dessert stage, an elaborate confection which drew cries of admiration. The base was a square of blue cardboard repesenting a temple with, round its sides, porticos, colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches spangled with gold-paper stars. The main tier consisted of a medieval castle made of sponge cake, surrounded by tiny battlements of angelica, almonds, raisins and orange segments; and, finally, on the topmost layer – a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and hazelnut-shell boats – a little Cupid sat on a chocolate swing, the uprights of which were finished with real rosebuds in the place of knobs. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857), translated by Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press, ‘Oxford World’s Classics’, 2004), p. 27. Listen to the passage read in English translation by Eleanor, an undergraduate at Oxford University. Further reading: The manuscripts and drafts of Madame Bovary can be consulted on the website of the Centre Flaubert (Université de Rouen): http://www.bovary.fr/ The draft of the cake passage is at: https://www.bovary.fr/folio_visu.php?folio=1408&mode=sequence&mot= Gaultier, Jules de, Le Bovarysme (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902) Jenson, Deborah, ‘Bovarysm and Exoticism’, in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman and Brian J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 167-70

Elise Busset, an undergraduate at Oxford University, reads an extract from Madam Bovary in french. Blog post by Professor Jennifer Yee. The heroine of Gustave Flaubert's 1857 novel Madame Bovary, Emma, is the daughter of a farmer, who has been educated ‘above her station' alongside aristocratic girls in a convent. She read Romantic novels, some of them smuggled into the convent illicitly, and her reading has filled her with vivid, unrealisable fantasies and less clearly defined aspirations to a more glamourous life. When Charles Bovary, a medical officer from a nearby village, comes to the farm to set her father's broken leg, he falls in love with her. He is probably one of the first men Emma has met who is not a farmer, a priest, or her father. Naturally she accepts him. Theirs is a country wedding, rather more rustic than Emma would have liked (she would have preferred to be married at midnight, by the light of flaming torches). Emma's wedding cake gives physical form to her Romantic dreams and half-formed aspirations. Clearly, Emma is not going to find satisfaction in her married life. Madame Bovary is one of the greatest French adultery novels, adultery being - of course! - one of the great themes of the French novel. Plot spoiler: it doesn't end well. At the moment of her wedding, however, Emma still has, intact, the notion that she will find ‘la passion' and ‘la félicité' in married life. For the first chapters we are not given much access to her point of view. Instead, we see her mostly from outside through Charles's gaze: her slim fingers, her sensuous gestures, and a sort of iridescence of her whole being, from the colour of her eyes to the light playing through her parasol. The wedding cake offers us a glimpse of things that we will learn later about Emma's inner, fantasy life; and because it is a visually ridiculous object it also tells us about the impossibility of those fantasies. The cake is a joke - a grosse blague, such as Flaubert was very fond of. And yet it is not simply a way of mocking Emma's Romantic dreams and social aspirations. Flaubert believed that irony at the expense of his characters did not reduce pathos (or the reader's emotional response); on the contrary, it should increase it. Emma is a tragic figure in a very modern sense: she is caught in the gap between her inner life and the real world in which she lives. We are all potentially subject to this irony. Flaubert is reputed to have said ‘Madame Bovary, c'est moi' and many of us could say as much. Later in the century, a philosopher called Jules de Gaultier was to coin the term le bovarysme (Bovarysm) for what he saw as the essential human capacity to imagine that we are something we are not. Here is the description of Emma's wedding cake, in French and in English. On avait été chercher un pâtissier à Yvetot, pour les tourtes et les nougats. Comme il débutait dans le pays, il avait soigné les choses; et il apporta, lui-même, au dessert, une pièce montée qui fit pousser des cris. À la base, d'abord, c'était un carré de carton bleu figurant un temple avec portiques, colonnades et statuettes de stuc tout autour, dans des niches constellées d'étoiles en papier doré; puis se tenait au second étage un donjon en gâteau de Savoie, entouré de menues fortifications en angélique, amandes, raisins secs, quartiers d'oranges; et enfin, sur la plate-forme supérieure, qui était une prairie verte où il y avait des rochers avec des lacs de confitures et des bateaux en écales de noisettes, on voyait un petit Amour, se balançant à une escarpolette de chocolat, dont les deux poteaux étaient terminés par deux boutons de rose naturelle, en guise de boules, au sommet. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857. Listen to the passage read in French by Elise, an undergraduate at Oxford University. The tarts and nougats had been ordered from a pastry-cook in Yvetot. As he was new to the area, he had gone to a great deal of trouble, and he himself brought to the table, at the dessert stage, an elaborate confection which drew cries of admiration. The base was a square of blue cardboard repesenting a temple with, round its sides, porticos, colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches spangled with gold-paper stars. The main tier consisted of a medieval castle made of sponge cake, surrounded by tiny battlements of angelica, almonds, raisins and orange segments; and, finally, on the topmost layer – a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and hazelnut-shell boats – a little Cupid sat on a chocolate swing, the uprights of which were finished with real rosebuds in the place of knobs. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857), translated by Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press, ‘Oxford World's Classics', 2004), p. 27. Listen to the passage read in English translation by Eleanor, an undergraduate at Oxford University. Further reading: The manuscripts and drafts of Madame Bovary can be consulted on the website of the Centre Flaubert (Université de Rouen): http://www.bovary.fr/ The draft of the cake passage is at: https://www.bovary.fr/folio_visu.php?folio=1408&mode=sequence&mot= Gaultier, Jules de, Le Bovarysme (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902) Jenson, Deborah, ‘Bovarysm and Exoticism', in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman and Brian J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 167-70

Eleanor Gilbert, an undergraduate at Oxford University, reads an extract from Madam Bovary in english. Blog post by Professor Jennifer Yee. The heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel Madame Bovary, Emma, is the daughter of a farmer, who has been educated ‘above her station’ alongside aristocratic girls in a convent. She read Romantic novels, some of them smuggled into the convent illicitly, and her reading has filled her with vivid, unrealisable fantasies and less clearly defined aspirations to a more glamourous life. When Charles Bovary, a medical officer from a nearby village, comes to the farm to set her father’s broken leg, he falls in love with her. He is probably one of the first men Emma has met who is not a farmer, a priest, or her father. Naturally she accepts him. Theirs is a country wedding, rather more rustic than Emma would have liked (she would have preferred to be married at midnight, by the light of flaming torches). Emma’s wedding cake gives physical form to her Romantic dreams and half-formed aspirations. Clearly, Emma is not going to find satisfaction in her married life. Madame Bovary is one of the greatest French adultery novels, adultery being - of course! - one of the great themes of the French novel. Plot spoiler: it doesn’t end well. At the moment of her wedding, however, Emma still has, intact, the notion that she will find ‘la passion’ and ‘la félicité’ in married life. For the first chapters we are not given much access to her point of view. Instead, we see her mostly from outside through Charles’s gaze: her slim fingers, her sensuous gestures, and a sort of iridescence of her whole being, from the colour of her eyes to the light playing through her parasol. The wedding cake offers us a glimpse of things that we will learn later about Emma’s inner, fantasy life; and because it is a visually ridiculous object it also tells us about the impossibility of those fantasies. The cake is a joke - a grosse blague, such as Flaubert was very fond of. And yet it is not simply a way of mocking Emma’s Romantic dreams and social aspirations. Flaubert believed that irony at the expense of his characters did not reduce pathos (or the reader’s emotional response); on the contrary, it should increase it. Emma is a tragic figure in a very modern sense: she is caught in the gap between her inner life and the real world in which she lives. We are all potentially subject to this irony. Flaubert is reputed to have said ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ and many of us could say as much. Later in the century, a philosopher called Jules de Gaultier was to coin the term le bovarysme (Bovarysm) for what he saw as the essential human capacity to imagine that we are something we are not. Here is the description of Emma’s wedding cake, in French and in English. On avait été chercher un pâtissier à Yvetot, pour les tourtes et les nougats. Comme il débutait dans le pays, il avait soigné les choses; et il apporta, lui-même, au dessert, une pièce montée qui fit pousser des cris. À la base, d’abord, c’était un carré de carton bleu figurant un temple avec portiques, colonnades et statuettes de stuc tout autour, dans des niches constellées d’étoiles en papier doré; puis se tenait au second étage un donjon en gâteau de Savoie, entouré de menues fortifications en angélique, amandes, raisins secs, quartiers d’oranges; et enfin, sur la plate-forme supérieure, qui était une prairie verte où il y avait des rochers avec des lacs de confitures et des bateaux en écales de noisettes, on voyait un petit Amour, se balançant à une escarpolette de chocolat, dont les deux poteaux étaient terminés par deux boutons de rose naturelle, en guise de boules, au sommet. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857. Listen to the passage read in French by Elise, an undergraduate at Oxford University. The tarts and nougats had been ordered from a pastry-cook in Yvetot. As he was new to the area, he had gone to a great deal of trouble, and he himself brought to the table, at the dessert stage, an elaborate confection which drew cries of admiration. The base was a square of blue cardboard repesenting a temple with, round its sides, porticos, colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches spangled with gold-paper stars. The main tier consisted of a medieval castle made of sponge cake, surrounded by tiny battlements of angelica, almonds, raisins and orange segments; and, finally, on the topmost layer – a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and hazelnut-shell boats – a little Cupid sat on a chocolate swing, the uprights of which were finished with real rosebuds in the place of knobs. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857), translated by Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press, ‘Oxford World’s Classics’, 2004), p. 27. Listen to the passage read in English translation by Eleanor, an undergraduate at Oxford University. Further reading: The manuscripts and drafts of Madame Bovary can be consulted on the website of the Centre Flaubert (Université de Rouen): http://www.bovary.fr/ The draft of the cake passage is at: https://www.bovary.fr/folio_visu.php?folio=1408&mode=sequence&mot= Gaultier, Jules de, Le Bovarysme (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902) Jenson, Deborah, ‘Bovarysm and Exoticism’, in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman and Brian J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 167-70

Eleanor Gilbert, an undergraduate at Oxford University, reads an extract from Madam Bovary in english. Blog post by Professor Jennifer Yee. The heroine of Gustave Flaubert's 1857 novel Madame Bovary, Emma, is the daughter of a farmer, who has been educated ‘above her station' alongside aristocratic girls in a convent. She read Romantic novels, some of them smuggled into the convent illicitly, and her reading has filled her with vivid, unrealisable fantasies and less clearly defined aspirations to a more glamourous life. When Charles Bovary, a medical officer from a nearby village, comes to the farm to set her father's broken leg, he falls in love with her. He is probably one of the first men Emma has met who is not a farmer, a priest, or her father. Naturally she accepts him. Theirs is a country wedding, rather more rustic than Emma would have liked (she would have preferred to be married at midnight, by the light of flaming torches). Emma's wedding cake gives physical form to her Romantic dreams and half-formed aspirations. Clearly, Emma is not going to find satisfaction in her married life. Madame Bovary is one of the greatest French adultery novels, adultery being - of course! - one of the great themes of the French novel. Plot spoiler: it doesn't end well. At the moment of her wedding, however, Emma still has, intact, the notion that she will find ‘la passion' and ‘la félicité' in married life. For the first chapters we are not given much access to her point of view. Instead, we see her mostly from outside through Charles's gaze: her slim fingers, her sensuous gestures, and a sort of iridescence of her whole being, from the colour of her eyes to the light playing through her parasol. The wedding cake offers us a glimpse of things that we will learn later about Emma's inner, fantasy life; and because it is a visually ridiculous object it also tells us about the impossibility of those fantasies. The cake is a joke - a grosse blague, such as Flaubert was very fond of. And yet it is not simply a way of mocking Emma's Romantic dreams and social aspirations. Flaubert believed that irony at the expense of his characters did not reduce pathos (or the reader's emotional response); on the contrary, it should increase it. Emma is a tragic figure in a very modern sense: she is caught in the gap between her inner life and the real world in which she lives. We are all potentially subject to this irony. Flaubert is reputed to have said ‘Madame Bovary, c'est moi' and many of us could say as much. Later in the century, a philosopher called Jules de Gaultier was to coin the term le bovarysme (Bovarysm) for what he saw as the essential human capacity to imagine that we are something we are not. Here is the description of Emma's wedding cake, in French and in English. On avait été chercher un pâtissier à Yvetot, pour les tourtes et les nougats. Comme il débutait dans le pays, il avait soigné les choses; et il apporta, lui-même, au dessert, une pièce montée qui fit pousser des cris. À la base, d'abord, c'était un carré de carton bleu figurant un temple avec portiques, colonnades et statuettes de stuc tout autour, dans des niches constellées d'étoiles en papier doré; puis se tenait au second étage un donjon en gâteau de Savoie, entouré de menues fortifications en angélique, amandes, raisins secs, quartiers d'oranges; et enfin, sur la plate-forme supérieure, qui était une prairie verte où il y avait des rochers avec des lacs de confitures et des bateaux en écales de noisettes, on voyait un petit Amour, se balançant à une escarpolette de chocolat, dont les deux poteaux étaient terminés par deux boutons de rose naturelle, en guise de boules, au sommet. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857. Listen to the passage read in French by Elise, an undergraduate at Oxford University. The tarts and nougats had been ordered from a pastry-cook in Yvetot. As he was new to the area, he had gone to a great deal of trouble, and he himself brought to the table, at the dessert stage, an elaborate confection which drew cries of admiration. The base was a square of blue cardboard repesenting a temple with, round its sides, porticos, colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches spangled with gold-paper stars. The main tier consisted of a medieval castle made of sponge cake, surrounded by tiny battlements of angelica, almonds, raisins and orange segments; and, finally, on the topmost layer – a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and hazelnut-shell boats – a little Cupid sat on a chocolate swing, the uprights of which were finished with real rosebuds in the place of knobs. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857), translated by Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press, ‘Oxford World's Classics', 2004), p. 27. Listen to the passage read in English translation by Eleanor, an undergraduate at Oxford University. Further reading: The manuscripts and drafts of Madame Bovary can be consulted on the website of the Centre Flaubert (Université de Rouen): http://www.bovary.fr/ The draft of the cake passage is at: https://www.bovary.fr/folio_visu.php?folio=1408&mode=sequence&mot= Gaultier, Jules de, Le Bovarysme (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902) Jenson, Deborah, ‘Bovarysm and Exoticism', in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman and Brian J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 167-70

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities on Thursday 13th May 2021. Join us for a fascinating evening with award-winning playwright and actress Lolita Chakrabarti in conversation with journalist Matt Wolf. Streamed live from an Oxford venue and chaired by Dr Sos Eltis, the event will cover Lolita’s wide-ranging career and hone in on her most recent play, Hymn, at the Almeida Theatre. Lolita Chakrabarti is an award-winning playwright and actress. Writing credits include the award-winning stage adaptation of Life of Pi, which will open in the West End in 2021, the ambitious Invisible Cities (MIF), Hymn (Almeida) and Red Velvet, which opened at the Tricycle Theatre before transferring to London’s West End and New York. Acting credits include playing Queen Gertrude, opposite Tom Hiddleston, in Sir Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (RADA), Fanny & Alexandra (Old Vic) and Free Outgoing (Royal Court). A Casual Vacancy (BBC1/HBO), To Provide All People (BBC2), Beowulf (ITV), Jekyll and Hyde (ITV), Riviera (Sky), Criminal (Netflix) and Defending The Guilty (BBC). Matt Wolf is an American theatre critic based in London, where he has spent his entire professional life. He moved to the UK directly upon graduating from Yale, where he read English and was co-arts editor of the Yale Daily News (a good place to begin). Soon upon arrival in London, he found work in a self-created job as arts and theatre writer for the Associated Press (AP), where he remained for 21 years.  Along the way, following brief stints at the Wall Street Journal/Europe and The Hollywood Reporter, Matt became London theatre critic for Variety from 1992-2005, during which time he was freelancing regularly for The International Herald Tribune – now the International New York Times. Following the departure from his long-held post of the august Sheridan Morley, Matt became London theatre critic for the IHT/INYT, and in 2009 was thrilled to help birth The Arts Desk – an arts-centred website that within a few years of its inception was named best specialism journalism website at the Online Media Awards in London. He remains theatre editor at that site and reviews there across the cultural spectrum. In addition to his journalism, Matt has collaborated on two books – one about Guys and Dolls, the other about Les Miserables – and is the author of Sam Mendes at the Donmar: Stepping into Freedom, an account of the theatre and film director Sam Mendes’s extraordinary tenure at one of London’s premier theatrical addresses. Matt sits on the panel of the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and is on the faculty of both NYU/London and the V&A Museum; he can be heard regularly on various radio programmes for both the BBC and Monocle.  Following an acclaimed, sold-out live-streamed and on-demand runs, Lolita Chakrabarti's Hymn will be broadcast on Sky Arts on Sunday 18 April at 9pm. The world premiere of this production was directed by Blanche McIntyre and features actors Adrian Lester and Danny Sapani. Sky Arts is free to watch on Freeview Channel 11. Sky and NOW subscribers can also watch Hymn on-demand after the broadcast. Lolita Chakrabarti is a HCP Visiting Fellow part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Oliver Ready (St Antony’s College) and Sasha Dugdale (Writer in Residence, St John’s College, Cambridge), two leading translators from the Russian, will discuss their work This event is part of the Russian and Slavonic Research Seminar series which is kindly supported by the Ilchester Fund. The convenors of the series are Professor Catriona Kelly and Professor Philip Bullock. To find out more about the series, visit their webpage here. https://www.ongc.ox.ac.uk/event/russian-and-slavonic-research-seminar Sasha Dugdale’s most recent collection, Deformations (Carcanet 2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. Her translations include work by Vasily Sigarev, Elena Shvarts, Tatiana Shcherbina, and most recently, Maria Stepanova (The War of the Beast and the Animals, Bloodaxe, 2021 and In Memory of Memory, Fitzcarraldo, 2021). Oliver Ready’s translations include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment ('A truly great translation . . . This English version really is better', A. N. Wilson, Spectator), And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon: Essential Stories by Nikolai Gogol, and Vladimir Sharov (‘the clarity and directness of Sharov's prose – wonderfully rendered by Oliver Ready’, Rachel Polonsky, NYRB).

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Oliver Ready (St Antony’s College) and Sasha Dugdale (Writer in Residence, St John’s College, Cambridge), two leading translators from the Russian, will discuss their work This event is part of the Russian and Slavonic Research Seminar series which is kindly supported by the Ilchester Fund. The convenors of the series are Professor Catriona Kelly and Professor Philip Bullock. To find out more about the series, visit their webpage here. https://www.ongc.ox.ac.uk/event/russian-and-slavonic-research-seminar Sasha Dugdale’s most recent collection, Deformations (Carcanet 2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. Her translations include work by Vasily Sigarev, Elena Shvarts, Tatiana Shcherbina, and most recently, Maria Stepanova (The War of the Beast and the Animals, Bloodaxe, 2021 and In Memory of Memory, Fitzcarraldo, 2021). Oliver Ready’s translations include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment ('A truly great translation . . . This English version really is better', A. N. Wilson, Spectator), And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon: Essential Stories by Nikolai Gogol, and Vladimir Sharov (‘the clarity and directness of Sharov's prose – wonderfully rendered by Oliver Ready’, Rachel Polonsky, NYRB).

Held on International Women's Day 2021, Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities - in collaboration with Lincoln College, Oxford. Talk and Performance from Dr Samantha Ege, Lincoln College Oxford. In celebration of International Women’s Day (8 March 2021), Dr. Samantha Ege presents an hour-long lecture-recital. Therein, she traces the lives and legacies of Black women composers in Chicago. The music of Florence B. Price, Nora Douglas Holt, Margaret Bonds, and Betty Jackson King represents the foundations of a vibrant creative network. Dr. Ege contextualises this in the transformative movement of the Negro Renaissance. Programme: Florence B. Price (1887-1953) Fantasie Nègre No. 2 in G minor (1932) Fantasie Nègre No. 3 in F minor (1932) Nora Douglas Holt (c.1885-1974) Negro Dance (1921) Betty Jackson King (1928-1994) Four Seasonal Sketches (1955) I. Spring Intermezzo II. Summer Interlude III. Autumn Dance IV. Winter Holiday Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) Spiritual Suite (1967) I. Valley of the Bones II. The Bells III. Troubled Water Dr. Samantha Ege is Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College. Her research focuses on Florence B. Price and the network of female practitioners in the age of the Black Chicago Renaissance. She released the album Four Women: Music for Solo Piano by Price, Kaprálová, Bilsland and Bonds with Wave Theory Records in 2018. Dr. Ege's new album Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price will be released digitally on the LORELT label on Monday 8 March to coincide with the celebration of International Women's Day. This event is kindly supported by Lincoln College, Oxford, Lord Crewe’s Charity and the Zilkha Trust.

Held on International Women's Day 2021, Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities - in collaboration with Lincoln College, Oxford. Talk and Performance from Dr Samantha Ege, Lincoln College Oxford. In celebration of International Women’s Day (8 March 2021), Dr. Samantha Ege presents an hour-long lecture-recital. Therein, she traces the lives and legacies of Black women composers in Chicago. The music of Florence B. Price, Nora Douglas Holt, Margaret Bonds, and Betty Jackson King represents the foundations of a vibrant creative network. Dr. Ege contextualises this in the transformative movement of the Negro Renaissance. Programme: Florence B. Price (1887-1953) Fantasie Nègre No. 2 in G minor (1932) Fantasie Nègre No. 3 in F minor (1932) Nora Douglas Holt (c.1885-1974) Negro Dance (1921) Betty Jackson King (1928-1994) Four Seasonal Sketches (1955) I. Spring Intermezzo II. Summer Interlude III. Autumn Dance IV. Winter Holiday Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) Spiritual Suite (1967) I. Valley of the Bones II. The Bells III. Troubled Water Dr. Samantha Ege is Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College. Her research focuses on Florence B. Price and the network of female practitioners in the age of the Black Chicago Renaissance. She released the album Four Women: Music for Solo Piano by Price, Kaprálová, Bilsland and Bonds with Wave Theory Records in 2018. Dr. Ege's new album Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price will be released digitally on the LORELT label on Monday 8 March to coincide with the celebration of International Women's Day. This event is kindly supported by Lincoln College, Oxford, Lord Crewe’s Charity and the Zilkha Trust.

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the first in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Performing Innocence: Belated Abstract: Why did terms like innocence, naïveté, and artlessness have currency for US artists working in fin-de-siècle Paris? This lecture examines the language employed by artists and critics that applied these terms to Franco-American art exchange. Professor Burns traces the concepts’ emergence and expansion at the end of the US Civil War. Linking the mass exodus to France for study to attempts at cultural rejuvenation, innocence reveals a culture triggered by the realities of war, failed Reconstruction, divisive financial interests, and imperial ambition. The impossibility of innocence gave the myth its urgency and paradox. Engaging with artists from Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri to writers Mark Twain, Henry James and Edith Wharton, as well as journalists, the lecture frames the definitions and stakes of claiming to be innocent and naïve in Paris. In performing these characteristics, these artists and writers built an idea that American culture was belated compared with Europe; the lecture contextualizes this idea of strategic belatedness alongside similar projections in other emergent national contexts. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Peter Gibian teaches American literature and culture in the English Department at McGill University (Montréal, Canada), where he has won four teaching awards. His publications include Mass Culture and Everyday Life (editor and contributor, Routledge 1997) and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge UP 2001; awarded the Best Book Prize in 2001-02 by NEASA, the New England branch of the American Studies Association) as well as essays on Whitman, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Dr. Holmes, Justice Holmes, Bayard Taylor, Washington Irving, G. W. Cable, Edward Everett Hale, Wharton and James, John Singer Sargent, Michael Snow and shopping mall spectacle, the experience of flânerie in 19th-century shopping arcades, and cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century American literature. He is currently at work on two book projects: one exploring the influence of two competing speech models—oratory and conversation—on Whitman’s writing and his notions of public life; the other tracing the emergence of a “cosmopolitan tradition” in American culture over the course of the long nineteenth century.

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the first in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists' playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood's incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Performing Innocence: Belated Abstract: Why did terms like innocence, naïveté, and artlessness have currency for US artists working in fin-de-siècle Paris? This lecture examines the language employed by artists and critics that applied these terms to Franco-American art exchange. Professor Burns traces the concepts' emergence and expansion at the end of the US Civil War. Linking the mass exodus to France for study to attempts at cultural rejuvenation, innocence reveals a culture triggered by the realities of war, failed Reconstruction, divisive financial interests, and imperial ambition. The impossibility of innocence gave the myth its urgency and paradox. Engaging with artists from Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri to writers Mark Twain, Henry James and Edith Wharton, as well as journalists, the lecture frames the definitions and stakes of claiming to be innocent and naïve in Paris. In performing these characteristics, these artists and writers built an idea that American culture was belated compared with Europe; the lecture contextualizes this idea of strategic belatedness alongside similar projections in other emergent national contexts. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Peter Gibian teaches American literature and culture in the English Department at McGill University (Montréal, Canada), where he has won four teaching awards. His publications include Mass Culture and Everyday Life (editor and contributor, Routledge 1997) and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge UP 2001; awarded the Best Book Prize in 2001-02 by NEASA, the New England branch of the American Studies Association) as well as essays on Whitman, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Dr. Holmes, Justice Holmes, Bayard Taylor, Washington Irving, G. W. Cable, Edward Everett Hale, Wharton and James, John Singer Sargent, Michael Snow and shopping mall spectacle, the experience of flânerie in 19th-century shopping arcades, and cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century American literature. He is currently at work on two book projects: one exploring the influence of two competing speech models—oratory and conversation—on Whitman's writing and his notions of public life; the other tracing the emergence of a “cosmopolitan tradition” in American culture over the course of the long nineteenth century.

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the third in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Performing Innocence: Primitive / Incipient The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914 Moderator: James Smalls, Professor and Chair of Visual Arts, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Abstract: Projections of different ideas of innocence became entangled in the representation of Black US character in fin-de-siècle Paris. By pairing new research on blackface minstrelsy and painter Henry Ossawa Tanner in the American Art Association of Paris with the displays of Blackness curated by Black intellectuals in the “Exhibit of American Negroes” in the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, Professor Burns argues that American minstrelsy in Paris built a racialized “primitive” identity that caricatured Black men as effeminate and emasculated, while the latter exhibit constructed innocence grounded in claims of youth, newness, and incipient culture. While the curators staunchly and effectively rejected narratives of primitivism, these tropes of the new simultaneously paralleled and reinforced performances of cultural innocence in the largely white US community in Paris. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Dr. James Smalls is an art historian, with a focus on the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexuality in the art and visual culture of the nineteenth century, as well as the art and visual culture of the black diaspora. He is the author of Homosexuality in Art (Parkstone Press, 2003) and The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts (2006). He has published essays in a number of book anthologies and prominent journals, including American Art, French Historical Studies, Third Text, Art Journal, and Art Criticism. His book chapters and articles include: Menace at the Portal: Masculine Desire and the Homoerotics of Orientalism (2016), The Soft Glow of Brutality (2015), A Teacher Uses Star Trek for Difficult Conversations on Race and Gender (2015), Racial Antics in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art and Popular Culture (2014), Sculpting Black Queer Bodies and Desires: The Case of Richmond Barthé (2013), and Exquisite Empty Shells: Sculpted Slave Portraits and the French Ethnographic Turn (2013). Smalls is currently completing a book entitled Féral Benga: African Muse of Modernism. In 2006, Smalls curated a two-part exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art on the art, career, and international influence of the African American artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner. In 2009-2010, he served as the Consulting Editor for the five-volume set of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art. In 2015 he was appointed to the Advisory Board for The Archives of American Art Journal. Dr. Smalls holds degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in Ethnic Arts (B. A.), and Art History (M. A., and Ph.D.). He has taught at Rutgers University, Columbia University, and at the University of Paris.

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the third in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Performing Innocence: Primitive / Incipient The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914 Moderator: James Smalls, Professor and Chair of Visual Arts, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists' playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood's incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Abstract: Projections of different ideas of innocence became entangled in the representation of Black US character in fin-de-siècle Paris. By pairing new research on blackface minstrelsy and painter Henry Ossawa Tanner in the American Art Association of Paris with the displays of Blackness curated by Black intellectuals in the “Exhibit of American Negroes” in the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, Professor Burns argues that American minstrelsy in Paris built a racialized “primitive” identity that caricatured Black men as effeminate and emasculated, while the latter exhibit constructed innocence grounded in claims of youth, newness, and incipient culture. While the curators staunchly and effectively rejected narratives of primitivism, these tropes of the new simultaneously paralleled and reinforced performances of cultural innocence in the largely white US community in Paris. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Dr. James Smalls is an art historian, with a focus on the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexuality in the art and visual culture of the nineteenth century, as well as the art and visual culture of the black diaspora. He is the author of Homosexuality in Art (Parkstone Press, 2003) and The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts (2006). He has published essays in a number of book anthologies and prominent journals, including American Art, French Historical Studies, Third Text, Art Journal, and Art Criticism. His book chapters and articles include: Menace at the Portal: Masculine Desire and the Homoerotics of Orientalism (2016), The Soft Glow of Brutality (2015), A Teacher Uses Star Trek for Difficult Conversations on Race and Gender (2015), Racial Antics in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art and Popular Culture (2014), Sculpting Black Queer Bodies and Desires: The Case of Richmond Barthé (2013), and Exquisite Empty Shells: Sculpted Slave Portraits and the French Ethnographic Turn (2013). Smalls is currently completing a book entitled Féral Benga: African Muse of Modernism. In 2006, Smalls curated a two-part exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art on the art, career, and international influence of the African American artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner. In 2009-2010, he served as the Consulting Editor for the five-volume set of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art. In 2015 he was appointed to the Advisory Board for The Archives of American Art Journal. Dr. Smalls holds degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in Ethnic Arts (B. A.), and Art History (M. A., and Ph.D.). He has taught at Rutgers University, Columbia University, and at the University of Paris.

Professor c, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the second lecture in the The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914 series. Moderator: Wanda M.Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Performing Innocence: Puritan Abstract: Visual culture representing Americans in Paris often polarized stereotypes of French and US identities, framing French bohemia as distinct from steadfast US work ethic. This lecture analyzes how Americans and US institutions in Paris adopted the ideal of the Puritan as a symbol of their sustained connection with the United States and a protective armor from becoming absorbed into Parisian decadence. US churches in Paris—all Protestant—participated in this construction alongside offering critiques of Catholicism in the context of debates about laicization in France. Professor Burns analyzes paintings, sculpture, and illustrations by Julius LeBlanc Stewart, Cecilia Beaux, Augustus St. Gaudens, and Jean André Castaigne, and studies St. Luke’s Chapel, which was built for the US students in Paris, to argue that this discourse inflected US artists’ representations of their studio spaces; the rhetoric of US artists’ clubs in Paris; and limited professional possibilities for US women artists. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Wanda M.Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University Having earned a BA (l963), MA (l965) and Ph.D. (l974) from New York University, Professor Wanda Corn taught at Washington Square College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College before moving to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California in 1980. At Stanford she held the university's first permanent appointment in the history of American art and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Acting Director of the Stanford Museum. From l992 to 1995 she was the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2000, she became the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History. She retired from teaching at Stanford in 2008. In 2009, she was the John Rewald Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the CUNY Graduate Center. A scholar of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art and photography, Professor Corn has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Smithsonian Regents, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, and the Clark Institute of Art. In 2003 she was the Clark Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College and in 2006-07, the Samuel H. Kress Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. In 2012, she was awarded a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship to support her pioneering research on Georgia O’Keeffe’s clothes. She has won numerous teaching awards: in 2007 The Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award from the College Art Association; in 2002 the Phi Beta Kappa Undergraduate Teaching Award; and in 1974 the Graves Award for outstanding teaching in the humanities. In 2006, the Archives of American Art awarded her The Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History and in 2007 she received the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts. In 2014, the College Art Association dedicated a Distinguished Scholar Session to her work. She has served two terms on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association and two on the Commission for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She served on the Advisory Board of the Georgia O’Keeffe Catalogue Raisonné and two terms on the Board of the Terra Foundation in American Art. Today she is a trustee of the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Foundation for American Art; and a board member of the Grant Wood Art Colony at the University of Iowa. Since 2000, she has chaired the Advisory Committee for Historic Artist Homes and Studios (HAHS) that is an affiliate of the National Trust. Active as a guest curator, she had produced various books and exhibitions, including The Color of Mood: American Tonalism 1990-1910 (1972); The Art of Andrew Wyeth (l973); Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983); Seeing Gertrude Stein, Five Stories (2011-12); and in 2017-19, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern. Her O’Keeffe study, published by Prestel Press, won Honorable Mention for the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award and was awarded the 1918 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award. Her historiographic article for Art Bulletin, "Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art" (June l988), became a significant point of reference in the field as has her work on cultural nationalism in early American modernism. Her study of avant-garde modernist culture along the Atlantic rim, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and American Identity, 1915-35, was published by the University of California Press in 1999 and won the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. In 2011, UC Press published Professor Corn’s Women Building History about Mary Cassatt and the decorative program of murals and sculptures for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. She continues to research, write, and lecture on high, middle, and low culture interpretations of Grant Wood’s American Gothic.

Professor c, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the second lecture in the The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914 series. Moderator: Wanda M.Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists' playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood's incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Performing Innocence: Puritan Abstract: Visual culture representing Americans in Paris often polarized stereotypes of French and US identities, framing French bohemia as distinct from steadfast US work ethic. This lecture analyzes how Americans and US institutions in Paris adopted the ideal of the Puritan as a symbol of their sustained connection with the United States and a protective armor from becoming absorbed into Parisian decadence. US churches in Paris—all Protestant—participated in this construction alongside offering critiques of Catholicism in the context of debates about laicization in France. Professor Burns analyzes paintings, sculpture, and illustrations by Julius LeBlanc Stewart, Cecilia Beaux, Augustus St. Gaudens, and Jean André Castaigne, and studies St. Luke's Chapel, which was built for the US students in Paris, to argue that this discourse inflected US artists' representations of their studio spaces; the rhetoric of US artists' clubs in Paris; and limited professional possibilities for US women artists. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Wanda M.Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University Having earned a BA (l963), MA (l965) and Ph.D. (l974) from New York University, Professor Wanda Corn taught at Washington Square College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College before moving to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California in 1980. At Stanford she held the university's first permanent appointment in the history of American art and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Acting Director of the Stanford Museum. From l992 to 1995 she was the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2000, she became the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History. She retired from teaching at Stanford in 2008. In 2009, she was the John Rewald Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the CUNY Graduate Center. A scholar of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art and photography, Professor Corn has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Smithsonian Regents, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, and the Clark Institute of Art. In 2003 she was the Clark Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College and in 2006-07, the Samuel H. Kress Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. In 2012, she was awarded a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship to support her pioneering research on Georgia O'Keeffe's clothes. She has won numerous teaching awards: in 2007 The Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award from the College Art Association; in 2002 the Phi Beta Kappa Undergraduate Teaching Award; and in 1974 the Graves Award for outstanding teaching in the humanities. In 2006, the Archives of American Art awarded her The Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History and in 2007 she received the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts. In 2014, the College Art Association dedicated a Distinguished Scholar Session to her work. She has served two terms on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association and two on the Commission for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She served on the Advisory Board of the Georgia O'Keeffe Catalogue Raisonné and two terms on the Board of the Terra Foundation in American Art. Today she is a trustee of the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Foundation for American Art; and a board member of the Grant Wood Art Colony at the University of Iowa. Since 2000, she has chaired the Advisory Committee for Historic Artist Homes and Studios (HAHS) that is an affiliate of the National Trust. Active as a guest curator, she had produced various books and exhibitions, including The Color of Mood: American Tonalism 1990-1910 (1972); The Art of Andrew Wyeth (l973); Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983); Seeing Gertrude Stein, Five Stories (2011-12); and in 2017-19, Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern. Her O'Keeffe study, published by Prestel Press, won Honorable Mention for the College Art Association's Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award and was awarded the 1918 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award. Her historiographic article for Art Bulletin, "Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art" (June l988), became a significant point of reference in the field as has her work on cultural nationalism in early American modernism. Her study of avant-garde modernist culture along the Atlantic rim, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and American Identity, 1915-35, was published by the University of California Press in 1999 and won the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. In 2011, UC Press published Professor Corn's Women Building History about Mary Cassatt and the decorative program of murals and sculptures for the Woman's Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. She continues to research, write, and lecture on high, middle, and low culture interpretations of Grant Wood's American Gothic.

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the fourth in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Content Warning: This talk will include references to historic racist language and imagery. Viewer discretion is advised. Performing Innocence: Baby Nation Moderator: Professor Alastair Wright, Associate Professor in the History of Art, St John's College Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Abstract: French artists often referred to US artists and art as their offspring. In the context of French declining birthrates, cultural fecundity absorbed the anxieties about a decline of French culture in the name of superiority. The final lecture analyzes how US artists in Paris took up the child as a motif and mantra that reinforced or rejected the narrative of French artistic parentage. While Edwin Blashfield and Henry Ossawa Tanner, both artists invested in the French academy system, framed dutiful tutelage, Mary Cassatt, Cecilia Beaux, and Ellen Emmet Rand instead probed burgeoning ideas in psychology about the child to frame independent and precocious children. These modern children modeled artistic independence echoed in these painters’ aesthetic experimentation, mirroring the conceit framed by Henry James’s depiction of his child character in What Maisie Knew as “flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge.” Cartoons related to the War of 1898 suggest the fungible nature of this position; while playing youthful in the context of Europe, Americans adopted the aged Uncle Sam in rendering their colonized subjects as the children as they moved to outgrow their longstanding dependence on Parisian art practice. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Alastair Wright teaches modern art and visual culture for both the first year course (Prelims) and courses taken in subsequent years. At graduate level, his teaching focuses on French modernism and the interaction between art and mass culture. In all his teaching he encourages students to engage as closely as possible with actual works of art, regularly leading visits to collections in Oxford and beyond. Alastair Wrights's research focuses primarily on European modernisms. His first book, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004, and more recently he curated an exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s prints at the Princeton University Art Museum. The accompanying catalogue, Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints, examined the role played by reproduction in Gauguin’s understanding of French colonialism in Tahiti. He has published essays in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Artforum International, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and in various edited volumes.

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the fourth in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Content Warning: This talk will include references to historic racist language and imagery. Viewer discretion is advised. Performing Innocence: Baby Nation Moderator: Professor Alastair Wright, Associate Professor in the History of Art, St John's College Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists' playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood's incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Abstract: French artists often referred to US artists and art as their offspring. In the context of French declining birthrates, cultural fecundity absorbed the anxieties about a decline of French culture in the name of superiority. The final lecture analyzes how US artists in Paris took up the child as a motif and mantra that reinforced or rejected the narrative of French artistic parentage. While Edwin Blashfield and Henry Ossawa Tanner, both artists invested in the French academy system, framed dutiful tutelage, Mary Cassatt, Cecilia Beaux, and Ellen Emmet Rand instead probed burgeoning ideas in psychology about the child to frame independent and precocious children. These modern children modeled artistic independence echoed in these painters' aesthetic experimentation, mirroring the conceit framed by Henry James's depiction of his child character in What Maisie Knew as “flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge.” Cartoons related to the War of 1898 suggest the fungible nature of this position; while playing youthful in the context of Europe, Americans adopted the aged Uncle Sam in rendering their colonized subjects as the children as they moved to outgrow their longstanding dependence on Parisian art practice. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Alastair Wright teaches modern art and visual culture for both the first year course (Prelims) and courses taken in subsequent years. At graduate level, his teaching focuses on French modernism and the interaction between art and mass culture. In all his teaching he encourages students to engage as closely as possible with actual works of art, regularly leading visits to collections in Oxford and beyond. Alastair Wrights's research focuses primarily on European modernisms. His first book, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004, and more recently he curated an exhibition of Paul Gauguin's prints at the Princeton University Art Museum. The accompanying catalogue, Gauguin's Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints, examined the role played by reproduction in Gauguin's understanding of French colonialism in Tahiti. He has published essays in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Artforum International, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and in various edited volumes.

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World by Dr Ushashi Dasgupta. 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. When Dickens was nineteen years old, he wrote a poem for Maria Beadnell, the young woman he wished to marry. The poem imagined Maria as a welcoming landlady offering lodgings to let. Almost forty years later, Dickens died, leaving his final novel unfinished - in its last scene, another landlady sets breakfast down for her enigmatic lodger. These kinds of characters are everywhere in Dickens's writing. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World explores the significance of tenancy in his fiction. In nineteenth century Britain the vast majority of people rented, rather than owned, their homes. Instead of keeping to themselves, they shared space - renting, lodging, taking lodgers in, or simply living side-by-side in a crowded modern city. Charles Dickens explored both the chaos and the unexpected harmony to be found in rented spaces, the loneliness and sociability, the interactions between cohabitants, the complex gender dynamics at play, and the relationship between space and money. In Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction, Dr Ushashi Dasgupta demonstrates that a cosy, secluded home life was beyond the reach of most Victorian Londoners, and considers Dickens's nuanced conception of domesticity. Panel includes: Dr Ushashi Dasgupta is the The Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow and Tutor in English at Pembroke College, Oxford. Her research centres around nineteenth-century fiction, specialising in the relationship between literature, space and architecture, in particular, the ways in which fiction articulates urban and domestic experience. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction is her first book, and her next project asks what it means to feel at home in a book, exploring the practice of re-reading, from the nineteenth century to the present. Professor Sophia Psarra is Professor of Architecture and Spatial Design at University College London. Her research is transdisciplinary, spanning architecture and urbanism, spatial morphology, history, and cultural studies, and has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, NSF-USA and the Onassis Foundation. Professor Psarra is also a prize-winning practicing architect, and her work has resulted in creative installations and design projects as well as a number of publications, which include The Venice Variations and Architecture and Narrative. Professor Jeremy Tambling is a writer and critic who has been engaged with education and teaching at all levels and across the range, including holding the Chair of Comparative Literature in Hong Kong, and of Literature in Manchester. As a literary scholar, he uses critical and cultural theory, especially the culture of cities, and particularly that of London, as a way of approaching writing on many forms and periods of literature, as well as film and opera. Professor Tambling’s many publications include, most recently, Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death.

TORCH Book at Lunchtime event on Sophocles: Antigone and other tragedies by Professor Oliver Taplin. With panellists Professor Karen Leeder and Dr Lucy Jackson. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. His plays are deeply disturbing and unpredictable, unrelenting and open-ended, refusing to present firm answers to the questions of human existence, or to provide a redemptive justification of the ways of gods to men-or women. These three tragedies portray the extremes of human suffering and emotion, turning the heroic myths into supreme works of poetry and dramatic action. Professor Oliver Taplin's original and distinctive verse translations of Antigone, Deianeira and Electra convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance, doing justice to both the sound of the poetry and the theatricality of the tragedies. Panel includes: Professor Oliver Taplin is an Emeritus Professor of Classics at Oxford University. His research has focused on the reception of poetry and drama through performance and material culture in both ancient and modern times. He co-founded the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, and has collaborated on a number of high-profile theatre productions. In recent years he has turned his attention to translating Greek Drama as verse to be spoken and performed. Professor Karen Leeder is a Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. She has published widely on modern German culture and is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature, most recently winning the English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig. She was a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre from 2014-15 and she currently works with MPT, Poet in the City, and The Poetry Society on her project Mediating Modern Poetry. Dr Lucy Jackson is an Assistant Professor in Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. Her research focuses on ancient Greek and Roman theatre and performance, neo-Latin translations of Greek drama and the reception of classical theatre in the sixteenth century, and translation studies and theory in the ancient and modern worlds. Her most recent publication is The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE.

TORCH Book at Lunchtime event on Sophocles: Antigone and other tragedies by Professor Oliver Taplin. With panellists Professor Karen Leeder and Dr Lucy Jackson. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. His plays are deeply disturbing and unpredictable, unrelenting and open-ended, refusing to present firm answers to the questions of human existence, or to provide a redemptive justification of the ways of gods to men-or women. These three tragedies portray the extremes of human suffering and emotion, turning the heroic myths into supreme works of poetry and dramatic action. Professor Oliver Taplin's original and distinctive verse translations of Antigone, Deianeira and Electra convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance, doing justice to both the sound of the poetry and the theatricality of the tragedies. Panel includes: Professor Oliver Taplin is an Emeritus Professor of Classics at Oxford University. His research has focused on the reception of poetry and drama through performance and material culture in both ancient and modern times. He co-founded the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, and has collaborated on a number of high-profile theatre productions. In recent years he has turned his attention to translating Greek Drama as verse to be spoken and performed. Professor Karen Leeder is a Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. She has published widely on modern German culture and is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature, most recently winning the English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig. She was a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre from 2014-15 and she currently works with MPT, Poet in the City, and The Poetry Society on her project Mediating Modern Poetry. Dr Lucy Jackson is an Assistant Professor in Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. Her research focuses on ancient Greek and Roman theatre and performance, neo-Latin translations of Greek drama and the reception of classical theatre in the sixteenth century, and translation studies and theory in the ancient and modern worlds. Her most recent publication is The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE.

At around 11am on Thursday 18 February 1943 two students in Munich were arrested for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. By Monday they had been interrogated, tried, and executed along with another member of the resistance circle. Further arrests followed. From 15-27 February 2021 the White Rose Project will be following the events as they happened in real time through daily posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. This year marks the 78th anniversary of the first White Rose trials. It's also a year when the dates and days of the week coincide. Imagine going about your normal routine on Monday, being arrested on Thursday, being interrogated over the weekend, and going to trial the following Monday morning. At the heart of our week is a live reading of the White Rose's resistance pamphlets, translated from German into English by student members of the White Rose Project. Dr Alex Lloyd (Fellow by Special Election in German, St Edmund Hall) will give a short introduction to the pamphlets. The readers are current and former students and academics, mirroring the membership of the original group: Sophie Caws, Eve Mason, Adam Rebick, Elba Slamecka, Sam Thompson, Amy Wilkinson, and Taylor Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature, T.J. (Jim) Reed, FBA. The event will open and close with music by the award-winning vocal ensemble SANSARA, recorded on 22 February 2020. This event is supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the University of Oxford's Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund. It is part of the White Rose Project, a research and public engagement initiative bringing the story of the White Rose resistance circle to English-speaking audiences. Dr Alexandra Lloyd is Fellow by Special Election in German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has published widely on post-war Germany, most recently in her book Childhood, Memory, and the Nation: Young Lives under Nazism in Contemporary German Culture (Legenda, 2020). She is currently a Knowledge Exchange Fellow at TORCH working with the White Rose Foundation in Munich, and is Project Lead on a Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund project, ‘Resistance: The Story of the White Rose', in collaboration with the award-winning vocal ensemble SANSARA. Eve Mason is a final-year student of English and German at the Queen's College, Oxford. Her passion for translation led her to the White Rose Project, where she was one of the original translators of the pamphlets for The White Rose: Reading, Writing, Resistance. She was awarded a prize for German in the Warwick Prize in Undergraduate Translation in 2019 and has gone on to self-publish A String of Pearls: A Collection of Five German Fairy Tales by Women Writers, for which she won the LIDL Year Abroad Project Prize 2019–20. Sophie Caws is a final year student of French and German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. After taking German as a beginner's language, she now studies modern German literature with Dr Lloyd, with a particular interest in Freudian psychology and the literature of the former GDR. She spent 9 months living in Leipzig, Germany, where she worked as an English Language Assistant with the British Council and a teacher of English as a Second Language. She was also involved in English-language community theatre with English Theatre Leipzig, with the aim of promoting intercultural linguistic and artistic exchange within the Leipzig community and beyond. Sam Thompson is a fourth-year PhD student at King's College London, where he is completing a thesis on Classical Reception in German-language exile literature, 1933-45. Sam previously studied Classics and German at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he also received an MSt in German (with a dissertation on Austrian memory literature). His recent research interests include the work of Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Anna Seghers, and Interbellum literature more broadly.

At around 11am on Thursday 18 February 1943 two students in Munich were arrested for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. By Monday they had been interrogated, tried, and executed along with another member of the resistance circle. Further arrests followed. From 15-27 February 2021 the White Rose Project will be following the events as they happened in real time through daily posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. This year marks the 78th anniversary of the first White Rose trials. It’s also a year when the dates and days of the week coincide. Imagine going about your normal routine on Monday, being arrested on Thursday, being interrogated over the weekend, and going to trial the following Monday morning. At the heart of our week is a live reading of the White Rose’s resistance pamphlets, translated from German into English by student members of the White Rose Project. Dr Alex Lloyd (Fellow by Special Election in German, St Edmund Hall) will give a short introduction to the pamphlets. The readers are current and former students and academics, mirroring the membership of the original group: Sophie Caws, Eve Mason, Adam Rebick, Elba Slamecka, Sam Thompson, Amy Wilkinson, and Taylor Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature, T.J. (Jim) Reed, FBA. The event will open and close with music by the award-winning vocal ensemble SANSARA, recorded on 22 February 2020. This event is supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the University of Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund. It is part of the White Rose Project, a research and public engagement initiative bringing the story of the White Rose resistance circle to English-speaking audiences. Dr Alexandra Lloyd is Fellow by Special Election in German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has published widely on post-war Germany, most recently in her book Childhood, Memory, and the Nation: Young Lives under Nazism in Contemporary German Culture (Legenda, 2020). She is currently a Knowledge Exchange Fellow at TORCH working with the White Rose Foundation in Munich, and is Project Lead on a Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund project, ‘Resistance: The Story of the White Rose’, in collaboration with the award-winning vocal ensemble SANSARA. Eve Mason is a final-year student of English and German at the Queen’s College, Oxford. Her passion for translation led her to the White Rose Project, where she was one of the original translators of the pamphlets for The White Rose: Reading, Writing, Resistance. She was awarded a prize for German in the Warwick Prize in Undergraduate Translation in 2019 and has gone on to self-publish A String of Pearls: A Collection of Five German Fairy Tales by Women Writers, for which she won the LIDL Year Abroad Project Prize 2019–20. Sophie Caws is a final year student of French and German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. After taking German as a beginner’s language, she now studies modern German literature with Dr Lloyd, with a particular interest in Freudian psychology and the literature of the former GDR. She spent 9 months living in Leipzig, Germany, where she worked as an English Language Assistant with the British Council and a teacher of English as a Second Language. She was also involved in English-language community theatre with English Theatre Leipzig, with the aim of promoting intercultural linguistic and artistic exchange within the Leipzig community and beyond. Sam Thompson is a fourth-year PhD student at King’s College London, where he is completing a thesis on Classical Reception in German-language exile literature, 1933-45. Sam previously studied Classics and German at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he also received an MSt in German (with a dissertation on Austrian memory literature). His recent research interests include the work of Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Anna Seghers, and Interbellum literature more broadly.

TORCH Goes Digital! presents Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In this joint event between St Peter's College and TORCH, distinguished and multi-award-winning British filmmaker, social campaigner and St Peter’s College alumnus, Ken Loach (Jurisprudence, 1957), will discuss his filmmaking career with Professor Judith Buchanan, Master of St Peter’s College Oxford. Their conversation will concentrate on two remarkable films: The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016).

Internationally-renowned composer Anne Boyd is in conversation with composer Thomas Metcalf, discussing her life and music ahead of a performance of her String Quartet No. 2 ’Play on the Water’ later this year. This is part of the TORCH project ‘Pixelating the River’: Engagement with Contemporary Music through Graphical Inputs, played by the Kreutzer Quartet, alongside a new work by Thomas Metcalf. Professor Anne Boyd AM is one of Australia’s most distinguished composers and music educators. Her undergraduate studies were in the Department of Music at the University of Sydney, where Peter Sculthorpe was her earliest and most influential composition teacher. The award of a Commonwealth Scholarship enabled her to undertake a PhD in composition at the University of York (1969-72), where her supervisors were Wilfrid Mellers and Bernard Rands. In 1990, Boyd became the first Australian (and the first woman) to be appointed Professor of Music at the University of Sydney. Before this, she was the Foundation Head of the Department of Music at the University of Hong Kong (1981–90) and taught at the University of Sussex (1972–77). The hallmarks of her musical style are its transparency, gentleness and delicacy, attributes which reflect her long involvement with Asian traditions, especially those of Japan and Indonesia. Two solo CDs of her music are Meditations on a Chinese Character (ABC Classics, 1997) and Crossing a Bridge of Dreams (Tall Poppies, 2000). Professor Boyd was honoured with an AM in the Order of Australia in 1996, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York in 2003, the Distinguished Services to Australian Music Award at the APRA-AMC Classical Music Awards in 2005 and the 2014 Sir Bernard Heinz Award for service to music in Australia. Biography taken from Faber Music, 2021 Thomas Metcalf is a composer and DPhil candidate in Music at Oxford University (Worcester College), where he is researching the transformation of graphical spaces into determinately–notated music – focusing on a range of composers in the 20th and 21st centuries. His research has been recognised in the UK and internationally, appearing in peer-reviewed journals as well as diverse conference settings in Europe. Beginning his composition training with Robert Saxton at Oxford in October 2014, Thomas subsequently achieved a first–class BA in Music and an MSt in Composition with distinction as the Ogilvie–Thompson Scholar of Worcester College. Since January 2020, Thomas has studied with Kenneth Hesketh, focusing specifically on graphical methods of determinate composition, a process that is present in much of Hesketh’s recent work. Thomas’s works have been performed by a variety of ensembles, such as the ANIMA Collective, BBC Singers, Christ Church Cathedral Choir, GBSR Duo, Oxford Philharmonic, St. Pancras Parish Church Choir, and the Villiers Quartet. He has worked with composers such as Judith Weir, Michael Zev Gordon, Henning Kraggerud, and Dario Marianelli. He has also collaborated with festivals such as Oxford Lieder Festival (2018), Oxford Chamber Music Festival (2019), and the Vale of Glamorgan Festival (as part of the Peter Reynolds Composers Studio) (2020).

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on The Political Life of an Epidemic – Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe written by Professor Simukai Chigudu. About the book: Zimbabwe's catastrophic cholera outbreak of 2008–9 saw an unprecedented number of people affected, with 100,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths. Cholera, however, was much more than a public health crisis: it represented the nadir of the country's deepening political and economic crisis of 2008. This study focuses on the political life of the cholera epidemic, tracing the historical origins of the outbreak, examining the social pattern of its unfolding and impact, analysing the institutional and communal responses to the disease, and marking the effects of its aftermath. Across different social and institutional settings, competing interpretations and experiences of the cholera epidemic created charged social and political debates. In his examination of these debates which surrounded the breakdown of Zimbabwe's public health infrastructure and failing bureaucratic order, the scope and limitations of disaster relief, and the country's profound levels of livelihood poverty and social inequality, Simukai Chigudu reveals how this epidemic of a preventable disease had profound implications for political institutions and citizenship in Zimbabwe. Panel includes: Professor Simukai Chigudu is an Associate Professor of African Politics at Oxford and a Fellow of St Antony's College. Prior to academia, he was a medical doctor in the National Health Service where he worked for three years. He is principally interested in the social politics of inequality in Africa, which he examines using disease, public health, violence, and social suffering as organising frameworks. He has conducted research in Zimbabwe, Uganda, The Gambia, Tanzania and South Africa. Professor Sloan Mahone is an Associate Professor of the History of Medicine at Oxford University. She specialises in the history of psychiatry and neurology in Africa as well as the history of medicine and psychiatry globally. Her current research projects, funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) and Oxford's James Martin School, involve the implementation of oral history programmes on epilepsy in Africa and in resource poor settings globally. She is a member of Oxford's Epilepsy Research Group. Professor Mahone has also worked extensively in historical research and community development in Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo), South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zanzibar. Doctor Jon Schubert is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Brunel University. He is a political and economic anthropologist working on state institutions, infrastructures, and transnational trade in Angola and Mozambique. He is the author of Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola and has previously held postdoctoral research positions at the universities of Leipzig and Geneva.

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire, written by Dr Priya Atwal. 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. In late-eighteenth-century India, the glory of the Mughal emperors was fading, and ambitious newcomers seized power, changing the political map forever. Enter the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh, whose Sikh Empire stretched throughout northwestern India into Afghanistan and Tibet. Priya Atwal shines fresh light on this long-lost kingdom, looking beyond its founding father to restore the queens and princes to the story of this empire’s spectacular rise and fall. She brings to life a self-made ruling family, inventively fusing Sikh, Mughal and European ideas of power, but eventually succumbing to gendered family politics, as the Sikh Empire fell to its great rival in the new India: the British. Royals and Rebels is a fascinating tale of family, royalty and the fluidity of power, set in a dramatic global era when new stars rose and upstart empires clashed. Panel includes: Dr Priya Atwal is Community History Fellow at Oxford. She is a historian of empire, monarchy and cultural politics across Britain and South Asia. She has taught History at King's College London and Oxford, where she obtained her doctorate. Her research has been featured in collaborative projects with Historic Royal Palaces, among others; and she makes regular broadcast appearances, most recently presenting the BBC Radio 4 series, Lies My Teacher Told Me. She tweets @priyaatwal. Professor Faisal Devji is a Professor of Indian History and the Director of the Asian Studies Centre at Oxford. His research focuses on political thought in modern South Asia, and is more broadly concerned with ethics and violence in a globalized world. He is the author of four books, most recently Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. He is a Fellow at New York University’s Institute of Public Knowledge and was formerly Yves Otramane Chair at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Professor Polly O’Hanlon is a Professor of Indian History and Culture at Oxford and co-course director for the MSc and MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies. Her research interests focus on the social and intellectual history of India. Her most recent book was At the Edges of Empire: Essays in the Social and Intellectual History of India, which explores new approaches to questions about caste, gender, and religious cultures across a range of historical environments.

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation, TORCH is delighted to support the Annual Besterman Lecture, 2020 Lecture by Professor William Doyle. Introduced by Karen O'Brien (Head of Humanities Division, Oxford University) and Gregory S. Brown (General Editor of Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and Senior Research Fellow, Voltaire Foundation). Moderated by Professor Lauren Clay, Vanderbilt University. When Napoleon in 1799 declared that the French Revolution was over, he said that was because it was now established on the principles with which it began. The implication was that much of what had happened over the preceding decade of upheaval had not been in accordance with those principles. Napoleon took care, of course, not to state what they were: his constitution was the first since 1789 not to contain a declaration of basic rights. Yet everyone during the Revolution claimed to be acting on revolutionary principles, or denounced their opponents for betraying them. Can we distinguish between those who held to and those who ignored or compromised revolutionary aspirations? This lecture will make the attempt, challenging some of the most enduring assumptions in revolutionary historiography. Professor William Doyle Professor William Doyle is Professor Emeritus of History and Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol. Professor Doyle is a British historian, specialising in 18th-century France, and is most notable for his one-volume Oxford History of the French Revolution (1st edition, 1989; 2nd edition, 2002; 3rd edition, 2018). Professor Doyle one of the leading revisionist historians of the French Revolution, obtaining his doctorate from the University of Oxford with a thesis entitled The parlementaires of Bordeaux at the end of the eighteenth century, 1775-1790 - he is also the author of sixteen books on French and European history, five of which have been translated into Chinese. Professor Doyle is also a fellow of the British Academy and a co founder of the The Society for the Study of French History. Introduced by: Karen O'Brien, Head of Humanities Division, Oxford University. Before taking on this role in 2018, Professor O’Brien was Vice Principal (Education) and Professor of English Literature at King’s College, London. At King’s she oversaw institutional strategy for all undergraduate and postgraduate students, the university Maths school, admissions and widening access, and the financing and implementation of student-facing capital projects. She implemented major changes in the areas of online degrees and digital learning, new classroom and clinical teaching spaces, careers and co-curricular learning. Prior to this, she was Pro-Vice Chancellor at Birmingham University and held academic posts at Warwick, Cardiff and Southampton Universities. Originally educated at Oxford, she held a Harkness fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and a research fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge where she is now an Honorary Fellow. She is a trustee of the Rhodes Trust, a trustee of Chawton House, a member of Princeton University Press’s European advisory board and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In addition to being Head of the Humanities Division, she is a professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century literature, particularly the historical writing and fiction of the period. Professor Gregory S. Brown, Professor of History; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Senior Research Fellow; Voltaire Foundation and general editor of OSE. He is author, with Isser Woloch, of Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress (2nd edition; Norton, 2012), and author of Cultures in Conflict: The French Revolution (Greenwood, 2003); and A Field of Honor: Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in French Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (Columbia, 2002). Professor Brown will be delivering the ASECS-BSECS lecture at this winter's virtual BSECS conference, on the intellectual origins of "eighteenth-century studies. Moderated by: Professor Lauren Clay, Vanderbilt University. Lauren R. Clay is an historian of Old Regime and revolutionary France and its empire, with particular interests in urban cultural and civic life and the emergence of a commercially oriented society. Her book Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2013) examines the establishment of professional public theaters in cities throughout France and the French empire during the prerevolutionary era. Stagestruck was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2014 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History by the American Society for Theatre Research and was named a finalist for the 2013 George Freedley Memorial Award, for exceptional scholarship examining live theatre or performance, awarded by the Theatre Library Association. Her article “Provincial Actors, the Comédie-Française, and the Business of Performing in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies (2005) was the co-winner of the 2006-2007 James Clifford Prize, awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has a chapter on Voltaire’s fortunes at the box office forthcoming in Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793/Données, recettes et répertoire. La scène en ligne (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles), Eds. Sylvaine Guyot and Jeffrey S. Ravel (MIT Press, 2020). Lauren's work has also appeared in The Journal of Modern History, Slavery and Abolition, and The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution. Currently, she is writing about the debate over the legality of the slave trade during the early French Revolution. Lauren completed her PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, she spent several years teaching at Texas A and M University. Her scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She teaches courses on the history of early modern France, the economic history of the eighteenth century, revolutions in the modern world, European imperialism, and the history of Paris. She is a past Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies.

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation, TORCH is delighted to support the Annual Besterman Lecture, 2020 Lecture by Professor William Doyle. Introduced by Karen O'Brien (Head of Humanities Division, Oxford University) and Gregory S. Brown (General Editor of Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and Senior Research Fellow, Voltaire Foundation). Moderated by Professor Lauren Clay, Vanderbilt University. When Napoleon in 1799 declared that the French Revolution was over, he said that was because it was now established on the principles with which it began. The implication was that much of what had happened over the preceding decade of upheaval had not been in accordance with those principles. Napoleon took care, of course, not to state what they were: his constitution was the first since 1789 not to contain a declaration of basic rights. Yet everyone during the Revolution claimed to be acting on revolutionary principles, or denounced their opponents for betraying them. Can we distinguish between those who held to and those who ignored or compromised revolutionary aspirations? This lecture will make the attempt, challenging some of the most enduring assumptions in revolutionary historiography. Professor William Doyle Professor William Doyle is Professor Emeritus of History and Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol. Professor Doyle is a British historian, specialising in 18th-century France, and is most notable for his one-volume Oxford History of the French Revolution (1st edition, 1989; 2nd edition, 2002; 3rd edition, 2018). Professor Doyle one of the leading revisionist historians of the French Revolution, obtaining his doctorate from the University of Oxford with a thesis entitled The parlementaires of Bordeaux at the end of the eighteenth century, 1775-1790 - he is also the author of sixteen books on French and European history, five of which have been translated into Chinese. Professor Doyle is also a fellow of the British Academy and a co founder of the The Society for the Study of French History. Introduced by: Karen O'Brien, Head of Humanities Division, Oxford University. Before taking on this role in 2018, Professor O’Brien was Vice Principal (Education) and Professor of English Literature at King’s College, London. At King’s she oversaw institutional strategy for all undergraduate and postgraduate students, the university Maths school, admissions and widening access, and the financing and implementation of student-facing capital projects. She implemented major changes in the areas of online degrees and digital learning, new classroom and clinical teaching spaces, careers and co-curricular learning. Prior to this, she was Pro-Vice Chancellor at Birmingham University and held academic posts at Warwick, Cardiff and Southampton Universities. Originally educated at Oxford, she held a Harkness fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and a research fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge where she is now an Honorary Fellow. She is a trustee of the Rhodes Trust, a trustee of Chawton House, a member of Princeton University Press’s European advisory board and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In addition to being Head of the Humanities Division, she is a professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century literature, particularly the historical writing and fiction of the period. Professor Gregory S. Brown, Professor of History; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Senior Research Fellow; Voltaire Foundation and general editor of OSE. He is author, with Isser Woloch, of Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress (2nd edition; Norton, 2012), and author of Cultures in Conflict: The French Revolution (Greenwood, 2003); and A Field of Honor: Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in French Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (Columbia, 2002). Professor Brown will be delivering the ASECS-BSECS lecture at this winter's virtual BSECS conference, on the intellectual origins of "eighteenth-century studies. Moderated by: Professor Lauren Clay, Vanderbilt University. Lauren R. Clay is an historian of Old Regime and revolutionary France and its empire, with particular interests in urban cultural and civic life and the emergence of a commercially oriented society. Her book Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2013) examines the establishment of professional public theaters in cities throughout France and the French empire during the prerevolutionary era. Stagestruck was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2014 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History by the American Society for Theatre Research and was named a finalist for the 2013 George Freedley Memorial Award, for exceptional scholarship examining live theatre or performance, awarded by the Theatre Library Association. Her article “Provincial Actors, the Comédie-Française, and the Business of Performing in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies (2005) was the co-winner of the 2006-2007 James Clifford Prize, awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has a chapter on Voltaire’s fortunes at the box office forthcoming in Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793/Données, recettes et répertoire. La scène en ligne (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles), Eds. Sylvaine Guyot and Jeffrey S. Ravel (MIT Press, 2020). Lauren's work has also appeared in The Journal of Modern History, Slavery and Abolition, and The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution. Currently, she is writing about the debate over the legality of the slave trade during the early French Revolution. Lauren completed her PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, she spent several years teaching at Texas A and M University. Her scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She teaches courses on the history of early modern France, the economic history of the eighteenth century, revolutions in the modern world, European imperialism, and the history of Paris. She is a past Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies.

This event is supported by TORCH as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones of the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Supported by TORCH through the Humanities Cultural Programme. Join us for an online in-conversation with Prof Geoffrey Batchen and Dr Lena Fritsch, discussing the work of pioneering British photographer and botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871). Her innovative use of new photographic technologies linked art and science, and exemplified the potential of photography in books. Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford and Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. This talk accompanies the 2020 Photo Oxford festival, Women and Photography: Ways of Seeing and Being Seen. Biographies: Geoffrey Batchen is professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001), Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016), and Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (2018). Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Her monographs on photography include Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (English version with Thames & Hudson / Japanese version with Seigensha 2018), The Body as a Screen: Japanese Art Photography of the 1990s (Georg Olms 2011), and Yasumasa Morimuras Self-Portrait as Actress: Überlegungen zur Identität (VdM 2008).

This event is supported by TORCH as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones of the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Supported by TORCH through the Humanities Cultural Programme. Join us for an online in-conversation with Prof Geoffrey Batchen and Dr Lena Fritsch, discussing the work of pioneering British photographer and botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871). Her innovative use of new photographic technologies linked art and science, and exemplified the potential of photography in books. Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford and Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. This talk accompanies the 2020 Photo Oxford festival, Women and Photography: Ways of Seeing and Being Seen. Biographies: Geoffrey Batchen is professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001), Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016), and Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (2018). Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Her monographs on photography include Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (English version with Thames & Hudson / Japanese version with Seigensha 2018), The Body as a Screen: Japanese Art Photography of the 1990s (Georg Olms 2011), and Yasumasa Morimuras Self-Portrait as Actress: Überlegungen zur Identität (VdM 2008).

Talking Afropean: Johny Pitts in conversation with Elleke Boehmer and Simukai Chigudu about his award-winning book. TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events!. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. This Writers Make Worlds and TORCH panel discussion features the author Johny Pitts in conversation about his ground-breaking travelogue Afropean, his 2019 notes on a journey around contemporary Black Europe. Johny Pitts will explore together with Oxford academics Simukai Chigudu and Elleke Boehmer questions of black history, hidden archives, decolonization and community, and what it is to be black in Europe today. Hailed as a work that reframes Europe, Afropean was the 2020 winner of the Jhalak Prize. Biographies: Johny Pitts is a writer, photographer and broadcast journalist, and the author of Afropean (2019). His work exploring African-European identity has received numerous awards, including a Decibel Penguin Prize and the Jhalak Prize. He has contributed words and images to the Guardian, the New Statesman and the New York Times. Elleke Boehmer is a writer, historian, and critic. She is Professor of World Literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her most recent books are Postcolonial Poetics (2018) and To the Volcano (2019). She is currently on a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship working on a project called ‘Southern Imagining’. Simukai Chigudu is Associate Professor of African Politics and Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. Simukai is interested in the social politics of inequality in Africa and his first book The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe came out in 2020. Prior to joining the academy, Simukai was a medical doctor in the UK’s National Health Service.

Talking Afropean: Johny Pitts in conversation with Elleke Boehmer and Simukai Chigudu about his award-winning book. TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events!. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. This Writers Make Worlds and TORCH panel discussion features the author Johny Pitts in conversation about his ground-breaking travelogue Afropean, his 2019 notes on a journey around contemporary Black Europe. Johny Pitts will explore together with Oxford academics Simukai Chigudu and Elleke Boehmer questions of black history, hidden archives, decolonization and community, and what it is to be black in Europe today. Hailed as a work that reframes Europe, Afropean was the 2020 winner of the Jhalak Prize. Biographies: Johny Pitts is a writer, photographer and broadcast journalist, and the author of Afropean (2019). His work exploring African-European identity has received numerous awards, including a Decibel Penguin Prize and the Jhalak Prize. He has contributed words and images to the Guardian, the New Statesman and the New York Times. Elleke Boehmer is a writer, historian, and critic. She is Professor of World Literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her most recent books are Postcolonial Poetics (2018) and To the Volcano (2019). She is currently on a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship working on a project called ‘Southern Imagining’. Simukai Chigudu is Associate Professor of African Politics and Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. Simukai is interested in the social politics of inequality in Africa and his first book The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe came out in 2020. Prior to joining the academy, Simukai was a medical doctor in the UK’s National Health Service.

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe written by Professor Judith Herrin. Date: 4 November 2020. Book at Lunchtime https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/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: From 402 AD until 751 AD, Ravenna was first the capital of the Western Roman Empire, then that of the immense kingdom of Theoderic the Goth and finally the centre of Byzantine power in Italy. In Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe, Judith Herrin explains how scholars, lawyers, doctors, craftsmen, cosmologists and religious luminaries were drawn to Ravenna where they created a cultural and political capital that dominated northern Italy and the Adriatic. As she traces the lives of Ravenna's rulers, chroniclers and inhabitants, Herrin shows how the city became the meeting place of Greek, Latin, Christian and barbarian cultures and the pivot between East and West. The book offers a fresh account of the waning of Rome, the Gothic and Lombard invasions, the rise of Islam and the devastating divisions within Christianity. It argues that the fifth to eighth centuries should not be perceived as a time of decline from antiquity but rather, thanks to Byzantium, as one of great creativity - the period of 'Early Christendom'. These were the formative centuries of Europe. Author Judith Herrin won the Heineken Prize for History (the 'Dutch Nobel Prize') in 2016 for her pioneering work on the early Medieval Mediterranean world, especially the role of Byzantium, the influence of Islam and the significance of women. She is the author of Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, The Formation of Christendom, A Medieval Miscellany and Women in Purple. Herrin worked in Birmingham, Paris, Munich, Istanbul and Princeton before becoming Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London until 2008, where she is now the Constantine Leventis Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Classics. Panel: Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is also Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He works on the history of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia/Iran, Central Asia and beyond, and on relations between Christianity and Islam. His books The Silk Roads (2015) and The New Silk Roads (2018) received huge acclaim. He writes regularly for the international press, advises governments on geopolitics, and is chair of this year's Cundill History Prize. Professor Dame Averil Cameron was Warden of Keble College, Oxford from 1994-2010, and before that Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at King's College London where she was also the first Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies. She has been President of CBRL (Council for British Research in the Levant) and FIEC (Fédération internationale des associations d'études classiques) and is currently President of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Dr Conrad Leyser is Associate Professor of History at Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor of History at Worcester College. He specialises in the religious and social history of the Latin West in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (300-1100). His current research project centres on celibacy and the professionalisation of the priesthood in the so-called 'unreformed' Church of the tenth century. He is the author of Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great and the co-editor of England and the Continent in the Tenth Century.

Dr Joseph Moshenska, Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at University College, discusses his new book, Iconoclasm as Child's Play. Drawing on a range of sixteenth-century artifacts, artworks, and texts, as well as on ancient and modern theories of iconoclasm and of play, Iconoclasm As Child's Play argues that the desire to shape and interpret the playing of children is an important cultural force. Formerly holy objects may have been handed over with an intent to debase them, but play has a tendency to create new meanings and stories that take on a life of their own. Joe Moshenska shows that this form of iconoclasm is not only a fascinating phenomenon in its own right; it has the potential to alter our understandings of the threshold between the religious and the secular, the forms and functions of play, and the nature of historical transformation and continuity. Panel includes: Dr Joseph Moshenska is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at University College. Joe grew up in Brighton, and as an undergraduate he read English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After graduating he went to Princeton, initially for a year as the Eliza Jane Procter Visiting Fellow, and stayed there to complete his PhD. From 2010 to 2018 he was a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. Joe joined the Oxford Faculty in 2018. In 2019 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. Professor Lorna Hutson is the Merton Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies. She was educated in San Francisco, Edinburgh and Oxford and has repeated that pattern in her career, having taught at Berkeley, St Andrews and now Oxford. Professor Hutson is a Fellow of the British Academy and works on English Renaissance literature. She has written on usury and literature, on women’s writing and the representation of women, on poetics and forensic rhetoric and, most recently, on the geopolitics of England’s ‘insular imagining’ in the sixteenth century.” Professor Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. She currently serves as Chair of the Faculty of History. She was an undergraduate and Masters student at the University of Melbourne before coming to Trinity College, Cambridge, for her PhD. After a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, she taught at the University of Exeter for fourteen years before returning to Cambridge in 2010. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009 and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2013. She was appointed a CBE for services to History in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2017. Professor Kenneth Gross is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rochester. His critical writing ranges from Renaissance literature, especially Shakespeare, to modern poetry, theater, and the visual arts. His books include The Dream of the Moving Statue, Shakespeare’s Noise, Shylock is Shakespeare, and most recently Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, winner of the 2012 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He’s also the editor of John Hollander’s 1999 Clark Lectures at Cambridge, The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History. Gross has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bellagio Study Center, the Princeton Humanities Center, and the American Academy in Berlin. Gross has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bellagio Study Center, the Princeton Humanities Center, and the American Academy in Berlin. Professor Matthew Bevis is Professor of English Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Keble College. He is the author of The Art of Eloquence, Comedy: A Very Short Introduction, and, most recently, Wordsworth’s Fun (Chicago University Press, 2019). His recent essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, Harper's, Poetry, and The New York Review of Books. He’s currently working on Knowing Edward Lear for Oxford University Press, and a book On Wonder for Harvard University Press.

Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. 'Liveness'. Biographies: Katie Mitchell is a British theatre director whose unique style and uncompromising methods have divided both critics and audiences. Though sometimes causing controversy, her productions have been innovative and groundbreaking, and have established her as one of the UK’s leading names in contemporary performance. She was born in Berkshire in 1964, grew up in the small village of Hermitage and read English at Magdalen College, Oxford. She began her theatre career in 1986 with a job at the King’s Head Theatre as a production assistant. She became an assistant director at Paines Plough a year later, and then took the same post at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988. In 1990, she founded her own company, Classics on a Shoestring, where she directed a number of pioneering and highly acclaimed productions including the House of Bernada Alba and Women of Troy. In the decades with followed, Mitchell worked as an associate director with the Royal Court Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. Whilst at the RSC, she was responsible for programming at the now defunct black box space, The Other Place, and her production of The Phoenician Women earned her the Evening Standard Award for Best Director. Her numerous theatre credits include 2071 and Night Songs for the Royal Court, The Cherry Orchard for the Young Vic, The Trial of Ubu for Hampstead Theatre, Henry VI Part III (to date her only Shakespeare production) for the RSC and A Woman Killed with Kindness and The Seagull at the National Theatre. She has also directed opera, working with the Royal Opera House and English National Opera. An exponent of Stanislavski techniques and naturalism, her style was strongly influenced by the time she spent working in Eastern Europe early in her career. Her work is characterised by the creation on stage of a highly distinctive environment, the intensity of the emotions portrayed and by the realism of the acting. Mitchell’s work has pushed boundaries and explored technique and, not just confined to the stage, has also taken her into other creative mediums. She has directed for film and television with work including The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and The Turn of the Screw. In 2011, together with video maker, Leo Warner, Mitchell devised an immersive video installation called Five Truths for the Victoria and Albert Museum which explored the nature of truth in theatrical production. Ben Whishaw is a multi-award winning English actor in film, television, and theatre. He trained at RADA, and his work in theatre quickly brought acclaim including a much-lauded Hamlet at the Old Vic with Trevor Nunn in 2004. He has been directed by Katie Mitchell multiple times, including The Seagull at the National Theatre in 2006, and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy at the Shed in New York last year. In television his work ranges from BAFTA-winning performances in Rupert Goold's Richard II for the BBC in 2012 to A Very English Scandal in 2018. Among many film roles, he is perhaps best known for taking on the part of Q in the Bond films since 2012’s Skyfall and for delighting audiences young and old as the voice of Paddington in the hit movies in 2014 and 2017.

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Drama Week Biographies: Fiona Shaw CBE Fiona Shaw is an actor and theatre and opera director. She is known for her role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter film series (2001–10), as Marnie Stonebrook in season four of the HBO series True Blood (2011), and as Carolyn Martens in the BBC series Killing Eve (2018–present), for which she won the 2019 BAFTA TV Award for Best Supporting Actress. For her performances in the second seasons of Killing Eve and the comedy-drama Fleabag, Shaw received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series respectively. Fiona has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. She won the 1990 Olivier Award for Best Actress for various roles, including Electra, the 1994 Olivier Award for Best Actress for Machinal, and the 1997 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance for The Waste Land. Her other stage work includes playing the title role in Medea in the West End and on Broadway (2001–02). She was awarded an Honorary CBE in 2001. In 2020, she was listed at number 29 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors. Professor Oliver Taplin, Emeritus Professor of Classics, Magdalen College, Oxford. Professor Oliver Taplin is a fellow of Magdalen College and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. Professor Taplin's main teaching has been in all aspects of ancient Greek epic, tragedy and comedy: Classics, Classics (and Joint Honours), Classics and English, Classics and Modern Languages, Classics with Oriental Studies at Oxford University. Oliver's primary focus as a scholar is on Greek drama, especially from the viewpoint of staging and performance. His first book was The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, in which he dealt with the entrances and exits of characters in Aeschylus's plays. Subsequent books, including Comic Angels (1993) and Pots and Plays (2007) examine vase paintings as evidence for the performance of tragedy and comedy. In 1996, together with Edith Hall, he set up the APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama). It is devoted to the international production and reception of ancient plays since the Renaissance. He has also worked with productions in the theatre, including The Oresteia at the National Theatre (1980–81), The Thebans at the RSC (1991–92), and The Oresteia at the National Theatre (1999–2000). Apart from Greek drama, his chief area of interest was in Homer. Oliver retired as Tutor in Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford in 2008. The same year, Oxford University Press published Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin, edited by Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson. Further related subjects include vase-painting and theatre; performance studies; reception of ancient literature in modern poetry; practical translation workshops. Currently he is working on a broad-brush book on Greek Tragedy, including a critique of Aristotle’s Poetics. Publications include: The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford 1977, reissued as a paperback 1989). Greek Tragedy in Action (London and Berkeley 1978; revised edition 1985); also translated into Greek, Japanese and Polish. Greek Fire (London 1990); also translated into Dutch, Portuguese, French, German and Greek. Homeric Soundings. The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford 1992, reprinted in paperback, 1994). Comic Angels – and other approaches to Greek drama through vase-painting (Oxford 1993, reprinted in paperback, 1994). Pots and Plays. Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-painting of the Fourth Century BC (Getty Museum Publications, Los Angeles, 2007) Sophocles Oedipus the King and other tragedies (Oxford World’s Classics, 2016) Aeschylus The Oresteia (Norton, New York, 2018) His new book, Sophocles' Antigone and Other Tragedies was published in September 2020.

Join us for an online TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War written by Dr Alice Kelly. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held fortnightly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. About the book: One of the key questions of modern literature was the problem of what to do with the war dead. Through a series of case studies focusing on nurse narratives, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, as well as visual and material culture, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War provides the first sustained study of women’s literary representations of death and the culture of war commemoration that underlie British and American literary modernism. Considering previously neglected writing by women in the war zones and at home, as well as the marginalised writings of well-known modernist authors, and drawing on international archival research, this book demonstrates the intertwining of modernist, war, and memorial culture, and broadens the canon of war writing. Author Alice Kelly is currently a Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Sussex, and the Communications Officer here at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on twentieth-century literary and cultural history in Britain and America. As well as Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (2020), Alice has published a critical edition of Edith Wharton’s First World War reportage, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (2015), and essays on modernist and First World War literature. She has held Fellowships at Yale University, New York University, and a British Academy Rising Stars Award for her interdisciplinary seminar series Cultures and Commemorations of War. https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/people/alice-kelly Panel: Michael Whitworth is a Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. He has published extensively on Virginia Woolf, with his most recent work being an edition of Virginia Woolf's Night and Day for Cambridge University Press (published 2018). His previous publications include Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature, and chapters on Oliver Lodge’s science writing and Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry. He is currently working a project concerning on science, poetry, and specialization in the early twentieth century, Laura Rattray is Reader in American Literature at the University of Glasgow and Director of its Centre for American Studies. She has teaching and research interests in modern American literature and culture, women’s writing and gender, editing and publishing history. In 2016 she founded the Transatlantic Literary Women series, funded by the British Association for American Studies and US Embassy small grants programme. Publications include Twenty-First-Century Readings of Tender Is the Night (co-editor with William Blazek), The New Edith Wharton Studies (co-editor with Jennifer Haytock) and The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, while her new monograph, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction, is published by Palgrave Macmillan. J​ay Winter​ is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the 20th century. Previously, Winter taught at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Warwick, the University of Cambridge, and Columbia University. In 2001, he joined the faculty of Yale. Winter is the author or co-author of 25 books, including ​Socialism and the Challenge of War; Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912-18​; ​Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History​; ​The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century;​ ​Rene Cassin and the rights of man​, and most recently, ​War beyond words: Languages of remembrance from the Great War to the present​.

Bàrbara Molas discusses Transnational Francoism: The British and The Canadian Friends of National Spain as part of the TORCH Network Conversations in Identity, Ethnicity and Nationhood. Bàrbara Molas is a PHD Candidate in History at York University

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events!. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Join us to discuss Imagined Journeys: Pilgrimage, Diplomacy, and Colonialism in Medieval Europe - Professor Marion Turner (Faculty of English) in Conversation with writer Matthew Kneale. In this event, Marion and Matthew discuss their recent books – Matthew’s novel, Pilgrims, and Marion’s biography, Chaucer: A European Life – both of which focus on medieval journeys across Europe. They will discuss different aspects of medieval travel – ranging from colonialism in Wales to the expulsion of the Jews from England, from diplomacy and cultural exchange to pilgrimage, both real and imagined. One of the issues underpinning their work, and this conversation, is the question of what it means to be English and what it means to be European – both then and now. Biographies: Professor Marion Turner, Tutorial Fellow of Jesus College and Associate Professor of English, University of Oxford Marion Turner works on late medieval literature and culture, focusing especially on Geoffrey Chaucer. Her most recent book, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, 2019) argues for the importance of placing Chaucer in multilingual and international contexts, tracing his journeys across Europe and his immersion in global trade routes and exchanges. It was named as a book of the year 2019 by the Times, the Sunday Times, and the TLS, and was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2020. ‘An absolute triumph’ A.N. Wilson, Times Literary Supplement ‘A quite exceptional biography,’ Wolfson History Prize judges Matthew Kneale Matthew Kneale was born in London in 1960, the son of two writers and the grandson of two others. His father, Nigel Kneale, was a screenwriter for film and television, best known for the ‘Quatermass’ series. Matthew’s mother, Judith Kerr, was the author and illustrator of children’s books including ‘The tiger who came to tea’ and ‘Mog the forgetful cat’ while she has also written three autobiographical novels, beginning with ‘When Hitler stole pink rabbit’. From his earliest years Matthew was fascinated by different worlds, both contemporary and from the past. After studying at Latymer Upper School, London, he read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. During his university years he began travelling, seeing diverse cultures at first hand, in Asia, Europe and Latin America. Matthew's books include: Whore Banquets, Inside Rose’s Kingdom, Sweet Thames, English Passengers, Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance, When we were Romans and An Atheist’s History of Belief. Matthew's current novel, Pilgrims, explores medieval life, shaped by religious laws as well as personal battles and follows a fascinating cast of characters on a journey from England to Rome. When not writing Kneale enjoys to travel and has visited some eighty countries and seven continents. He is also fascinated with languages, trying his hand at learning a number, from Italian, Spanish, German and French to Romanian and Amharic Ethiopian. Matthew currently lives in Rome with his wife, Shannon, and their two children, Alexander and Tatiana.