‘So... what is it that you actually do?’

It’s a question most PhD students have faced at some time during their study, and one which can be surprisingly difficult to answer. It’s with this question in mind that Cambridge researchers Richard Blakemore and John Gallagher came up with the idea for the Cambridge PhDcasts, a new project undertaken in collaboration with CRASSH. 

The format is simple: every week, a PhD student sits down with our presenter, John Gallagher, and over copious amounts of tea we have a conversation about the work they do and why it matters. The PhDcasts are available as videos or podcasts and last about half an hour each. We’ve tried to aim each at an audience that’s intelligent and interested, but with no prior experience in the speaker’s field.

To find out more, go to http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/phdcasts 

Cambridge PhDcasts

cambridge

Lectures etc

The French philosopher Michel Foucault set about his task rather like a historian. After painstaking research, he concluded that knowledge and power were intimately related throughout history. He illustrated this central idea of his philosophy through studies of madness, sexuality, and discipline and punishment, arguing that there is no such thing as absolute truth, only different truths about reality at particular moments – truths that fulfil the needs of power.

This audiobook is an expert account of Foucault’s life and philosophical ideas – entertainingly written and is above all easy listening. Also included are selections from Foucault’s work, suggested further reading, and chronologies that place Foucault in the context of the broader scheme of philosophy.

Foucault: Philosophy in an Hour by Paul Strathern, read by Jonathan Keeble

Season 1 Episode 4 of Cambridge PhDcasts with PhDcaster Alice Blackhurst.

'Luxury in a Digital Age'

Alice Blackhurst is a first year MML graduate at Emmanuel College working on concepts of luxury from medieval France to post-9/11 New York.

For more details, including links to additional materials, please see http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1190/alice-blackhurst.htm  

To find out more about Cambridge PhDcasts, go to http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/phdcasts

Cambridge PhDcasts are presented by John Gallagher and produced by Richard Blakemore and Ruth Rushworth with thanks to CRASSH.

Alice Blackhurst: Luxury in a Digital Age

Season 1 Episode 2 of Cambridge PhDcasts with PhDcaster Katy Barrett.

Katy Barrett is a final year PhD student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge working on the cultural history of the longitude problem in the eighteenth century.   

For more details, including links to additional materials, please see http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1188/katy-barrett.htm

  To find out more about Cambridge PhDcasts, go to http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/phdcasts   

Cambridge PhDcasts are presented by John Gallagher and produced by Richard Blakemore and Ruth Rushworth with thanks to CRASSH.

Katy Barrett: it's not longitude that matters, it's what you do with it that counts

Season 1 Episode 3 of Cambridge PhDcasts with PhDcaster Mark King.

'Landlord of England, not King? Reinterpreting the Reign of Richard II'

Mark King is a PhD student in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge working on the political history of Richard II's reign.

For more details, including links to additional materials, please see http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1189/mark-king.htm  

To find out more about Cambridge PhDcasts, go to http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/phdcasts

Cambridge PhDcasts are presented by John Gallagher and produced by Richard Blakemore and Ruth Rushworth with thanks to CRASSH.

Mark King on Richard II: landlord, not king?

Season 1 Episode 6 of Cambridge PhDcasts with PhDcaster Michelle Wallis.

'Of Monsters and Mangled Tongues - Tales from Early Modern English Medical Advertising, 1660-1720'

Michelle Wallis is a PhD student in the department of history and philosophy of science working on cheap print and medical advertising in seventeenth and early eighteenth century England.

For more details, including links to additional materials, please see http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1193/michelle-wallis.htm 

To find out more about Cambridge PhDcasts, go to http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/phdcasts

Cambridge PhDcasts are presented by John Gallagher and produced by Richard Blakemore and Ruth Rushworth with thanks to CRASSH.

Michelle Wallis - Of Monsters And Mangled Tongues

n the first in a new series of Cambridge PhDcasts Simon Abernethy talks to John Gallagher about class and commuting in Greater London in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Simon Abernethy is a second year PhD student studying the relationship between social class, commuting habits, transport companies, and local government in Greater London in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For more details, including links to additional materials, please see http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1187/simon-abernethy.htm.

To find out more about Cambridge PhDcasts, go to http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/phdcasts

Cambridge PhDcasts are presented by John Gallagher and produced by Richard Blakemore and Ruth Rushworth with thanks to CRASSH.

Simon Abernethy- Class And Commuting

Language about ‘plague’ rather than – say – ‘epidemic’ introduces elements of moral and theological interpretation into our view of a situation: plague is something ‘inflicted’, and is conceived against the background of certain kinds of biblical and classical narratives (the plagues of Egypt, Oedipus at Thebes, etc.). While this is by no means defunct (with some very unpleasant recent applications) the overall climate has changed. But it is still possible to reach for this language as a metaphorical structure – Camus, Garcia Marquez – which highlights aspects of the moral urgencies and ambiguities of a situation. The lecture will look at both the background usage and its modern transformations so as to draw out some thoughts on the nature of human limits and human responsibilities.

Biography

Dr Williams is Master of Magdalene College. He was educated at Dynevor Secondary Grammar School in Swansea, he came up to Christ’s College in 1968. He studied for his doctorate at Christ Church and Wadham College Oxford, working on the Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky. His career began as a lecturer at Mirfield (1975-1977). He returned to Cambridge as Tutor and Director of Studies at Westcott House. After ordination in Ely Cathedral, and serving as Honorary Assistant Priest at St George’s Chesterton, he was appointed to a University lectureship in Divinity. In 1984 he was elected a Fellow and Dean of Clare College. During his time at Clare he was arrested and fined for singing psalms as part of the CND protest at Lakenheath air-base. Then, still only 36, it was back to Oxford as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity for six years, before becoming Bishop of Monmouth, and, from 2000, Archbishop of Wales. He was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2003. He was awarded the Oxford higher degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1989, and an honorary DCL degree in 2005; Cambridge followed in 2006 with an honorary DD. He holds honorary doctorates from considerably more than a dozen other universities, from Durham to K U Leuven, Toronto to Bonn. In 1990 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Dr Williams is a noted poet and translator of poetry, and, apart from Welsh, speaks or reads nine other languages. He learnt Russian in-order to read the works of Dostoevsky in the original. This led to a book; he has also published studies of Arius, Teresa of Avila, and Sergii Bulgakov, together with writings on a wide range of theological, historical and political themes.

Plagues & Metaphor

Royal Society Fellows are the most the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists in the UK and Commonwealth and Fellowships have been awarded annually since 1660. Six new Cambridge researchers were made Royal Society Fellows in 2013. Tonight we are delighted to welcome immunologist Professor Gillian Griffiths from Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, biochemist Dr Phillip Hawkins from The Babraham Institute and computer scientist Professor Jon Crowcroft from the Computer Laboratory to the Festival to introduce us to their research

Cambridge stars: Professor Gillian Griffiths

Today, more people live in cities than in rural areas and, by 2050, this ratio is predicted to rise to 7 out of every 10 people. Can we rethink how we design and live in cities? What will the impact of increasing numbers of people living in cities be on society, or biodiversity, or on food, water and energy security? A panel of distinguished speakers focuses on some of these most pressing challenges faced by our cities. 

Sustainable Cities

Social Science, Small worlds and Big Data

Matthew Jackson - Research Directions: Networks and their Roles in Economics

Jonathan Haslam, Professor of the History of International Relations
The history of Russia’s Secret Services from the Revolution to the Fall of the Wall: the Military Intelligence, the codes and ciphers and the KGB. 

Near and Distant Neighbours 1917–1989

Dr Girard will describe how the “red scare” greatly varied depending on the period, the political affiliation or the country; and the main long-lasting conspiracy theory actually concerned the threat of the far-right and, to a certain extent, of the government itself. 

Conspiracy Theories in France and Italy during the Cold War and Decolonization

A Public Lecture by Conspiracy & Democracy Visiting Fellow Professor Cornel Zwierlein (Ruhr-Universität Bochum). 

It seems as if Conspiracy Theories are a particularly modern phenomenon. By relying on some examples and cases, this lecture gives a long-term overview of what they looked like and when they appeared. We possess full-fledged conspiracy theory texts only since the 16th century. While examples may have existed already in Antiquity, we do not possess any textual evidence for them. The lecture tries to develop an explanation for why conspiracy theories emerged only at this point in European history. In order to do so, it is necessary to distinguish between conjurations, any kind of revolts, conspiracies and conspiracy theories. We will show how their coming into being is linked to the emergence of the ‘Information Public Sphere’, as a by-product of the early inter-state diplomatic communication (which has, first, little to do with the later famous ‘Enlightenment Public Sphere’), and how those narratives filled in where knowledge gaps existed. In a hasty run through history, we will distinguish several phases or ‘epochs’ of Conspiracy (theory) communication. Finally, we will ask how Democracy comes in: ‘Real’ democracies were practiced rather nowhere after Ancient Europe, and were rare even during the 19th century. So, in pre-modern times, often it was ‘democracy’ or ‘democrats’ that were ‘conspiring’ against the good order of the commonwealth – not vice versa.

Cornel Zwierlein is Associate Professor at the University of Bochum, Germany. Currently, he is on leave as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. His research focuses on the intersection of political, religious and scientific knowledge. Cornel is the author of ‘Discorso und Lex Dei die Entstehung neuer Denkrahmen im 16. Jahrhundert und die Wahrnehmung der französischen Religionskriege in Italien und Deutschland’ (Göttingen, 2006), and, more recently, ‘Der gezähmte Prometheus. Feuer und Sicherheit zwischen Früher Neuzeit und Moderne’ (Göttingen, 2011). 

The Early Modern Foundations of Conspiracy & Democracy

Mr Dwight Smith Jr will speak about ‘The Mafia & Conspiracy’. Mr Smith’s paper will explore how the idea of the mafia and conspiracy emerged in America, developed and became entangled in very different contexts.

Mr Smith will describe the ideas, experiences, and events through which his book, ‘The Mafia Mystique’ (1975), took shape; the consequences of those events that have led to contemporary public understanding and use of ‘Mafia’ in the United States; and the consequences in a democracy of strategies that were developed for organized crime control. 

The Mafia & Conspiracy

"Is Democracy Conspiratorial?: Koselleck, Furet, and the Debate on the French Revolution"

Since the time of the abbé Barruel, the French Revolution - the source of democratic claims eventually the world over - has been unmasked as the outcome of a dark conspiracy. This talk will examine some of the contemporary legacies of this claim about the secret agenda of democratic self-rule, with a focus on some famous main twentieth-century commentators like Reinhart Koselleck and François Furet who were insufficiently critical of the old allegation even in renovating our sense of where the Revolution fits in modern politics. Dwelling on some of the intellectual origins of Furet's "Interpreting the French Revolution," in which the conspiracy claim figured, the talk will distinguish that strand of the book from other and more valuable impulses, which had other sources, notably the view that democracy is the rule of no one, so that it is very hard to justify or even securely locate its legitimate authorities at any given time.

Samuel Moyn is James Bryce Professor of European Legal History at Columbia University, where he has been teaching since 2001. He is author of "The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History" (2010) and a new collection of essays entitled "Human Rights and the Uses of History" (2014). From July 1, 2014, he will take up a new position as professor of law and history at Harvard University. 

Is Democracy Conspiratorial?

Welcome to the Science and Policy Seminars Podcast, brought to you by the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge. 
The Seminar series brings together different perspectives and new thinking on the relationship between scientific expertise, policy and politics.
To learn more about the Centre for Science and Policy, and our work in promoting engagement between researchers and policy professionals, please visit www.csap.cam.ac.uk.  


Prof Michael Kenny - Changing ideas of statecraft in an ever loosening Union

Track 2 from Friedrich Kittler's spoken-word album, "Musen, Nymphen und Sirenen"


Friedrich Kittler - Musen, Nymphen und Sirenen

How do conspiracies happen, how can historians use them to understand more about the past, and where do they begin and cease to be relevant to the study of history? Such questions were the starting point for this panel debate, in which Professor Christopher Andrew and Dr Stephen Dorril examine cases from Stalinist Russia, Harold Wilson’s government in the 1960s, and Northern Ireland in the 1970s, to name but a few.