Tag Archives: Lecture

Lecture 8th Nov: ‘Science Fictions: The triumph of the imagination and the invention of scientific creativity’

This week the History Faculty will host the inaugural lecture of Professor Rob Iliffe, entitled:

Science Fictions: The triumph of the imagination and the invention of scientific creativity

‘In this lecture Prof Iliffe will describe the various attacks on the imagination launched by natural philosophers in the seventeenth century, and account for the dramatic change in its reputation that occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century, when a powerful imagination became the defining characteristic of the recently-invented scientific genius.  It continues to play a key role in modern accounts of scientific creativity, but the ways in which the potential dangers of scientific theorizing have been emphasised shows that the imagination, while essential to areas such as modern physics, is still seen by many as posing an existential threat to science.’

Thursday 8th November, 17.00. South Schools, Examinations Schools.
All wellcome to attend! The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the North School.

Climate and the Plague: The Astor Lecture in Global Environmental History- Friday 25th May

The Oxford Centre for Global History presents the 2018 Astor Lecture in Global Environmental History:

Professor John L. Brooke (Ohio State University)
‘Climate and the Plague: Toward a Late Holocene Eurasian Synthesis’

Friday 25 May, 5:30pm (followed by drinks)
St Antony’s College – Nissan Lecture Theatre

  All welcome, but registration is essential. For further information and to register, contact global@history.ox.ac.uk 

The history of the bubonic plague – a central question in Eurasian environmental history for decades — has been fundamentally changed by new research in genetics and climate science. Traditionally thought to have been a new disease around the time of the Black Death, genetic analysis now has extended the origins of the plague back first to Plague of Justinian and now deep into the prehistory of arid Central Asia. We now can suggest when and where the bubonic plague emerged, and how shifting climates drove its emergence and epidemic diffusion, entangled with patterns of steppe migrations and trade.

John L. Brooke is an Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University, where he also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Anthropology.  He has held fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Charles Warren Center, and Harvard University.  Building on work with the Tufts University Environmental Studies Program, the OSU History Constellation in Environment, Health, Technology,  And Science, and the National Science Foundation-funded ‘Project on European Health since the Paleolithic’, his most recent book is Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (CUP 2014).  Examining the long material and natural history of the human condition, his research has pioneered the integration of the earth-system approach of the new climate science with human history.

Lecture: ‘The human factor: collective responsibility for infectious disease’

‘The human factor: collective responsibility for infectious disease’ with Prof Mark Harrison and Dr Hannah Maslen – 19 May, 5pm, Oxford Martin School

Prevention and management of infectious diseases remains one of this century’s biggest challenges. As drugs and vaccinations have proliferated, protection from disease has increasingly been seen as an individual problem, requiring individual action. But due to the evolution of anti-microbial resistance, vaccine refusal and rapid disease transmission through global trade and travel, the impact of the drugs and vaccines that we have come to take for granted is undermined.

This lecture will explore the importance of understanding the ‘Human Factor’ in disease management, looking at the effects of policy on individual and group behaviour and at the role psychology plays in developing a new understanding of collective moral responsibility for infectious disease. The lecture is an introduction to the Oxford Martin Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease, an interdisciplinary team from zoology, history, philosophy, psychology and medicine.

This is part of a wider seminar series looking at reconciling individual and collective needs, as detailed below –

19 May 2016 ‘The human factor: collective responsibility for infectious disease’ with Prof Mark Harrison and Dr Hannah Maslen
26 May 2016 ‘Our shared world: reconciling individual need and collective responsibility’ – panel discussion