Podcasts about history faculty

In this week's episode of then & now, guest host Professor Fernando Pérez-Montesinos is joined by Carlos Pérez Ricart, Assistant Professor in International Relations at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico City, to discuss Mexico's Dirty War—an internal conflict from the 1960s to the 1980s between the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-ruled government and left-wing student and guerrilla groups. As one of the four members of Mexico's truth commission from 2021 to 2024, Carlos draws on the findings of this initiative to examine the country's systematic use of violence and repression, as well as the most significant revelations from the commission's comprehensive reports.Carlos situates Mexico's experience within the broader context of Latin America's wave of repressive military regimes during the Cold War, which implemented widespread crackdowns on real and perceived political dissidents. While countries across the region began confronting these legacies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Mexican government remained largely unresponsive to calls for a truth commission, despite persistent demands from activists and human rights organizations. In 2021, the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) finally initiated a formal process to address past abuses, creating a truth commission tasked with conducting interviews and scouring archives for evidence of past violence. This conversation considers the complexities of uncovering evidence implicating powers behind the formation of the truth commission itself and provides critical insights into the mechanisms of state violence, the politics of memory, and the challenges of transitional justice in contemporary Mexico.Carlos Pérez Ricart is an assistant professor in International Relations at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City. Prior to joining CIDE, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, where he worked at both the History Faculty and the Latin American Centre, St. Antony's College. His research and teaching interests include the relationship between Mexico and the United States, security and organized crime, arms trafficking, drug policies. He is co-editor of the book "Gun Trafficking and Violence: From The Global Network to The Local Security Challenge" (Palgrave, St. Antony's College 2021). Fernando Pérez-Montesinos is an associate professor in the Department of History at UCLA. His research focuses on the history of modern Mexico with a focus on the nineteenth century and the Mexican Revolution. His book, "Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands" (UT Press, 2025), focuses on the Purépecha people of Michoacán, Mexico, and examines why and how long-standing patterns of communal landholding changed in response to liberal policies, railroad expansion, and the rise of the timber industry in Mexico.Further Reading:Fifty Years of Silence: Mexico Faces the Legacy of its Dirty War, GWU National Security ArchiveInquiry into Mexico's ‘dirty war' obstructed by military and other agencies, board says, the Guardian

The world will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II later this year. Richard J. Evans helps us understand the murderous leaders of Nazi Germany, and the people at every level of German society who did their bidding. Evans is an historian of modern Germany and modern Europe and is the preeminent historian of the Third Reich today. He has published over 20 books in the field, including his trilogy on the Third Reich. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature and the Learned Society of Wales, and an Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, Birkbeck, University of London, and Jesus College Oxford. In 2022, he was made an Honorary Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has been Vice-Master and Acting Master of Birkbeck, University of London, Chairman of the History Faculty in the University of Cambridge. He currently serves as Provost of Gresham College in London and a visiting Professor of History at Birkbeck University of London.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Host: Charlie Bowden Editor: Charlie Bowden In celebration of the 300th anniversary of the establishment of the Regius Professorship of History at Oxford, the History Faculty organised a research event entitled ‘What is History now?' at Trinity College. Charlie Bowden, a History student at Jesus College, speaks to a variety of attendees, from visiting professors to PhD students to employees in the heritage sector, to find out about where the discipline finds itself at present and where it should go in the future. About OxPods: Looking to make the most of Oxford's world-leading professors, we decided to set up a platform to interview these academics on the niche, weird and wonderful from their subjects. We aim to create thought-provoking and easily digestible podcast episodes, made for anyone with an interest in the world around them, and to facilitate university access and outreach for students aspiring to Oxford or Cambridge.   To learn more about OxPods, visit our website ⁠www.oxpods.co.uk⁠⁠, ⁠or follow us on socials ⁠@ox.pods. ⁠ ⁠ If you would like an audio transcription of this episode, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us. OxPods is made possible through the support of our generous benefactors. Special thanks to: St Peter's College JCR, Jesus College JCR & Lady Margaret Hall JCR for supporting us in 2024. OxPods © 2023 by OxPods is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

History Faculty, Matthew Ellis, stops by this week to talk borders, his time in Egypt, his study of the Middle East, his favorite TV shows, being a workaholic, why he views historical research as an "elaborate exercise in empathy", and more! To learn more about Matthew visit his faculty page here: https://www.sarahlawrence.edu/faculty/ellis-matthew.html The Sarah Lawrence Student Life Preservation Project is accepting contributions at https://slcstudentlifeproject.omeka.net/ Follow The SLC Library on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube @SLCLibrary. Visit the Library's website at www.sarahlawrence.edu/library. Thank you for listening.

How did the discovery of oil in Persia transform Persian society and British imperialism in the Middle East at the turn of the century? In this episode moderated by Dr. Sheng Peng (RECET), Leonardo Davoudi explores the formal and informal dealings of politicians, investors, civil servants, and intermediaries during the development of the Persian petroleum industry from its uncertain beginnings to becoming one of British Empire's most valuable pocessions in the Middle East.   Dr. Leonardo Davoudi is an associate member of Oxford University's History Faculty and a researcher with the Global History of Capitalism project at the Oxford Centre for Global History. He is the author of “Persian Petroleum: Oil, Empire and Revolution in Late Qajar Iran” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). His research interests lie at the intersection of imperialism and capitalism.

Kate Erickson shares the story of her family, including her grandmother's experiences in a Wittenberg, Wisconsin residential Indian boarding school. Kate is a member of the Oneida Nation and History Faculty at the Milwaukee Area Technical College where she teaches Native American, Wisconsin Indian, State of Wisconsin, and Early American History. Kate has been teaching at MATC for over a decade after starting her teaching career at The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.Kate earned her bachelor's degree in American Indian Studies with a focus on History and Sociology and earned her Master's degree in Public History and Museum Studies from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Public Museum.Kate is a member of the MATC Diversity Equity and Inclusion Committee, The National Indian Education Association, the Wisconsin Archaeological Society, Bridge the Divide, NAACP Ozaukee County, the Milwaukee FBI Community Roundtable, and an Alternate Board Member of the Wisconsin Indian Education AssociationGreat intro links to Native History/Issueshttps://wisconsinfirstnations.org/https://www.ncai.org/https://www.bia.gov/You can also follow her at @NativeHistoryKate on Facebook. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today's episode, "What is Juneteenth? (in 8 minutes and 46 seconds)" will be released at 8:46am. Our choice to highlight 8:46 is in commemoration of the death of George Floyd. Written by English Professor Andrea Rivers, this brief history of Juneteenth explains the origins of the holiday and its contemporary significance in the year 2020. It features information about the national and local celebrations of the holiday, along with a call for our country to do better. Show notes: Produced by the South Phoenix Oral History Project and members of South Mountain Community CollegeWritten by Andrea RiversSpeakers (in order of appearance): Andrea Rivers, English Faculty; Clyne Namuo, Vice President of Learning; Summer Cherland, History Faculty; Osaro Ighodaro, Vice President of Student Affairs; Shari Olson, President; Azra Mahmood, Communication Faculty Please also see SMCC's companion video. https://youtu.be/JYcQAqKdg8o Please see the website: https://8m46s.com/ for a partial transcript and timer of George Floyd's death. Learn more about Juneteenth history and celebrations in Phoenix, AZ. Learn more about Eastlake Park's History.Music credit:  Too Cool by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4534-too-coolLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Connect with us:Click here to tell us your story.Why is it called More and More Every Day? Click here to read our first More and More post. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @smcchistoryRecording date: 6/17/20

To know what Jesus thought about the Sabbath, we need guidance from a History Faculty member hailing from the heart of Texas football and Friday Night Lights.

Lectures of the J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow Prof. Tony K. Stewart 31 Jan 2017 In 1287 bs [=1879/80 ce] a short Bangla work was published in Calcutta under the title of Iblichnāmār punthi by the highly productive scholar Garībullā, who had composed the text about a century earlier. This somewhat unusual text is a colloquy between the Prophet Muhammad and the fallen Iblich (Ar. Iblīs), also called Saytān. The bulk of this fictional text is an interrogation of Iblich regarding the nature of his followers and their actions. The text is prefaced in its opening verses with a somewhat uneasy statement about the nature of the book and whether it was even appropriate to compose such a text it in the vernacular Bangla, a move that immediately draws attention to the language of the text itself and its intended audience. The opening section moves from one language conundrum to another until the attentive reader begins to realize that the fact one is reading the text in Bangla suggests that question and those that followed were actually moot, a set up for something else. Soon, the logic of the argument makes clear that such a conversation between the always untruthful Iblich and the always truthful Muhammad could only happen in a fiction—and it is perfectly fine to write fiction in Bangla. This move to fiction immediately alters the approach of the reader, who is rewarded with humorous, often naughty descriptions of the depraved and licentious acts of Saytān’s lackeys, parodies of the standard ’aḥādīth literatures regarding proper conduct—everything a good practicing Muslim is not! This fictional inversion of all that is good and proper titillates the reader in its mad escape from the Bakhtinian monologic of theology, history, and law that governs the discourse of the conservative Sunni (Hanbalite) mainstream. It is the exaggerated negative image of the law as seen from the imagined squalid underbelly of Bengali society. (This seminar is jointly sponsored by the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, the Asian Studies Centre at St. Anthony’s College, and the History Faculty.) Prof. Tony K. Stewart specializes in the literatures and religions of the Bangla-speaking world, with a special emphasis on the early modern period. His most recent monograph, The Final Word: the Caitanya Caritāmṛta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition (Oxford, 2010), culminated a decades-long study of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava hagiographical tradition that included translating with Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, Harvard Oriental Series no. 56 (Harvard, 1999). From the literatures of the Muslim–Hindu mythic figure, Satya Pīr, he published Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal (Oxford, 2004) and is currently working on a monograph on the popular Bangla romance literatures of the pīrs. With prominent American poet Chase Twichell, he has published the first ever translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s pseudonymous Bhānusiṃha poetry titled The Lover of God(Copper Canyon, 2003). Stewart currently holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities and serves as a Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University.

Natalia Nowakowska (Tutor and Fellow in History, Somerville College and Principal Investigator 'The Jagiellonians Project') gives a talk for the History Faculty. In 1518, the Milanese Neapolitan princess Bona Sforza travelled to Krakow to marry King Sigismund I of Poland, in one of the most celebrated weddings seen in Renaissance Central Europe. The wedding is remembered today as bringing Italian food and culture to Poland. However, this lecture marking the 500th anniversary of the wedding, explores how it also generated new kinds of political ideas and language.

Ryan Tripp teaches for Southern New Hampshire and other institutions and he hosts a podcast for the New Books Network’s Native American Studies channel. In this episode of Filibustering History we talk about his background, his research interests, and his presentation on Matthew Robinson for the History Soundbites podcast. This episode’s recommendations: A dozen or so books from Ryan! Ciaran O’Neill, Catholics of Consequence: Transnational Education, Social Mobility, and the Irish Catholic Elite, 1850-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), https://global.oup.com/academic/product/catholics-of-consequence-9780198707714?lang=en&cc=us. Arthur Quinn, The Rivals: William Gwin, David Broderick, and the Birth of California (New York: Crown Publishers, 1994; Lincoln, Nebraska: Bison Books, 1997), http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9780803288515/. Dr. Tripp can be reached at r.tripp@snhu.edu. His podcast episodes are listed at http://newbooksnetwork.com/?s=ryan+tripp. Rob Denning can be reached at snhuhistory@gmail.com or r.denning@snhu.edu. James Fennessy can be reached at j.fennessy@snhu.edu. Follow us on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/FilibusterHist.

Thomas Jefferson is well-known as one of the founders of American religious freedom and the separation of church and state; yet, while he strongly opposed government involvement in religion, he always expected Americans to be privately religious. In designing the University of Virginia, he worked diligently, against considerable political opposition, to ensure that the University did not actively promote religion but left religious matters to the students. Almost two hundred years later, in Rosenberger v. UVA (1995), the Supreme Court adopted a “neutrality principle” — government must neither promote nor discriminate against religion – a decision with which Jefferson would undoubtedly have been pleased. John Ragosta, Fellow, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, History Faculty, Randolph College, and UVA's Summer Jefferson Symposium Faculty Leader, will address Jefferson's role in defining American religious freedom, his plans for UVA, and the modern religious freedom issues with which we continue to grapple. http://alumni.virginia.edu/learn/program/religious-freedom/

Professor Pradip Dutta speaks on Tagore at the South Asia Seminar Vishwabharati, the university that Tagore founded, was an early experiment in producing a global habitation. While many of the ideas that motivated this institution hold out resonances for the contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism, Tagore worked in the field of modern Indian thought. The tradition was strongly inflected by Vedantism. In its modern incarnation Vedantism produced a universalism that announced its location. The presentation will look at how Tagore extended the theology of neo-Vedantism, shifting it away from its metaphysical orientation to outline a theory of global survival of which Vishwabharati, established in the rural hinterlands of Bengal, was designed as the institutional beginnings. Professor Pradip Datta has worked on communal relations in Bengal and in contemporary India. He is now exploring non-antagonistic modes of identity formations through his work on Vishwabharati , the global university founded by Tagore. His publications include Carving Blocs (1999), Khaki Shorts Saffron Flags (co-author, 1993), Heterogeneities (2008). This seminar series is organised with the support of the History Faculty.

Professor Chaudhuri speaks at the South Asia Seminar on a public meeting held in Calcutta, on December 15th, 1829. On December 15th , 1829, a large public meeting was held amidst much excitement at the Town Hall in Calcutta. The speakers, principally from the British mercantile community in Calcutta, but including, prominently, Dwarakanath Tagore and Rammohun Roy, spoke on behalf of a petition to be sent to the English Parliament arguing for what they called "The Colonization of India". The debate centred on the upcoming renewal of the Charter Act, and this community pressed for further abolishing remaining monopolies the East India Company held. I will show how the disputes generated on the subject played out in Calcutta at the time, and also, crucially, show how Rammohun’s involvement in the event and his later evidence before the Select Committee was misread by leading Marxist historians affiliated to the CSSSC in the 1970s. Rosinka Chaudhuri is Professor of Cultural Studies and Dean (Academic Affairs) at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). She has published: Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Seagull: 2002), Freedom and Beef-Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (Orient Blackswan: 2012) and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Literary Culture (Oxford University Press: 2013, Peter Lang: 2014), and has edited: Derozio, Poet of India: A Definitive Edition (Oxford University Press, 2008), and, with Elleke Boehmer, The Indian Postcolonial (Routledge, 2010). Her most recent publication is A History of Indian Poetry in English, published by Cambridge University Press, New York, in March 2016. She has also translated and introduced the complete text of the letters Rabindranath Tagore wrote his niece Indira Debi as a young man, calling it Letters from a Young Poet (1887-94) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2014); this received an Honorable Mention in the category A.K. Ramanujan Prize for Translation (S. Asia) at the Association for Asian Studies Book Prizes 2016. Currently, she is editing and introducing An Acre of Green Grass: English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose for Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Her current research is tentatively titled Young Bengal and the Empire of the Middle Classes. This seminar series is organised with the support of the History Faculty.

Uday Chandra speaks at the South Asia Seminar Two decades ago, the historical anthropologist K. Sivaramakrishnan noted with a sense of irony that "elites assuming the task of building a national culture and providing it with a liberatory/progressive history have turned to modes of knowledge and reconstruction produced in the colonial period". This paper builds on this ironic comment to understand and critique Subaltern Studies' rediscovery of the "primitive" tribal subject in the forests of Middle India. Seeking to turn away from colonial, nationalist, and Marxist historiographic traditions, Uday Chandra argues, the Subalternists' quest for the quintessential subaltern ended when it encountered an erstwhile favourite of colonial ethnology, namely, the tribal or aboriginal subject. Once merely an anthropological curiosity, this quintessential subaltern figure came to be reworked in the 1980s and 1990s as the anti-colonial rebel par excellence with his own impenetrable lifeworld and habits that stood in opposition to the modern state and capitalism. The old colonial tropes of irreducible cultural difference, underwritten by a paternalistic ideology of "primitivism," now re-emerged, most notably in the writings of Ranajit Guha, as the basis of a new historiographic and theoretical turn in postcolonial India. The rediscovered primitive of the radical historian’s imagination could do what the Subalternist demanded: revel, riot, and rebel. Much like Alexis de Tocqueville's reflections on the Kabyles of mid-nineteenth century Algeria or his British Indian counterparts’ concerns over vanishing tribes in a predominantly caste-based society, the radical postcolonial historian thus came to rely on the dramaturgy of tragedy to re-tell adivasi pasts. To show what such Subalternist historiography leaves out and why, the author turns to Ranajit Guha's evocative description of the Santal Hul of 1855. For Guha, as for his colonial predecessors, the Hul represented the outburst of the irrational savage, entirely at odds with the workings of the modern world. Yet, as this paper will show, colonial records clearly document, on the one hand, the Santals’ well-established grievances against moneylenders, their petitions and appeals to the local state, and, on the other hand, the influence of Christian missionaries in the rebels' articulation of "millennarian" ideas. Reflecting on the problems inherent in Guha’s historical methods and turning afresh to the same colonial archive, an altogether different view emerges of adivasi engagements with the modern state and economy in the mid-nineteenth century. This view of the past depicts the modern tribal subject within the logics of modern state-making and capitalism, not outside or prior to it. Such a reading points to the limits of neo-romantic representations of the exotic beyond “reason and evidence.” Acknowledging how state and tribe constitute each other in the margins of modern India is, Uday Chandra argues, a necessary step to undo the colonial legacies that inhere ironically yet not surprisingly in neo-romantic representations of adivasi pasts. This seminar series is organised with the support of the History Faculty.

A debate and discussion on “The Ethics of Equality” held in collaboration with the GlobalNet21. Christopher Snowdon - Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA.). He is the author of The Art of Suppression, The Spirit Level Delusion and Velvet Glove; Iron Fist. His work focuses on pleasure, prohibition and dodgy statistics. He has authored a number of publications including Sock Puppets, Euro Puppets, The Proof of the Pudding, The Crack Cocaine of Gambling and Free Market Solutions in Health. Engelbert Stockhammer - Director of Research at the Economics, Politics & History Faculty of Kingston University and also presently a research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and member of the coordination committee of the Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policy.

Dr Dag Erik Berg speaks at the South Asian seminar. There has been a tendency in caste studies to explain the origins and existence of caste, relying on structural approaches to explain how it is produced and by whom. This paper seeks to step aside from such a focus in order to analyse enduring caste-based oppression of Dalits in India. To do so, I introduce the concept of mechanism of oppression, which means that upward social mobility is a trend that co-exists with atrocity. I suggest that the concept "mechanism of oppression" follows up common sense explanations among Dalit activists and that it represents one realist approach to address "the Dalit question" and caste exclusion. As an adequate starting point for analysing atrocities, this concept opens possibilities of understanding legal developments pertaining to the Scheduled Castes in India. The paper will refer to cases in Andhra Pradesh and lessons concerning dominance, atrocity and caste. Dr Dag Erik Berg is a postdoctoral research fellow associated with the group on "Diversity and Inequality" at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), University of Göttingen, Germany. Before joining CeMIS, he was Associate Professor in Intercultural Studies at NLA University College, Norway and has been previously affiliated with University of Bergen and SOAS, London. Berg has published articles on Dalit movements in Andhra Pradesh, law and governance in India as well as caste and race in intercultural perspective. His ongoing book project is concernDed with studying the Dalits in India and the relation between embedded social complexities of caste based oppression and the legal responses to redress social injustice. This presentation follows up his article in Asian Journal of Law and Society "Structural mechanism of oppression, law and the Dalit question in India" (2015). This seminar series is organised with the support of the History Faculty.

Markku Peltonnen discusses “Popularity and the Arts of Rhetoric: Julius Caesar in Context”. Peltonnen is History Faculty at the University of Helsinki. This talk was included in the session titled, “Popularity and Popular Politics in Early Modern England”.

Nationalism has been one of the most dynamic yet dangerous ideologies in modern history. Politicians encourage us to think that national frontiers are firm and unchanging, central to our identity. But in this session, members of the History Faculty reflect on the porous nature of borders. With Professors David Reynolds, Chris Clark and Dr Joya Chatterjee. THE BALKANS AND THE LEGACIES OF 1914 Prof. Chris Clark (St Catharine's) Professor of Modern European History Until recently, a bronze plaque in Sarajevo commemorated the moment in June 1914 when the young Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated an Austrian Archduke and took ‘the first steps into Yugoslav liberty’. National tensions wrought havoc on the Balkan peninsula in 1912 and 1913 and triggered the outbreak of the First World War. After the collapse of Soviet power, they helped to bring about the dissolution of the Yugoslavian state. Chris Clark unravels the legacies of a region in which political borders and cultural identities have never coincided. MAKING AND BREAKING MODERN SOUTH ASIA Dr Joya Chatterji (Trinity) Reader in Modern South Asian History The British Raj came to an abrupt end in 1947 but millions of people in South Asia are still living with the legacies of its break-up. Joya Chatterji unravels the tangled story and the nationalist mythologies spun around it. A schools project she has developed in London with migrants from Bangladesh shows how a clearer understanding of the past can promote reconciliation in the present. BRITAIN, EUROPE AND THE LEGACIES OF 1940 Prof. David Reynolds (Christ's) Professor of International History The events of 1940 cast a long shadow over modern Europe. They drove Britain away from the continent, just at a time when it had been drawing closer to France. Across the Channel, however, the appalling legacies of 1940 for France and Germany persuaded these two countries to transcend their long cycle of border wars and forge an unprecedented European Community. David Reynolds reflects on the frontiers of the mind that often matter as much in history as visible national borders.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and influence of William Caxton, the merchant who brought the printing press to the British Isles. After spending several years working as a printer in Bruges, Caxton returned to London and in 1476 set up his first printing press in Westminster, and also imported and sold other printed books. Caxton concentrated on producing popular books that he knew would sell, such as Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' and small liturgical 'books of hours'. The standard of Caxton's printing may have lagged behind that on the continent, but he was a skilful businessman and unusually for printers at the time, he managed not to go bankrupt. The advent of print is now seen as one of the great revolutions in intellectual history - although many scholars believe it was a revolution that took many generations to have an effect.With:Richard Gameson Professor of the History of the Book at the University of DurhamJulia Boffey Professor of Medieval Studies in the English Department at Queen Mary, University of LondonDavid Rundle Member of the History Faculty at the University of OxfordProducer: Natalia Fernandez.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and influence of William Caxton, the merchant who brought the printing press to the British Isles. After spending several years working as a printer in Bruges, Caxton returned to London and in 1476 set up his first printing press in Westminster, and also imported and sold other printed books. Caxton concentrated on producing popular books that he knew would sell, such as Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' and small liturgical 'books of hours'. The standard of Caxton's printing may have lagged behind that on the continent, but he was a skilful businessman and unusually for printers at the time, he managed not to go bankrupt. The advent of print is now seen as one of the great revolutions in intellectual history - although many scholars believe it was a revolution that took many generations to have an effect. With: Richard Gameson Professor of the History of the Book at the University of Durham Julia Boffey Professor of Medieval Studies in the English Department at Queen Mary, University of London David Rundle Member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford Producer: Natalia Fernandez.

Prof. Anderson (Oxford University) examines the tumultuous history in the Jubaland area of southern Somalia and northern Kenya at the turn of the 20th century. (Presented in the Global and Imperial History Research Seminar). Professor David Anderson (Oxford University, African Studies Centre) presents research on the history of Jubaland, located in Southern Somalia and, previously until 1924, part of the Kenya colony and East African protectorate. Focused on the tumultuous history of British involvement in this area, Prof. Anderson uses the themes of Islam, imperialism(s), and transnational history to understand what was going on in this region at the turn of the 20th century. Anderson offers possible insights for the troubles facing this region today. (Presented at the Global and Imperial History Research Seminar, History Faculty, University of Oxford, http://www.history.ox.ac.uk)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the relationship between astronomy and the British Empire. The 18th century explorer and astronomer James Cook wrote: 'Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go'. Cook's ambition took him to the far reaches of the Pacific and led to astronomical observations which measured the distance of Venus to the Sun with unprecedented accuracy. Cook's ambition was not just personal and astronomical. It represented the colonial ambition of the British Empire which was linked inextricably with science and trade. The discoveries about the Transit of Venus, made on Cook's voyage to Tahiti, marked the beginning of a period of expansion by the British which relied on maritime navigation based on astronomical knowledge. With Simon Schaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge; Kristen Lippincott, former Director of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; Allan Chapman, Historian of Science at the History Faculty at Oxford University.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the relationship between astronomy and the British Empire. The 18th century explorer and astronomer James Cook wrote: 'Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go'. Cook's ambition took him to the far reaches of the Pacific and led to astronomical observations which measured the distance of Venus to the Sun with unprecedented accuracy. Cook's ambition was not just personal and astronomical. It represented the colonial ambition of the British Empire which was linked inextricably with science and trade. The discoveries about the Transit of Venus, made on Cook's voyage to Tahiti, marked the beginning of a period of expansion by the British which relied on maritime navigation based on astronomical knowledge. With Simon Schaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge; Kristen Lippincott, former Director of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; Allan Chapman, Historian of Science at the History Faculty at Oxford University.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the relationship between astronomy and the British Empire. The 18th century explorer and astronomer James Cook wrote: 'Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go'. Cook's ambition took him to the far reaches of the Pacific and led to astronomical observations which measured the distance of Venus to the Sun with unprecedented accuracy. Cook's ambition was not just personal and astronomical. It represented the colonial ambition of the British Empire which was linked inextricably with science and trade. The discoveries about the Transit of Venus, made on Cook's voyage to Tahiti, marked the beginning of a period of expansion by the British which relied on maritime navigation based on astronomical knowledge. With Simon Schaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge; Kristen Lippincott, former Director of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; Allan Chapman, Historian of Science at the History Faculty at Oxford University.