Wolfson College Humanities Society

By the time neutral America officially joined WWI in April 1917 as an “Associate” of the Allies, Theodore Roosevelt had for two and a half years been carrying on a quixotic and unpopular struggle at home. This domestic crusade was fought against what he considered the craven neutrality of Woodrow Wilson, whose very presence in the White House TR blamed on himself. This talk examines these years in the multiple, intertwined, contexts of Roosevelt’s post-presidential political career, the preparedness movement, and the “Special Relationship” he fostered between America and Britain which helped define his perceptions of the war in Europe.

Arguments about climate change are rife with conspiracy theories. There are those who think the whole thing is a giant hoax: a scam cooked up by environmentalists and left-wing scientists to empower governments and rip off consumers. But there are equivalent suspicions on the other side: a belief that the sceptics and denialists are just the front for an oil industry-funded plot to bamboozle voters and keep the fossil fuels flowing. The prevalence of these kinds of conspiracy theories is one reason why the debate has become so fractious and polarised. This talk will explore why the climate debate seems so susceptible to conspiracy theories and what that tells us about the current state of mistrust in democracy: mistrust of experts, mistrusts of corporations, mistrust of government itself. Why on an issue like this – of such enormous importance – do we find it so hard to believe what we are told?

This lecture was given in place of the advertised lecture by Professor Sir David Cannadine who was unable to attend.

The discovery of a spring complex, adjacent to Vespasian's Camp and just over a mile from Stonehenge, with well preserved and substantial Mesolithic deposits, potentially transforms our understanding of the Mesolithic use of the pre Stonehenge landscape, and the establishment of its later ritual landscape. This talk outlines the newly discovered local landscape history of the Vespasian's Camp area, the field interventions, and concludes with a review of the site and its wider significance and context for the later development of the Stonehenge ritual landscape.

E.M. Forster’s famous phrase, ‘Only Connect’, is not only a guide to a successful emotional life; it is also a guide to cognition. The universities were reformed in the nineteenth century but despite this they still lacked curiosity, imagination and originality, in short, what we might call research. Consequently the cultivation of knowledge was thrust out into those colonies of learned societies which emerged in this period: the Royal Society, the Metaphysical Society, the Philological Society, the Royal Asiatic Society and many others. This talk takes up the inner history of these societies and shows the ways in which knowledge formation was a social process. Learning was spawned in the interstices of conviviality and sociality.

This talk examines the gendered political culture of the Victorian House of Commons by looking at the efforts that politicians made to appear ‘manly’. This culture had very real political significance: it shaped the interactions between politicians, it shaped their public images, and it underpinned the opposition to admitting women as members of parliament.

The recent forced resignation of Mr Justice Coleridge prompts questions about rogue judges and the boundaries of judicial misconduct. How far may a judge express controversial opinions? How far may his personal convictions influence his decisions? Clashes with the Executive and with his fellow judges characterised the judicial career (1916-1933) of Mr Justice McCardie -`rebel judge who feared nobody’. Did his iconoclasm help or hinder reform of the law? Maverick or hero?

This paper argues that neoliberalism offers a highly productive site to excavate the ways in which Cold War power/knowledge formations have shaped, and continue to shape, sociological thinking, and suggest that post-socialism can make similar critical intervention into sociological thought as postcolonial and feminist scholarship, since it challenges us to rethink some key epistemological and ontological issues in sociological knowledge production.

Plato began the discussion about the purpose of education. Each succeeding age has given its own answers. Now it is our turn.

This talk explores the familiar topic of Chile under the Popular Unity Government (1970-1973) from a less familiar angle: the indigenous heartlands of the south. Here, unresolved territorial conflicts between European settlers and the Mapuche people accentuated the political divisions of a nation-state in denial about its indigenous heritage. Through the history of the Araucanía region, we can understand the obstacles to Allende’s “Chilean road to Socialism”, the hopes of Che Guevara-inspired revolutionaries and why a supposedly stable democracy gave way to a 17-year-long military dictatorship.

This paper offers a close reading of the grammar of the gaze offered in eighteenth-century prints that depict crowds of people looking at the window displays of London’s many print shops. It asks how far we can read them as accurate records of spectatorial practice, and what we can learn from the ways in which they advertise and project both their own public and their own position within the visual economy of the street in the Georgian city. The images discussed can be viewed using the links below: John Raphael Smith, "Miss Macaroni and her Gallant" (1773) http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=1172511&objectId=3423048&partId=1 Piercy Roberts, "Caricature Shop" (1801) http://images.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/oneitem.asp?imageId=lwlpr10184 James Gillray, "Very Slippy-Weather" (1808) http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=38375&objectId=1480045&partId=1

The media’s obsession with weight is perceived as a recent phenomenon but we have been struggling with what, when, and how we eat ever since the Greeks first pinched an inch. This surprising and sometimes shocking talk exposes the anxieties, fashions and ‘anti-fat cures’ that have driven an expanding dieting industry, and reveals the extreme and often dangerously absurd lengths people have gone to in order to slim down. Slides from the presentation can be viewed at: www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/LFoxcroft_Presentation.pdf

The two most fundamental transformations of economic life in human history were the Neolithic food revolution and the industrial revolution. It is no surprise that the latter was unexpected by contemporaries, but it is intriguing and instructive that those who were best informed, such as, for example, Adam Smith and the other classical economists, were explicit that such a transformation was impossible. The paradox can be resolved, however, by considering the role of energy supply in the transformation which was taking place.

How can the arts and humanities meet the challenges of contemporary society without relying on notions of socio-economic impact? This talk contributes to current debates on whether and why the arts and humanities matter to society, and how their value can be articulated in ways that avoid over-simplifications and the crude equivalence of ‘value’ with ‘utility’ in a narrowly instrumental interpretation of ‘impact’.

Why did Lincoln prompt a discussion of Sappho in the American Senate? And how does this lead us to explore why Sappho was good to represent for nineteenth century artists and what do these representations tell us about female desire in this era and the role of the classical past in it?

The talk will examine the history of Zimbabwe since Independence in 1980, paying particular attention to the origins and nature of the country’s economic and political crisis.

The production of culture is an open-ended and highly political process that demarcates the experience of daily life and its continuity and change within social institutions from the family to the state. The construction of modern ethnic identities and their politicization revealed the crucial role of the 19th and 20th century development of the intellectual ‘disciplines’ and institutions of the humanities and social sciences in the imagining and dissemination through mass media and popular culture of the often conflicting identities of ethnicity, race, class and gender. These have created contending claims to interpretive authority and a cultural politics that both unites and divides us.

This talk explores the ways in which the Marinid dynasty in Morocco exploited architecture and display to legitimise themselves before their subjects, a volatile mix of restive tribesmen and proud urbanites. Marinid ceremonial and demonstrations of power served to win over public opinion by providing employment and stimulating the economy in a manner as familiar today as it was then.

Constance Markievicz (nee Gore-Booth, 1868-1927), was born to the privileged Protestant upper class in the west of Ireland. She embraced suffrage and then scandal as she left the Slade School of Art in London for a bohemian life in a Parisian atelier. There she met Casimir Dunin Markievicz (1874-1932), becoming part of a local avant-garde, which had the painter and mystic, George Russell (AE) at its centre. The Markievices took a prominent role in anti-imperial debates that not only related to Constance’s home country but also Casimir’s native Poland during World War One and to the post –War Irish republican movement.

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen’s “Diary of a Man in Despair” has long been known as a searing indictment of Hitler and the Nazis, written in secret in a Bavarian hillside retreat. Asked to write a Foreword to a new edition, Richard Evans uncovered a hornet’s nest of allegations and counter-allegations about the author and his work. This talk investigates the book, its writer, and the charges that it was all falsified.