lectures

2013 marks the six-year anniversary of the Festival of Ideas, a University of Cambridge public engagement initiative that celebrates the arts, humanities and social sciences by showcasing a diverse mix of inspirational talks, performances, films, exhibitions and other creative displays. 

Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2013

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Speaker Series with Linda Robinson, senior international policy analyst at the RAND Corporation and author of One Hundred Victories: Special Operations Forces and the Future of American Warfare.

Linda Robinson: Unveiling the Secret World of Special Operations Forces | Shorenstein Center

The problem of violence against women and girls has been prominent in media coverage with many distressing cases coming to light over the last year and more. What steps are being taken through legal processes, by organisations and academia to tackle the issues involved? Speakers include Norah Al-Ani of Cambridge Rape Crisis centre.

How far have we come? Ending violence against women and girls

Writer and influential political commentator Owen Jones talks about his strong opposition to Government cuts and proposes a fight-back alternative to austerity.

Owen Jones is a columnist, author and influential commentator associated with left-wing politics, he appears regularly on Question Time, Newsnight and in newspapers. In this talk, he examines the alleged failings of the current Government's austerity measures and proposes what some might consider a radical alternative.

Owen Jones was born in Sheffield and grew up in Stockport. After graduating, he worked as a trade union and parliamentary researcher. His first book, Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class, was published in June 2011. He writes a weekly column for the Independent, is a regular broadcaster and is a policy and media advisor to the trade union think tank Class. He is currently working on his second book, on power in Britain, for Penguin. He was named 2012 Stonewall Journalist of the Year and Young Writer of the Year at the 2013 Political Book Awards.

An alternative to austerity: a talk by Owen Jones

Join Dr Miranda Griffin, College Lecturer in medieval French literature, in her fascinating investigation of medieval tales of transformation, exploring the way in which the Middle Ages imagined the frontiers between the human and the animal.

Werewolves and snakewomen

Lord Byron’s death on 19 April, 1824, ‘in Greece, and for Greece’, created a legend that is still with us. Professor Roderick Beaton traces the real story behind Byron’s mission to help the Greeks in their revolution against Ottoman Turkish rule and shows its effects are still with us.

Roderick Beaton is Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History and Director at the Centre of Hellenic Studies at King's College, London. He is also Chair of the Academic Committee overseeing the International Byron Conference this year. His research interests are Greek literature since the 12th century; the history of the novel; and nationalism in Modern Greece.

What Byron really did for Greece and why it still matters

What can patterns of history and business teach us? Join a discussion with: Dr Victoria Bateman, Lecturer and Fellow in Economics; Alan Turner, Managing Director, Global Head of Debt and Co-Head of Product at Barclays; and Aditya Chakrabortty, Economics leader writer at the Guardian, to explore turbulence in the UK economy across centuries and the balance sheets of more recent times.

The cycle of confidence

Join Georg FK Höhn who will talk about interactions between attitudes to language and the creation and maintenance of identities in the current age of the nation-state.

Do the limits of my language mean the borders of my world ?

Is creating a more inclusive society vital for a country's economic development or does economic development need to come first? Speakers include journalist Richard Dowden, Dr Kamal Munir (Judge Business School), Dr Sharath Srinivasan (Department of Politics and International Studies) and Brita Fernandez Schmidt (Women for Women International). Chaired by Dame Barbara Stocking.

Four leading experts in the fields of social change, innovation and human rights will discuss this question, debating the role microfinance has played in economic development and the effect of new communication technologies, alongside examining how much these have allowed previously excluded groups, such as women, to have more of a say in governance. The panel will also discuss the importance of less recognisable social movements and collectives and how technology is changing the nature of social action.

Dr Kamal Munir has been teaching at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School since 2000. Dr Munir's research focuses on social change and stability, as well as innovation and technological shifts in society.

Dr Sharath Srinivasan is a Lecturer in Governance and Human Rights at the University of Cambridge. Prior to academia, Dr Sharath worked in the field of international aid in conflict settings. He has led programmes for a leading international relief agency in Sudan, and has advised a range of international organisations and government agencies on conflict prevention, peace-building and political development.

Brita Fernandez Schmidt is Executive Director of Women for Women International UK. She has a strong record of work on women’s human rights, gender, social inequality and development and has worked with a number of different national and international human rights and development institutions over the past 20 years. Prior to joining Women for Women International, Brita led the programmes and policy work of Womankind Worldwide; acted as Chair of the Gender & Development Network; and advised numerous other organisations and institutions, including the Department for International Development, on gender, women’s rights and development.

Richard Dowden is a journalist who has specialised in African issues. Since 1975, he has worked for several newspapers, including The Independent, The Times and The Economist, and for the past eight years he has been the Executive Director of the Royal African Society. He has made three television documentaries on Africa for the BBC and Channel 4 and is author of the book, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles.

Is social equality necessary for development?

Larry Samuelson: Beyond the Standard Model in Economic Behaviour

Educating The Heart

The Path to Peace and Happiness in a Global Society

Using specialist techniques, the Language Research Team at Cambridge University Press unpick the patterns of scholarly English as they explore the journey of academic writing: from sixth form students to published professors.

What makes a brilliant piece of academic writing?

Today's bookshops are helpfully categorised - crime, biography and memoir, fiction - and we rarely venture into unknown territory. Some writers are breaking down the barriers, but are publishers increasingly pushing their writers to write books with the same 'DNA' and will the digital revolution make any difference? Panel discussion with authors MJ Hyland and Trevor Byrne, digital publisher Daniel Franklin and literary agent Rachel Calder. 

Opening up literature: pushing the boundaries between genres

Speaker(s): Dr Helene Gayle | New approaches to address extreme poverty are emerging that involve greater private sector engagement. Traditional poverty-fighting efforts are being combined with new, innovative business models aiming for social impact—providing long-term economic growth as well as greater social empowerment. Dr Gayle will discuss the variety of ways in which an NGO can engage with a broader range of partners toward improving the lives of poor people around the world. Helene D Gayle is president and CEO of CARE USA, a leading international humanitarian organisation. Thu, 31 Oct 2013 18:30:00 GMT

Private Sector Approaches to Sustainable, Long-Term Economic Development [Audio]

How far do conspiracy theories undermine trust in government and shape history? From 9/11 to the rise of Holocaust denial, three leading academics will explore and reveal some surprising answers. Sir Richard John Evans is an academic and historian, best known for his research on the history of Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly the Third Reich. Professor John Naughton is an academic, journalist and author. He is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge, Vice President of Wolfson College, Cambridge, Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the British Open University, Adjunct Professor at University College, Cork, and the Technology columnist of the London Observer newspaper. Professor David Runciman is a political scientist who teaches political theory at Cambridge University. He specialises in the development of the theory of the modern state and on aspects of contemporary politics.

Conspiracy theories: the impact on world history

Times have never been better for single women. Then why is it still so hard? Four women, experts on relationships and sex, share their insight and suggestions.

The s word- spinster - has been virtually outlawed, and ladies of all ages are encouraged to seek out the sex and relationships that suit them online or in person. Being single is all about being free, having fun, doing things your way or the highway...or is it?

This event brings together four experts on relationships and sex to discuss their own unique take on single womanhood at all ages - it's pitfalls, freedoms and the pressures. If it's as great as we think it should be in 2013, why do so many women, particularly those over 30, still find being single such a trial? How can they get the most out of it? Join in the discussion with Rowan Pelling, broadcaster, writer and founder of The Erotic Review; Cecilia d'Felice, award-winning clinical psychologist, author and relationships expert; Susan Quilliam, sex and relationships educator and author of the revised Joy of Sex and panel head Zoe Strimpel, internet dating and gender scholar and author of The Man Diet: One Woman's Quest to End Bad Romance (Avon).

How to be a single woman in 2013, whether you're 25 or 60

This seminar was given by Jonathan Pershing, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate Change Policy and Technology for the U.S. Energy Department on October 31, 2013 as part of the Regulatory Policy Program’s seminar series.

U.S. Climate and Energy Policy | M-RCBG

The Government's welfare reforms are starting to bite, but are they radical enough, given projected demographic changes, or do we need a complete rethink of our social values? With Rory Meakin, Professor Simon Szreter, Bill Davies, Jeff Miley and chaired by Gaby Hinsliff.

Rory Meakin is Head of Tax Policy at the TaxPayers' Alliance. He has contributed to projects on a variety of subjects from local government spending to an influential paper on simplifying taxes on income called Abolish National Insurance. Simon Szreter is Professor in History and Public Policy at Cambridge. He teaches modern British economic and social history since 1700. His main fields of research are demographic and social history, the history of empirical social science and the relationship between history and contemporary public policy issues. Jeff Miley is Lecturer of Political Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge. His research interests include nationalism, language politics, identity politics, immigration, religion and politics, regime types, and democratic theory.

Is Britain's welfare system ready for the 21st century?

These lectures suggest a number of different ways in which to take Shakespeare's comedies seriously, and to appreciate how seriously he took them. They weren't meant to give the students a general introduction, but rather to support their other work on Shakespeare by suggesting some different angles from which to approach him.

Comedy And Contradiction

This lecture will review just some of the extensive evidence from ancient civilisations – mainly China, Mesopotamia and Greece – that helps to throw light on four interrelated questions that form my principal agenda: (1) What items were the subjects of prediction? (2) How were predictions made: on what basis did people think they could foresee the future? (3) Why were they interested in doing so? (4) How is foresight related first to divination and prediction in general, and then to wisdom and prudence? The subjects on which predictions were attempted (Q 1) can be used to reveal the concerns and values of the groups in question. While hundreds of different techniques were tried out (Q 2) that will lead me to examine the ways ancient theorists evaluated them and to a discussion of the growth of scepticism. The aims and motives of ancient investigators (Q 3) include influencing policy and advising rulers as well as building up their own prestige (when they got it right). Most important is Q 4 . What were the resources available in antiquity to learn to make more prudent and wiser judgements about what to do, and to that end do we not still need all the resources available to us to do the same?

Biography

Geoffrey Lloyd is Professor Emeritus of Ancient Philosophy and Science at Cambridge, where he was Master of Darwin College from 1989 to 2000. He is now based at the Needham Research Institute, whose Trust he chaired from 1992 to 2002. He has held Visiting Professorships in Europe (France, Spain, Italy, Germany) in the Far East (PRC, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Singapore), Australasia, and North and South America. He has published 25 books, initially concentrating on ancient Greek philosophy and science and then embarking on detailed comparative studies with ancient Chinese thought. His three most recent books, which tackle the underlying philosophical problems of such comparisons and related issues in cognitive science, are: Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (2007: the subject of a special number of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews in 2010), Disciplines in the Making (2009) and Being, Humanity and Understanding (2012, all from Oxford University Press). He has been translated into12 different languages. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983 and an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. He was awarded the Sarton medal for History of Science in 1987, and the Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies in 2007. He holds Honorary Fellowships at King’s, Darwin, and Tembusu College Singapore, and Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Athens and Oxford. He was knighted for ‘services to the history of thought’ in 1997.

Foresight in Ancient Civilisations

Bridget Kendall is BBC Diplomatic Correspondent, covering major international developments, with a particular interest in Russia. She is also host of The Forum, the flagship ideas programme for the BBC World Service. Her awards include the James Cameron Award for distinguished journalism, and an MBE from the Queen. She was educated at Harvard and Moscow, as well as Oxford, where she is now Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s college. She is a Trustee of Asia House and visiting professor of Journalism at Lincoln University.

Foresight in Journalism

Science fiction is often termed a literature of prediction, but is it really, and, if so, how does it accomplish that? Hugo Award-winning science-fiction novelist Robert J. Sawyer explores the speculative mindset, the role science fiction plays in the intellectual landscape, and how science-fictional thinking about the future can be applied to business and government. Along the way, he shows how 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired an entire generation of computer scientists, looks at why Star Trek sets so much of our research agenda, and examines the notion of the technological singularity. He points out some of science fiction’s greatest predictive successes, and he also spotlights where the science-fictional vision has come up short and explains the foresight lessons to be learned from those failures.

Biography

Robert J. Sawyer’s bestselling science-fiction novels are known for “marshaling a daunting quantity of fact and theory from across scientific disciplines” (National Post) to produce “page after page of bold scientific extrapolation” (The New York Times). New Scientist calls his work “scientifically plausible, fictionally intriguing, and ethically important,” and artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky says, “Lately, I’ve been inspired by the work of Robert J. Sawyer.” The TV series FlashForward was based on his novel of the same name.

Rob is one of only eight people in history to have won all three of the science-fiction field’s top awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo (which he won for Hominids), the Nebula (which he won for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (which he won for Mindscan). According to the American science-fiction trade journal Locus, he is the #1 all-time worldwide leader in number of award wins as a science-fiction or fantasy novelist. His latest novel is Triggers (published by Orion/Victor Gollancz).

Rob has published in both of the world’s leading scientific journals, Science (guest editorial) and Nature (fiction), and he is a frequent guest on science topics on BBC Radio and Monocle 24. He has done consulting for Canada’s Department of Justice (on what laws Canada should adopt related to the privacy of genetic information) and for major corporations including Motorola, Lockheed Martin, Sanofi-Aventis, and CA (Computer Associates), and he’s previously spoken all over the world, including at the Library of Congress and the Googleplex (the international headquarters of Google). In 2007, he participated in the invitation-only workshop The Future of Intelligence in the Cosmos at the NASA Ames Research Center. In 2010 and again in 2012, he was the only science-fiction writer invited to speak at the SETI Institute’s first two SET Icon conferences on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In 2011, he became an invited contributor to the 100 Year Starship initiative, sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Rob hosts the skeptical TV series Supernatural Investigator for Canada’s Vision TV. He is past president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, and he holds an honorary doctorate from Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. He lives in Toronto. Visit his website at http://sfwriter.com.

Foresight and Fiction

We may ask two questions about foresight in relation to science: (1) whether science can foretell future events, and (2) whether we can foretell the future of science itself. Regarding the first question, many philosophers and scientists (including Lakatos and Popper) have especially valued the ability of science to make novel predictions, sometimes to the point of regarding it as the defining characteristic of science. I will argue that the acknowledged ability of modern science to make successful predictions is only as valuable as its ability to organise and explain previously known phenomena. Regarding the second question, I will argue that scientists and others have been very unsuccessful in predicting the course of the development of science itself. The uncertainty about the staying power of scientific theories, even predictively successful ones, actually raises a serious question about the value of predictive success. The final lesson from these reflections is one of humility: true foresight consists in recognising the limits of our foresight.

Biography

Hasok Chang is Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Previously he taught for 15 years at University College London, after receiving his PhD in Philosophy at Stanford University following an undergraduate degree at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Is Water H2O ? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism (Springer, 2012), and Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Oxford University Press, 2004), which was a joint winner of the 2006 Lakatos Award. He is also co-editor (with Catherine Jackson) of An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology and War (British Society for the History of Science, 2007), a collection of original work by undergraduate students at University College London. He is a co-founder of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP), and the International Committee for Integrated History and Philosophy of Science. Currently he is the President of the British Society for this History of Science.

Foresight in Scientific Method

The idea of music as a harbinger of future social trends is associated with French banker, economist, and all-purpose intellectual Jacques Attali, but the idea that music gives access to a time that is different from that of the everyday world seems to be as old as music itself. The conception of musical works as abstract objects, located in time but not intrinsically temporal, reflects Platonic and medieval thinking yet remains fundamental to the still dominant orthodoxies of modernist music aesthetics and theory: just as in a recording, time is translated into space, with the past always present and the future always already known. Such rationalising models do little justice to the varieties of musical time as experienced, performed, and indeed composed. As practice rather than theory, music is highly unpredictable, both at the micro-level of individual musical experiences and the macro-level of changes in musical style and in patterns of consumption. Hence the conspicuous lack of foresight that has devastated the contemporary record industry, which attempted to perpetuate an outdated business model rather than embracing the technological and social changes that Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig, and Aram Sinnreich respectively call convergence culture, remix culture, and configurable culture. Sinnreich provides the most fully developed version of Attali’s idea of music as harbinger of social trends: networked patterns of musical production and consumption are seen as a template for democratised patterns of social interaction. But the linkage of musical micro-level and social macro-level remains unconvincing, and many aspects of Sinnreich’s configurable culture can be found in earlier musical cultures (it is only modernist aesthetics and theory that blind us to them). I conclude that, rather than seeing music as providing special insight into the future, it is more productive to see it as a privileged arena within which to understand aspects of the present.

Biography

Nicholas Cook took up the 1684 Professorship in 2009. He was formerly Professorial Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he directed the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and before that taught at the universities of Hong Kong, Sydney, and Southampton, where he also served as Dean of Arts. A musicologist and theorist, he holds separate degrees in music and in history/art history. His articles have appeared in leading British and American journals, and cover topics from aesthetics and analysis to psychology and pop.

His books, mostly published by Oxford University Press, include A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987); Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990); Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1993); Analysis Through Composition (1996); Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998); and Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998), which is published or forthcoming in twelve other languages and to which a special issue of Musicae Scientiae was devoted. Oxford also publish Rethinking Music (1999), coedited with Mark Everist, and Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, coedited with Eric Clarke (2004); he also coedited the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (with Anthony Pople, 2004) and The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (2009). His latest book, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Oxford, 2007), received the Wallace Berry Award of the Society for Music Theory in 2010. A further collection is in press: Music as Performance: New Perspectives Across the Disciplines, coedited with the dramaturgue Richard Pettengill (Michigan University Press). Also nearing publication is a book on performance analysis, integrating computational approaches developed at CHARM with those of cultural musicology and inter-disciplinary performance theory, while he is currently working on a study of recordings of Webern’s Piano Variations funded by an AHRC Fellowship. Planned projects thereafter includes books on music as creative practice and on relational musicology.

A former Editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Nicholas Cook was Chair of the Music Panel in the Higher Education Funding Councils’ 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Europe.

Foresight in Music

Images uncovered from splendid palaces at Nineveh and Nimrud, coupled with vivid accounts in the Bible where Assyria was reviled by the prophet Isaiah, give us something of the face Assyria presented to the outside world. A more behind the scenes look at the internal workings of this first of all empires, however, takes us to the systematic institutional implementation of foresight by Assyrian kings. State sponsored divination by the stars and by the liver of a sacrificial sheep were the techniques employed by kings to know the future and gauge their chances of success.

Ancient Assyrian kings were invested in the art of anticipating the future in the realms of politics and economics, much as we ourselves are invested in projecting and preparing for the future in our modern realms of business, government, and science. From cuneiform tablets produced by the diviners of the 7th century BC Assyrian court, we are afforded an intimate look at the Assyrian Empire, and gain insight into the context, practice, and purpose of Assyro-Babylonian divination and its role in the earliest and most fully documented cultivation of foresight.

Biography

Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the Office for the History of Science and Technology, and the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was Research Professor at the Institut für Assyriologie und Hethitologie, Ludwig-Maximilian Universität, München in 2010, and is currently a Senior Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU . She has also been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Visiting Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. In 1982 she was the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2008 was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society

She has published and lectured widely on Babylonian celestial sciences and produced editions of cuneiform texts that set Babylonian science in various contexts, from cultural to cognitive history. Her research on ancient Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman traditions in astronomy and astrology has introduced the evidence of ancient cuneiform science into the philosophy of science through investigations of empiricism, prediction, logic, and reasoning.

She is the author of Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination: The Lunar Eclipse Tablets of Enuma Anu Enlil, Archiv für Orientforschung Beiheft 22 (Ferdinand Berger und Söhne, 1988), Babylonian Horoscopes, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol.88, Pt.1 (American Philosophical Society, 1998), The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004 and 2007), and In the Path of the Moon: Babylonian Celestial Divination and Its Legacy, Studies in Ancient Magic and Divination (E.J. Brill, 2010). Babylonian Horoscopes won the 1999 John Frederick Lewis Award from the American Philosophical Society.

Foresight In Ancient Mesopotamia

"The Bells" is taken from Lowell's debut album 'We Loved Her Dearly' (available now on Arts & Crafts).

“dream pop princess” - NYLON
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“no ordinary pop chanteuse” - New York Times T Magazine
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Lowell - The Bells

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Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy, and Chris Blackhurst, editor of The Independent
Trust in British public life has now reached catastrophically low levels for parliament, the press, the banks, the police and the NHS. Just as the National Rifle Association in the USA claims that the solution to gun crime lies in more guns, our government (and, for instance, The Times) preaches that the cure for decline in trust lies in less public service and more profit motive. The conversation will reflect on this alarming state of affairs.