Humanities Society

Tuesday 15 November 2016 '[T]hough Ramme stinks with cookes and ale,/ Yet say thers many a worthy lawyers chamber,/ Buts vpon Rame-Alley': An Innsman Goes to the Playhouse' Combining ideas of early modern sense perception with research on the Inns of Court, London topography and theatre history, this paper is an experimental journey to a performance of Lording Barry’s ‘Ram Alley’ at nearby Whitefriars. It considers the sensory interactions between audience and dramatic locations: playing space, imaginative locus and surrounding city.

Tuesday 31 January 2017 Dr Maria Sequeira Mendes (Beaufort Visiting Fellow, St John's College) The Ideal Self: Flattery in Julius Caesar Susceptibility to flattery has long been considered a character flaw, which is the reason those who believe it are usually described as being vain, proud, tyrannical or conceited. I will close-read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, so as to question if Caesar’s failure to anticipate the conspirators’ plot is, as is usually thought, an illustration of his proneness to flattery or, as I hope to show, an example of the flatterer’s capacity to mirror one’s own mind. Flatterers might be very able in showing rhetorically what the flattered person’s ideal self would look like, and they might in turn tend to supplement rhetorical suggestion with their own desires and concerns. If this is the case, flattery is central to understanding that Julius Caesar describes a hermeneutic difficulty, and characterises the difficulties of knowing another’s mind.

Tuesday 31 May 2016 Dr Tim Rogan (St Catherine's College, University of Cambridge) An 'Age of the Crisis of Man'? 'Human Personality' in British Social Thought, 1910-1973 Mark Greif’s 2015 book on midcentury American humanism raises a difficult question. Is the history of responses to fundamental anthropological questions (‘What is man?’) worth writing? This paper uses developments in 20th century British social thought to consider some of those questions. It explores the mutable and increasingly nebulous meanings which critics of capitalism in Britain attached to the concept of ‘human personality’. It argues that the answer to Greif’s question is ‘yes’.

Tuesday 25 October 2016 Professor Steven Connor (Peterhouse College, University of Cambridge). 'The Humanities and the Machine' For the last century or so, the humanities have defined themselves defensively and self-aggrandisingly against a paranoid notion of the dominion of the machine that I want to say does us no good and should be abandoned. At a time when we must be less sure than ever what a machine is, or might be, it makes no sense at all to think of humanity separate from the experience of and feeling for machines. In place of the defensive question ‘What future in a technical world is there for the humanities?’, we should be asking ‘What future in a technical world is there but the humanities?’

Tuesday 16 May 2017 Dr Jane Chapman (Lincoln University; College Research Associate, Wolfson College) 'Captured and Alive: War Satire, Time and Space' What attitudes emerged during the First World War on the issue of soldier reactions to new locations and to use of time? The rediscovery of visual caricatures created by the lower ranks – both locally in the East of England by captive German soldiers and internationally by British, Australians and Canadians at the fronts – provides a surprising insight into contemporary concerns, with evidence of shared outlooks.

Dr Alastair Reid (Fellow, Girton College) Trade Unions and the British Tradition of Pluralism In contrast to the usual assumption that trade unions were the product of capitalism and industrialisation, this talk traces their origins back to the pre-industrial craft guilds. A liberal-pluralist view of trade unions is then outlined, advocating collective organisation and collective bargaining as ends in themselves rather than stepping stones to state-socialism.

Tuesday 14 March 2017 Dr Alex da Costa (University Lecturer at the Faculty of English; Fellow of Newnham College) 'The Pardoner's Passing and How it Matters: Gender, Relics and Speech Acts' For decades, critics have been ignoring the particular doubt ‘Chaucer’, the narrator, raises over the figure of the Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales when he says ‘I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare’ (l.691). Even as the Pardoner has been embraced as a ‘a complicated sort of gay “ancestor”’ by first gay and lesbian studies and later by queer theorists, just one critic has been prepared to doubt his essential masculinity, though several have accepted his masculinity as neutered or castrated. The question of whether the Pardoner is a ‘mare’, a woman passing as a man, has thus been ignored, despite being the most straightforward gloss, until Jeffrey Rayner Myers ventured to suggest in 2000 that ‘this sexually ambiguous character might be a woman.’ This critical lacuna is all the more puzzling given that when Chaucer was writing there were several texts in which writers presented women passing as men. The widely circulated Gilte Legende included two saints lives in which a female dresses, lives and passes as male, without suspicion, until her death. Gower included the legend of Iphis and Achilles’ successful disguise as a maid in the Confessio Amantis. There were also Old French texts with similar episodes, such as Yde et Olive and the Roman de Silence, while Boccaccio included the tale of Pope Joan in De mulieribus claris, as well as the stories of a female disguised as an abbot and a steward in the Decameron (Day II, Tales III and IX). In this paper, I want to explore the possibility that the Pardoner is a woman passing as a man and to show how such a reading allows a parallel to emerge between the figure of the Pardoner, relics and oaths, bringing out a narrative interest across general prologue, prologue and tale in accident and substance, doubt and complicity.

Tuesday 07 November 2017 Dr Peter Sloman (Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and Churchill College, Cambridge) The idea of a Universal Basic Income has moved rapidly up the British political agenda in recent years, with support from the Royal Society of Arts, the Green Party, and left-wing writers such as Paul Mason. Contemporary interest in basic income forms part of a lively global debate about inequality and the impact of automation, but it also draws on a long history of proposals for tax-benefit integration in Britain which dates back almost a century. This talk will examine the history of the idea and analyse the prospects for its successful implementation.

Tuesday 11 October 2016 'Commemorating the First World War a 100 Years on in Popular and Public History' The talk comes from Dr Thom’s experience as a member of the academic advisory committee for the new First World War galleries at the Imperial War Museum, London. It explores changing public perceptions of the First World War in British history, especially for groups with less public recognition, looking especially at women and children.

Tuesday 07 June 2016 Dr. Edit Schlaffer (Founder of Women without Borders) 'The Power of Families in Preventing Radicalization -- a bottom up Security Strategy' Women without Borders works to engage and strengthen women in the security sphere. For over 10 years its work has strengthened resilience to violent extremism in communities at-risk across more than 10 countries. Experts have sought the underlying social and psychological factors that motivate individuals to adopt extremist ideologies. The counter terrorism approach has largely consisted of reactive strategies that are meant to both punish and deter. In this talk I will explore alternative security approaches based in families and communities where the most strategic buffers to radical influences emerge.

Tuesday 13 June, 2017 Professor Sir Richard Evans FBA (President of Wolfson College and Provost of Gresham College, London) 'Art and Architecture in Nazi Germany' We still think of art in the ‘Third Reich’ as a kind of black hole, a period, 1933-1945, in which all the competent artists fled the country to live abroad, and nothing of any interest was produced. The Nazis were philistines who regarded all modern art as ‘degenerate’. This lecture brings this view of Nazism as hostile to modernity and modern art into question. It looks at Nazi attitudes to art and architecture and examines the work of some of the artists who stayed, in the wider context of European modernism and the artistic beliefs of Hitler, who regarded himself, as is well known, as an artist.

Janet Todd, Professor emerita, University of Aberdeen and Hon Fellow of Newnham College

How can we explain the immense popularity of the Hebrew Bible in Tudor and Stuart England?

John Aubrey (1626-97) loved England. From an early age, he saw his England slipping away and, against extraordinary odds, committed himself to preserving for posterity what remained of it - in books, monuments and life stories. His Brief Lives redefined the art of biography. My talk will introduce John Aubrey and explain why I have taken an innovative approach to writing his life.

When Dorigen mourns the absence of Arveragus in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, her friends ‘prechen hire’ to ‘make hire leve hir hevinesse’. Their preaching takes effect in the same way that engraving leaves a ‘figure’ in a ‘stoon’, wearing away ‘by proces’ at Dorigen’s sorrow and ‘emprenting’ consolation on her. The image, which originates with Ovid, appears in a different context in Il Filocolo, as Tarolfo imagines how he might win his lady through his persistent wooing. It was also a common trope in sermons, where preaching to resistant audiences was likened to carving and eroding stones. Chaucer develops this imagery in two key episodes in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’: when Dorigen curses the rocks around the coast, she says that no clerical argument could justify their existence as part of God’s creation, questioning the power of preaching to imprint meanings on stone; later, she challenges Aurelius to remove them ‘stoon by stoon’, chipping away at them like a persistent preacher, presenting this action as an impossible task. In this paper, I argue that the metaphor of ‘emprenting’ stone structures a wide-ranging investigation into the operations of persuasive language in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’. It provides a way to theorise, and also sometimes to fantasise, about the effects of persuasive language, and, at the same time, a set of terms to imagine the troubling situation of the unreceptive listener, who remains unmoved, unpersuaded, and unconsoled.

The description of Esau’s family in Genesis 36 and I Chronicles 1 has the figure of Timna change gender in the span of a few verses. She is a concubine, a sister, and then a male head of a clan. This study uses archaeology to help us understand the function of multiple genders in the Hebrew Bible’s genealogies which originated as oral mental maps of how the various Canaanite tribes related to one another politically and economically.

Professor Robert Koepp examines how Eliot's characters struggle with the profoundly human inclination to trust in luck by worshiping at the altar of 'blessed Chance'- arguing that this tendency is central to the novelist's treatment of various moral dilemmas in her fiction.

The economist John Maynard Keynes’ activities on the stock market are well known. One company in which he bought stocks in the late 1920s was the Hector Whaling Company Ltd. The paper explores how Keynes became involved in this company and the analysis provides new insights to the more general question on the motivations and decisions behind his stock market investments.