Topic: SMARTbiomed Seminar Time: Apr 25, 2025 10:00 AM Paris Join Zoom Meeting https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/63418302375 Meeting ID: 634 1830 2375 Abstract: Smartphones and wearable devices provide a major opportunity to transform our understanding of the mechanisms, determinants, and consequences of diseases. For example, around 9 in 10 people own a smartphone in the United Kingdom, while one-fifth of US adults own wearable technologies. This high level of device ownership means that many people could contribute to health research from the comfort of their home by offering small amounts of time to share data and help address health-related questions that matter to them. A leading example is the seven day wrist-worn accelerometer data measured in 100,000 UK Biobank participants between 2013-2015 that has led to important new findings. These include discoveries of: new genetic variants for sleep and activity; small amounts of vigorous non-exercise physical activity being associated with substantially lower mortality; and no apparent upper threshold to the benefits of physical activity with respect to cardiovascular disease risk. However, challenges exist around cost, access, validity, and training. In this talk I will review progress made in this exciting new area of health data science and share opportunities for self-supervised time-series machine learning to provide new insights into physical activity, sleep, heart rhythms and other exposures relevant to health and disease. Bio: I am a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Oxford. My team of ~20 researchers develop reproducible methods to analyse wearable sensor data in both clinical trials and very large health studies to better understand the causes and consequences of disease. Our team has played a key role in the collection of wearable sensor data in over 150,000 research participants across the UK and China, ansl also complementary open human activity recognition validation datasets to further enhance these resources. Our team develops open software tools and data resources for machine learning methods to measure sleep, sedentary behaviour, physical activity behaviours and steps.
China Centre Book Talk: Governing Digital China by Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo China’s approach to digital governance has gained global influence, often evoking Orwellian 'Big Brother' comparisons. Governing Digital China challenges this perception, arguing that China's approach is radically different in practice. This book explores the logic of popular corporatism, highlighting the bottom-up influences of China’s largest platform firms and its citizens. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and nationally representative surveys, the authors track governance of social media and commercial social credit ratings during both the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping eras. Their findings reveal how Chinese tech companies such as Tencent, Sina, Baidu and Alibaba, have become consultants and insiders to the state, thus forming a state-company partnership. Meanwhile, citizens voluntarily produce data, incentivizing platform firms to cater to their needs and motivating resistance by platforms. Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo unveil the intricate mechanisms linking the state, platform firms and citizens in the digital governance of authoritarian states. Daniela (Danie) Stockmann is Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School in Berlin, Germany. Her current research focuses on platform regulation in the United States, China and Europe. She received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2007) and an MA in Chinese Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (2001). Before joining the Hertie School faculty, she was Associate Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. Her book, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China (Cambridge University Press, 2013), received the 2015 Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Beyond her academic work, she has served as advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands and to German President Steinmeier during his 2018 visit to China and on platform regulation in 2021.
The 3 Minute Thesis competition challenges doctoral candidates to present a compelling spoken presentation on their research topic and its significance in just three minutes to a non-specialist audience. This course helps you prepare for the competition and ensure that you have the best chance possible to represent Oxford nationally.
The most recent famine in Soviet and European History killed at least one million people in 1946-47, mostly in Ukraine and Moldova. However, we know much less about this famine than others in Soviet history. The Soviet state repressed news of the 1946/47 famine at the time. English-language scholarship on the family is small and the topic is much less addressed in the Russian and Ukrainian scholarship compared to the Holodomor of 1932/33. In this lecture we draw on recently declassified Soviet sources to illustrate the interaction of numerous factors in understanding famine causation, duration, mortality and contextualise it in broader Soviet and world history to understand its broader significance and enduring consequences. Registration only necessary for online attendees.
Dr Meghan Morrissey’s research uses cell and synthetic biology to uncover basic principles of macrophage signalling with an eye toward designing new therapeutics. Macrophages, key effectors of the innate immune system, protect the body by phagocytosing harmful targets while robustly ignoring healthy cells. Macrophages measure and integrate the signals they encounter to decide what to eat. These signals also tell macrophages if they should adjust their appetite, and what information to relay other immune cells. The mechanistic insight from our studies is critical for immunoengineering, or controlled activation of the immune system. We are particularly interested in how to control macrophage signalling during cancer therapy. Dr Morrissey is an Assistant Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. Prior to joining UCSB in 2020, Dr Morrissey was a postdoctoral fellow at University of California San Francisco in Ron Vale’s lab. She obtained her PhD from Duke University in 2015 and her BS from the University of Notre Dame in 2009.
This interdisciplinary conversation will address the theme of early modern migrations. How did objects, images, ideas, people, and texts migrate across the early modern globe? To what extent were these migrations productive and destructive? How were cities sites of cosmopolitanism, exchange, and encounter? How did texts migrate through prints and translation and in turn relay stories of migration? How did objects circulate, bringing with them new technologies and artisanal knowledge? Speakers will address these questions, shedding light on our understanding of encounters and entanglements in the early modern world. A collaboration between Kellogg College and the Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Oxford. Speakers will include Nandini Das (Exeter), Leah R. Clark (Kellogg), Viviana Tagliaferri (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia) and Imogen Choi (Exeter). The talks will run from 4.30-6pm (including a Q&A), followed by a drinks reception at 6.00-6.30pm. This event is free and open to all. If you have any questions please email events@kellogg.ox.ac.uk
Join one of the world’s foremost observers on the global economy, Professor Kenneth Rogoff, as he discusses his new book Our Dollar, Your Problem, with Professor of Economics Andrea Ferrero from Oxford’s Department of Economics. The event is moderated by the School’s Professor of Economics and Public Policy Clare Leaver. In Our Dollar, Your Problem, Professor Rogoff, the Maurits C. Boas Professor of Economics at Harvard University and former International Monetary Fund chief economist, explores the global rise of the U.S. dollar and shows why its future stability is far from assured, animating the remarkable postwar run of the dollar—how it beat out the Japanese yen, the Soviet ruble, and the euro—and the challenges it faces today from crypto and the Chinese yuan, the end of reliably low inflation and interest rates, political instability, and the fracturing of the dollar bloc. The discussion is followed by a drinks reception.
Join us for an insightful roundtable discussion featuring Emily Owens from Brown University and Kaisha Esty from Wesleyan University. These two historians focus on the experiences of enslaved and free women, examining narratives of sexual violence, resistance, legal redress, and survival through meticulous archival excavation. The scholars will explore the complex and precarious meaning of consent for Black women in the nineteenth-century as well as its lingering afterlives in the present day.
*Shreya Ganguli*, Ayahs, Amahs, and the Children They Cared For in 20th Century Colonial Households *Kate Harrison*, Between Rescue and Trauma: The Kindertransport, 1938-40 *Camille Lund*, Educating Multiracial Shanghai: The Evolution of Public Education in the International Settlement, 1863-1917 *Rawdah Uddin*, The Bengali Mother’s Gang of Invincible Children: Interrogating Child Victimhood in the Bangladesh Liberation War For online access, Microsoft Teams links will be sent to the mailing list in advance or email "$":mailto:sian.pooley@magd.ox.ac.uk for a link.
The intestine contains the greatest number and diversity of immune compartments in the body. These compartments can be broadly classified into intestinal inductive and effector sites: Intestinal inductive sites represent the sites in which adaptive immune cells undergo initial priming and differentiation in the intestine and comprise the intestinal draining mesenteric lymph nodes and the gut associated lymphoid tissues (GALT), the latter including the macroscopically visible Peyer’s patches of the ileum and the much more numerous isolated lymphoid follicles that are distributed along the entire length of the intestine. Intestinal effector sites include the intestinal lamina propria and epithelium in which primed adaptive immune cells localize and are maintained to promote barrier integrity and protective immunity. Here I will discuss some of our latest and unpublished work aimed at dissecting immune composition and function in these distinct niches of the human intestine in health and disease.
This talk presents findings from a project that is studying the relationship between student socioeconomic status (SES)/ethnicity/gender and discrepancies between teacher and student perceptions of the student’s effort, enjoyment, misbehaviour and abilities in school. Academic attitudes have been shown to be important determinants of children’s school attainment and teachers’ perceptions of such attitudes influence how teachers judge their students’ academic abilities. We conducted three studies, each focusing on different student characteristics and attitudes, and asked whether discrepancies (or ‘inaccuracies’) in teachers’ perceptions of students are systematically putting children from certain social groups at disadvantage. In study 1 we examined whether teachers systematically over- or under-estimate the effort and enjoyment of students depending on the student’s SES. We found that, indeed, teachers tend to rate the enjoyment and effort of lower SES-students more negatively and the attitudes of higher SES-students more positively than students own reports would suggest. Study 2 focused on student gender and academic self-concept (‘I am good at math/English’) in different subjects. We studied how discrepancies between teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the student’s academic abilities at the end of primary school predict student’s academic self-concept in later years, and how student gender interacts with these processes. It appears that for English teachers’ ‘over-estimation’ of both boys’ and girls’ abilities at age 11 leads to higher English self-concept at age 14. In contrast, for math, ‘under-estimation’ of students’ abilities at age 11 leads to lowered self-concept at age 14, with a particularly strong effect for girls. The aim of Study 3 was to analyse whether student ethnicity is related to discrepancies between teachers’ and students’ perceptions of students’ misbehaviour. Preliminary results are that the behaviour in class of students of Black Caribbean and Black African heritage is perceived more negatively by teachers than students’ own perceptions, while this discrepancy is weaker or reversed for other ethnic groups. We focused on children at the end of primary school and used data on England from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and – for Study 1 – also on Scotland from the Growing Up in Scotland Study (GUS). Join on Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OTNiZGM1MzItOTcwOS00YThjLWJmYTAtZGFjZGM1YzkyNjQw%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2275f39f15-fefd-45cf-b904-2e2174db4aa1%22%7d
Our guts are home to a complex, dense and dynamic consortia of microbes, which can have a profound impact on our health. In this presentation, we will discuss how the mucosal immune system has evolved to minimize the risk from opportunistic bacterial pathogens such as Salmonella and E.coli. This requires us to explore secretory antibody function, intestinal physiology, bacterial glycobiology, within-host evolution and microbial ecology of the gut. A functional understanding of these systems reveals the potential for oral vaccine-based interventions that allow elimination of pathogen carriage (3, 4), with potential to expand into rational microbiota engineering. 1. High-avidity IgA protects the intestine by enchaining growing bacteria. Moor K, et al. 2017. Nature 544:498–502 doi:10.1038/nature22058 2. Inflammation boosts bacteriophage transfer between Salmonella. Diard M, et al. 2017. Science 355:1211-1215, doi:10.1126/science.aaf8451 3. A rationally designed oral vaccine induces immunoglobulin A in the murine gut that directs the evolution of attenuated Salmonella variants.Diard M, et al. Nat Microbiol. 2021 May 27. doi:10.1038/s41564-021-00911-1. 4. Vaccine-enhanced competition permits rational bacterial strain replacement in the gut. Lentsch V. et al. Accepted in Science 2025. bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.20.498444
Are you planning to present a poster at an upcoming conference, meeting or symposium? This introductory session will provide you with some top tips on how to create a poster presentation which will help you to communicate your research project and data effectively. There will be guidance on formatting, layout, content, use of text, references and images, as well as advice on printing and presenting your poster. This session will also provide help with locating resources such as templates, free-to-use images and poster guidelines. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
The Oxford Ministry for the Future presents: 'Art, nature and science: Imagining other worlds' | Brian Eno and Kim Stanley Robinson in conversation with Laline Paull , J. M. Ledgard and Oxford academics. Join us for a thought-provoking performance and discussion on culture, science, and environmental responsibility. Renowned artist Brian Eno and acclaimed science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will be joined by novelist Laline Paull, writer J. M. Ledgard and a number of Oxford academics to explore the challenges facing our planet and the role of art, literature, and technology in shaping the future. This event will explore the intersection of culture, science, and environmental responsibility, offering diverse perspectives on the challenges facing our planet and the role of art, literature, and technology in shaping our future. The conversation will provide a unique opportunity to hear from leading voices in their respective fields as they share insights into the ways storytelling, music, and technological innovation can contribute to a more sustainable world. From the transformative potential of speculative fiction to the artistic exploration of ecological themes, this panel will examine the critical role of creative expression in fostering environmental awareness and action. This event co-hosted by Saïd Business School and Hertford College, is organised in partnership with Global Canopy, a data-driven non-profit that delivers transparency and accountability around the market forces driving deforestation and nature loss. 📅 Monday, 28 April 2025 🕓2 - 4 pm 📍 Sheldonian Theatre
Pediatric anxiety disorders are the most common psychiatric conditions and result in substantial personal, familial, social, and economic burden. Identifying effective interventions that reduce this burden is a global public health priority. In this lecture, Professor Ginsburg will review extant knowledge in this field on prevention and treatment efforts and present her own clinical research addressing these issues. To join the seminar on zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82038090687?pwd=bCosw1qaWUfmt7IE4bYrm5cA0AKqcZ.1 Meeting ID :502 408 7307 Passcode: 670557
Accessibility percolation is a simple model in evolutionary biology describing how a population driven by the evolutionary forces of selection and mutation explores a fitness landscape. Mathematically, the fitness landscape is modeled by attaching random weights to the vertices of a graph. Then, accessible percolation asks whether there are paths of increasing fitness of a certain length. I will review some of the progress in this area and then consider the question what happens if the fitness landscape changes over time. In particular, I will focus on the case when the underlying graph is a regular tree. Depending on the ratio of depth to width of the tree, we will see different scaling regimes for the time it takes to see an increasing path. Some of the proofs rely on adapting techniques from the area of noise sensitivity for Boolean functions.
HDRUK Oxford Monthly Meetup, Monday 28th April 2025, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Speaker(s): Associate Professor Sara Khalid, Dr. Marta Pineda-Moncusi and Dr. Qingze Gu Time: 14:00 – 15:00 Mode: Hybrid o In-person – Richard Doll Building, Lecture theatre o Online – please register (link below) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Opening Remarks: Associate Professor Sara Khalid, NDORMS, University of Oxford Short Bio: Professor Sara Khalid is an Associate Professor of Health Informatics and Biomedical Data Sciences. She is Head of the Planetary Health Informatics Lab and Machine Learning Lead at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine, NDORMS. Sara’s research applies artificial intelligence to international real-world health and environment data, in order to further our understanding of disease and fills the gaps in global health, leveraging common data models and federated network analytics. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: 1. Dr. Marta Pineda-Moncusi, NDORMS, University of Oxford Title: ‘The purpose and value of capturing ethnicity data in research’. Abstract: The lack of representation in research data results in biased outcomes that predominantly reflect the health behaviours of the majoritarian population. This absence of diversity in datasets leads to inaccurate estimates for minority or less prevalent groups, which can have detrimental effects on their health outcomes. Ethnicity, as a multifaceted concept, encompasses many elements that are often not captured in electronic health records, such as culture, language or identity. Ethnicity can serve as important health determinants, enabling a more accurate representation of population diversity and fostering more inclusive and equitable research practices. In this presentation, we will examine the completeness, coverage and granularity of ethnicity data available the Secure Data Environment of England, the NHS England, and show the impact of using different levels of granularity on the outcomes of health studies. Short Bio: Dr Pineda-Moncusi is a Biotechnologist by background and an Epidemiologist by training. She conducted her PhD in the University of Barcelona and has been a Postdoc at Oxford for the last 4 years, where she been involved in multiple projects including musculoskeletal conditions, as well as inequities in COVID-19 outcomes across different ethnic groups in the UK, characterising heavy menstrual bleeding and drugs shortages, among others. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Dr. Qingze Gu, NDORMS, University of Oxford Title: Unveiling Ethnic Disparities in Rare Cardiometabolic Diseases: Insights from 58 Million Electronic Health Records Abstract: Rare cardiometabolic diseases (CVD/MBD) pose significant diagnostic and management challenges, compounded by intersectional disparities in healthcare access and outcomes. Leveraging anonymised electronic health records (EHRs) from over 58 million individuals in England, this study characterises the prevalence, phenotypic diversity, and ethnic disparities of rare CVD/MBD across 250+ granular ethnicities. Initial results reveal over 1 million individuals with 406 rare disease phenotypes, categorised into cardiovascular, metabolic, mixed, and "other" subtypes. Ethnicity mapping demonstrated stark variations: while 80% of the cohort identified as White, granular analysis of 19 NHS primary care categories and 489 SNOMED-CT codes uncovered distinct patterns. For example, South Asian and Black African subgroups exhibited higher cardiovascular rare disease burdens, whereas polymyalgia rheumatica disproportionately affected White British populations. These findings underscore the critical role of granular ethnicity data in identifying health disparities and tailoring care for marginalised groups. Short Bio: Qingze Gu completed his DPhil in Clinical Medicine at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, in October 2024. He is a postdoctoral researcher working in the Planetary Health Informatics group. With a multidisciplinary background in biomedical data science and pharmacology, his research interest is in using routinely collected healthcare data to inform clinical decision-making.
Overcome the challenges of research antibodies with next-generation reagents for target binding and detection! Ankyrons are small binding reagents based on an ankyrin-repeat scaffold developed by ProImmune. They are cost-effective, high-affinity, animal-free, and can offer more convenient use and better imaging resolution than conventional antibodies. Join ProImmune in discovering where you can use the Ankyrons in your research!
We analyze the employment and environmental effects of US firms' exposure to green and digital technologies between 2010 and 2023. Using establishment-level data on online job postings, we construct a new measure of technological adoption by linking job skill requirements to advances in green and digital patents. We address endogeneity concerns using a shift-share instrumental variables design based on technological progress outside the US, yielding four main findings. First, increases in green technology adoption lead to job creation, with an elasticity of employment to green exposure of 0.4-0.5, though this effect weakened from 2015. Second, the employment impact of green innovation varies across sectors - innovation in information technology and buildings complements labor, while advances in transportation and smart grids substitute for workers. Third, both green and digital innovations raise relative demand for high-skill workers. Fourth, we find no evidence of negative environmental impacts of digital technology at the firm level.
Do you need help managing your references? Do you need help citing references in your documents? This online session will introduce you to EndNote, a subscription software programme which can help you to store, organise and retrieve your references and PDFs, as well as cite references in documents and create bibliographies quickly and easily. On completing the workshop you will be able to: understand the main features and benefits of EndNote; set up an EndNote account; import references from different sources into EndNote; organise your references in EndNote; insert citations into documents; and create a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
The next session of the Neurodiversity Network Reading Group will take place during the first week of Trinity Term. We will be reading the introduction of Neuroqueer Heresies (Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities, Fort Worth, TX: Autonomous Press, 2021).
What Humans Do with Life How can we coexist with living beings in increasingly degraded ecological environments? How can we create living conditions that reduce inequalities between human lives and promote a better quality of life? How can we make responsible use of biotechnologies? How can we harmonize the diverse relationships human societies maintain with the world, taking into account their ties to various living environments? These four interconnected questions are linked to a central issue of our time: how do we live on planet Earth? At the crossroads of the biological and the social, these questions extend beyond disciplines like ecology and biology. They lie at the core of a rapidly expanding field: the anthropology of life. Across the globe, humans perceive life as a force that shapes living beings, producing effects—growth, reproduction, aging, and death—on their bodies. From a comparative perspective, this book highlights how ethnographic research helps us better understand the ways societies organize themselves around this force and the inherent fragility of human life that depends on it.
In the early 1960s, Soviet researchers attempted to assist the WHO’s Global Malaria Eradication Programme (GMEP) by offering training in the Polovodova method—an infamously exacting dissection method used to determine the physiological age of a female mosquito by examining structural changes in its ovary, and by extension, their disease carrying capacity. The efforts to deploy this technique to assess the success of pilot indoor DDT-spraying schemes in Africa provides a compelling case of the trade-offs between what is knowable and what is doable in large-scale disease control. I suggest that the staggered circulation of the Polovodova technique provides a lens onto the shifting epidemiological conjugations of entomological knowledge across the long durée of malaria control programmes and, more broadly, the ways in which logics of contagion come to demarcate the field of scientific vision. *Anne H Kelly* is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She has led multiple transdisciplinary collaborations at the intersections of infectious disease control, health systems strengthening, and emergency R&D, and serves as a member of the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) for Ebola Vaccines and Vaccination. Her ethnographic engagement in those projects has been driven by an abiding concern with the socio-material conditions that structure the production of biomedical knowledge, the local ecologies of labour that circumscribe its circulation and use and the ethical imaginaries that animate collective responses to health crises. She is currently leading a collaboration with scientists, designers, architects and masons in Tanzania, the United States, and Brazil to unsettle entrenched models of ‘equitable access’ for mosquito control technologies. Following the seminar there will be a drinks reception in the History Faculty Common Room. Register here for online attendance only; in person attendance does not required registration. https://zoom.us/meeting/register/OOIL75MhQsqdnd2Jftb0Jg#/registration (note you will need to change the time zone from London to GMT for it to show the correct time)
Many Muslims are successful citizens of liberal democracies. Yet numerous scholars and commentators, both Muslim and non-Muslim, have argued that the conceptions of political justice affirmed by modern liberalism and by the dominant strands of the Islamic intellectual tradition are ultimately irreconcilable. If true, this would not prevent Muslims from living peacefully alongside non-Muslim fellow citizens in liberal democracies; but it would imply that commitment to the Islamic tradition of political thought stands in tension with viewing this co-existence as more than a pragmatic 'modus vivendi'. Dr Mohammad Fadel, Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, is one of the world's foremost experts in both Islamic jurisprudence and the theory of political liberalism. He will address the seminar on the question of whether, on the basis of the Islamic tradition itself, a commitment to liberal views of justice can be more than a modus vivendi but instead a full-fledged commitment by Muslims to viewing liberalism not as a pragmatic compromise but a moral ideal. There will then be an ample opportunity for questions and open discussion, in which all attendees are invited to actively participate. To gain maximum benefit from the Seminar, we will send a paper of Dr Fadel's addressing the topic to read beforehand, if possible (but you are still welcome to attend if you are not able to read this in advance). This Seminar is part of the Oxford Islam and Justice Programme, which aims to provide a grounding in the academic debates about the relationship between Islamic views of justice and the modern political order, with particular emphasis on the conceptions of justice appropriate in a religiously plural society. Dr Fadel will address the group virtually and there will then be an open discussion. Participants are recommended to complete a short pre-reading, if possible, which will be provided after registration. Please register at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdHpvZ5xrDwyQ1YcE6hLIU1colhEONZnzTrLT5WrOz4p-v30A/viewform?usp=sharing
In the UK election, one domestic policy issue loomed large above everything else: the NHS. But when finances are tough, NHS improvement will prove a challenge unless we can improve NHS productivity. And despite new investment, the new government must avoid the peril of its last term in office when rising personal satisfaction with the NHS failed to translate into an appreciation that the system was on the mend. This seminar will go to the heart of one of the biggest domestic policy reforms, and debate where the role of the state should begin and end and where the limitations of the NHS may lie. Find out more and register: https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/research/visiting-parliamentary-fellowship/register-to-attend-6/ This seminar will take place in the Nissan Institute Lecture Theatre at St Antony’s College: 62 Woodstock Rd, Oxford, OX2 6JF
The Catholic conciliar document Nostra Aetate acknowledged that Christians and Muslims share a devotion to the Virgin Mary. But did Christians always view her as a bridge between the two religions? A few medieval Latins stressed concord between the two Marys, but others raised the Virgin on military standards in battles against Muslims. My talk will consider the history of Mary’s role as both bridge and barrier in Christian-Muslim relations.
This session will draw on a small research study that interviewed leaders from across many sectors about what were the main challenges faced and what did they think leaders needed to get better at. In short there were two strong themes in relation to what they needed to get better at: getting used to being accountable but not in control and shaping the context of which they are a part. In this interactive session we will explore the relevance of these findings for health care organisations and leadership roles in the NHS.
In this talk, different machine learning techniques will be introduced that may help neuroscientific researchers in multiple ways ranging from data preprocessing to decomposition or integration. The focus will be the Sparse Partial Least Squares (SPLS) algorithm as well as its extension, the multi-block SPLS (mbSPLS). It will be shown how SPLS and mbSPLS can extract various layers of multivariate effects between any combination of two or more data matrices. Investigations into neuroinflammation-brain patterns as well as deeply layered genetic-brain-behavior signatures in the early-age PRONIA cohort will be given as specific examples. Furthermore, forays into hostility and neurodestructive processes in early and late-stage psychosis will be presented. A smaller part of the talk will revolve around novel approaches that go beyond data analysis. Specifically, a brief introduction to radiomics will highlight the potential for machine learning techniques in extracting new and innovative features from MRI scans, such as texture, entropy, and contrast. Moreover, transformer-based pipelines will be shown that allow the researcher to integrate multiple data domains from different cohorts to answer specific research questions without any requirement for data or sample homogenization. Overall, the talk will cover the fundamentals of these techniques, however, the focus will be on the application and translational value of these approaches This talk is hosted online only. To join, please use the link below: zoom.us/j/92620728590?pwd=s1JefrGff6bN0nZZcHSTBkCw8Z1RlT.1 Meeting ID: 926 2072 8590 Passcode: 196542
Are you looking to learn about the ways in which to transmit scientific ideas and make your research accessible to a non-specialist audience through a variety of mediums? This session will serve as an introduction to science communication and how it can be successfully incorporated into our roles. By the end of this session you will be able to: define science communication and provide a list of examples; explain why science communication is important for both our CPD and the public; and list ways in which we can all get involved in science communication. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Would you like to contribute to the discovery of new research materials in the Bodleian’s manuscript collections? And to learn something about editing early modern letters and approaches to digital humanities along the way? Then please sign up for our Bodleian Student Editions editing workshops. Take part in this hands-on session working on the transcription of early modern letters and join a discussion on the issues of representing historical power imbalances that are preserved in the archival record. In this day-long workshop you will learn the skills to handle some of the Bodleian’s special collections and to read eighteenth-century handwriting. No experience in history or historical texts is needed – we’ll teach you all you need to handle, read and transcribe these fascinating letters. Registration is required. Open to University of Oxford students only. Level – open to complete beginners and students from any subject, undergraduate or graduate. Please see link to the event page for more details on this workshop.
This joint study day between the Centre for Fashion Curation (London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London) and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing interrogates the overlap between material culture and life writing, from memoir and biography to the care, collection and interpretation of objects.
Citation for reading: Anne Antoni, Juliane Reinecke, and Marianna Fotaki. 'Making Time to Care, and Caring for Time: "Tricking Time" to Cope with Conflicting Temporalities in a Child Protection Agency.' _Journal of Business Ethics_ 188.4 (2023): 645–663. Local expert: *Freya Willis* What is “care” good for, and how best to apprehend it as a scholarly category? The “Care” Series gathers scholars of any discipline who are interested in reading and thinking about “care” together. Each session, we gather to discuss a short reading with the help of a local expert. In meeting under the auspices of WGQ (the Centre for Women’s, Gender, and Queer Histories), we recognize the centrality of feminists to care thinking since the 1980s, the importance of care practices to queer and otherwise marginalized communities, the historicity of when different disciplines invested in the category, and the importance of multidisciplinary and inclusive approaches as we now proceed.
There is increasing evidence of the importance of tailoring development interventions to the local context. We implement an RCT in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where there is variation in the presence of age sets, a mode of social organization that creates cohesive groups of young men who provide a check on the power of the older political elite. We provide villages chiefs with cash to purchase health products and form oversight committees. Some villages are randomly assigned to form a diverse committee and other villages are randomly assigned to form a young male committee. We ask whether young male committees in villages with age sets are more effective due to the match between the structure of the intervention and the social structure in the village. We find that young male committees in villages with age set are more cohesive, participate in more oversight tasks, and generated a more equitable distribution of products. In particular, we find that the chiefs and those within their network received fewer products. We find no effects on graft – project funds that are not spent on health products.
Dr. Elly Dezateux, 'Ruptures and attrition: the politics of environmental engineering in early modern England' (Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Legacies of Colonialism, Christ Church). Recent scholarship has emphasised that sovereignty and central authority were expressed and fuelled by an expansion of environmental governance across early modern Europe and the Atlantic world. By examining the contested and precarious nature of state action to ‘improve’ English wetlands in this period, this paper identifies a more expansive environmental politics that often challenged institutional parameters and agendas. Dr. Thomas Murphy, 'The Problem of (Early Modern) 'Nature' (Career Development Fellow in French, New College). Understood as a turning point in the history of science, the emergence of an objectified, conquerable 'nature' in the 17th century poses an equally significant philological dilemma. Through case studies of translations of Vergil by Dryden and Du Bellay, this talk shows how a new meaning of 'nature' arises in translation, even where 'natura' is absent in the source, demonstrating the importance of humanistic reading practices in the development of modern scientific thought. Registration via our website is required if you would like complimentary lunch.
Seminars followed by a sandwich lunch. All welcome!
Women remain significantly underrepresented in positions of power and have limited access to the most prestigious policy areas. Drawing on the political economy of committee assignments, several theoretical approaches could explain why gendered patterns in access to political offices persist. We assess the most prominent theories using unique fine-grained data on members of German state parliaments from 1948 to 2016 and introduce several measures of committee prestige. Using regression, matching and decomposition techniques, we show that observable factors such as qualifications, experience, electoral incentives and structural elements contribute little to gendered committee assignments. Moreover, the increase in the number of women in national parliaments and their growing expertise and experience does not significantly change this pattern. Marginalization remains stable over time, between East and West Germany and across the main parties. We conclude that women remain systematically disadvantaged in the political decision-making process, with unequal access to power.
For the second instalment of our EDI Media Club series, we will be watching half an episode of “Black and British: A Forgotten History”, the BBC documentary series by Prof. David Olusoga. Episode 4 “Homecoming” covers three African kings who stood up to Cecil Rhodes. Please join us for the screening and discussion, on Tuesday the 29th of April, 12.30-13.30 in the BDI Seminar Room. Tea/coffee and snacks will be provided! Please register using the link.
Although hardly known, Georg Rasch had an approach to studying growth based on the principle of invariant comparisons, the same principle for which he is well known with his models for measurement. The approach identifies a non-linear function of time, called a meta-metre, which governs the growth of all individuals of a population. Then within the meta-metre, each individual’s rate of growth is linear and invariant, thus permitting ready comparisons of rates of growth among individuals using standard statistical procedures. This presentation illustrates the approach with the educationally important variables of reading and mathematics attainment tests from two longitudinal studies. Each of the meta-metres show early rapid, decelerating growth, with noticeably different rates of growth among sub-populations. Decelerating growth is also related to the common grade scale, showing that any grade difference between groups in the early years invariably increases in later years. This increase has implications for interventions for groups at risk in their attainments. Join on Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OTNiZGM1MzItOTcwOS00YThjLWJmYTAtZGFjZGM1YzkyNjQw%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2275f39f15-fefd-45cf-b904-2e2174db4aa1%22%7d
If you are new to the University of Oxford and want to find out more about the University’s network of libraries or have been at the University a while and would like a refresher, join us for this online introduction to understanding and accessing the libraries, their services and resources. By the end of the session, you will: be familiar with the network of Oxford libraries; know the logins needed to access Bodleian Libraries services; be able to conduct a search in SOLO (the University’s resource discovery tool), filter results and access online and print resources; and know how to manage your library account including loans and requests. Intended audience: All Oxford library users.
Carl Schmitt and his work has been slowly clawing their way towards the political and academic mainstream in the English speaking world since his work began being translated into English in the 1980s. The ‘Crown Jurist of the Third Reich’ has become an important interlocutor for a sizable number of significant academics and political figures from Habermas, Derrida, and Agamben to Dugin, Vermuele, and JD Vance. In this first seminar, we will explore who Carl Schmitt was and how this contextualises his work. Particular emphasis will be placed on examining Schmitt’s Catholicism, conservatism, and Nazism and we will explore how these three important aspects of his character coloured his world view.
Abstract: Normal ovarian function is crucial for the production of egg - essential for not only human fertility but animal fertility more generally. In the William’s group, we seek to increase scientific understanding of ovarian function and develop technologies to optimise the use of the ovary for human and endangered species fertility preservation. One key aspect in understanding the nutritional requirements of ovarian tissues and how the modern diet of ultra-processed foods affects this. Our programme of research is focused on human and rhino ovarian tissue but also utilises model species when required. Using multiple species has led to cross-species benefits as we have developed novel culture techniques that benefit all. These techniques are directed to develop mature eggs in vitro from primordial follicles in ovarian tissues. Freezing of tissues is also key to preserving function and we have now expanded our programme of research to incorporate cryobiology as one of our group’s key pillars. Our aim is to enhance and develop human and rhino follicles in culture, as well as preserve tissues and fertility for other endangered species. In line with our conservation agenda, we are also exploring novel ways of isolating cells from endangered species with the long-term aim of in vitro gametogenesis. With recent success in elephant, we are pushing ahead to expand this work to other species. In this seminar, all team members will share information about their projects and the work they are doing.
Can union and firm market power counteract each other? What are the output and welfare effects of employer and union labor market power? Using data from French manufacturing firms, we leverage mass layoff shocks to competitors to identify a negative effect of employment concentration on wages. In line with the reduced form evidence and the French institutional setting, we develop and estimate a multi-sector bargaining model that incorporates employer market power. We find that, in the absence of unions, output decreases by 0.48 percent because they partially counteract distortions coming from oligopsony power. The reallocation of employment across space is key to realize the output gains from unions.
How does Europe plan to defend itself amidst constrained resources and geopolitical uncertainty? This presentation explores the fundamental role of the European Defense Technological Industrial Base (EDTIB) in providing materiel for a sustainable and credible deterrent, analyzing its status and challenges, assessing initiatives in progress, and providing potential options for policymakers. Commander Boyce is the 2024-2025 US Navy Hudson Fellow at St Antony’s College and a visiting research fellow at SST-CCW. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. He holds a Master of Arts in Defense and Strategic Studies from the US Naval War College and a Master of Arts in International Relations from the University of Belgrade. Commander Boyce’s operational sea duty includes assignment as a naval aviator to multiple helicopter sea combat squadrons and most recently as the first commanding officer of Fleet Logistics Multi-Mission Squadron FOUR ZERO (VRM-40), the US Navy’s East Coast CMV-22B Tiltrotor squadron, based in Norfolk, Virginia. His shore assignments include Flag Aide to the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations Warfare Systems (OPNAV N9) and 2019 Olmsted Scholar at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade, Serbia.
Formatting your in text citations, footnotes and bibliography correctly for your thesis or publication is crucial. Reference management tools make this easier and save you time. This classroom-based session comprises a 30-minute presentation, which gives an overview of reference management tools. The rest of the session is dedicated to practical exercises at the computers, giving you the opportunity to try out four tools (RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley), so that you can work out which one is best for you. Library staff will be there to help and guide you, and answer any questions you might have. You can leave at any point once you have tried out the tools you want, and do not have to stay until the end. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Faculty Presentations
Kerala has been widely regarded, throughout the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, as one of the most progressive and egalitarian states of India. Its transformation, from one of the most oppressively hierarchical regions in the nineteenth century, has been facilitated by both radical politics and campaigning religious reform movements. The movement led by Trivandrum-born spiritual leader and social activist Sri Narayana Guru (1854-1928) has been especially influential. It has been prominent in countering caste-related and other discriminations, in encouraging education, inter-religious dialogue and wider social engagement. Each year, it is galvanized by a new year pilgrimage to the Guru's final resting place. He foresaw that this could be an occasion for education, 'enlightenment' and taking stock. The concerns of participants and of wider society are addressed. Some pilgrims arrive following long, symbolically elaborated walking journeys; others simply travel by the most convenient means eg car or train. It frequently attracts commendation but also controversy. Its influence is increasingly apparent outside of Kerala, for instance within the South Indian diaspora. As the pilgrimage approaches its centenary, it is instructive to consider its contemporary significance, how far it fulfils its initial aims, and its relevance both for twenty-first century India and further afield. Alex Gath has carried out fieldwork over three decades in the sociocultural anthropology of religion, especially concerning pilgrimage. This has been within South India, mostly Kerala, and Western Europe, mainly the so-called 'Celtic' nations. He has worked widely on the religious culture of the South Indian diaspora, in the UK, US and Europe. Beginning his career working on clinical issues within psychology, he has maintained an involvement with the fields of neuropsychology, affective disorders and eating disorders - both applied and methodological/philosophical aspects. He has degrees from Oxford, Sussex and Edinburgh Universities; he has published in anthropological and psychotherapy journals and divides his time between Oxford and London.
Python Drop in session with Thomas Kiley, Senior Research Software Engineer, NDPH, University of Oxford Bring your software development problems and questions - can fix bugs, workout solutions and share tips. • Bugs in the code • Software architecture questions • How do I do X in Python • What tools or libraries would help with this problem Date: Tuesday 29 April Time: 14:00 - 15:00 Venue: BDI/OxPop Seminar room 0 Register: https://forms.office.com/e/ijnehdJM8n?origin=lprLink Bio: Thomas is a senior research software engineer working with Deidre Hollingsworth on neglected tropical disease modelling. His background is in software engineering (working in a range of areas, including games, a tech start up and a company making a medical device for Parkinsons). He was drawn to research software engineering after talking to scientists and realising a knowledge gap in software best practises. He want to share the expertise he has gained from being a software developer with people whose expertise lies in the research they are doing. Prerequisite: Be familiar with Python and please bring your own device Audience: Anyone looking to improve their Python skills Software required: Python
The idea of common good in education has become topical. In 2015, UNESCO suggested to consider education as a “common good” in order to differentiate knowledge from a mere commodity. According to UNESCO, education can be understood as more than just a “public good”. This conceptual shift arises important questions about how knowledge is created and, ultimately, how it is distributed fairly (see Marginson, 2024). According to the seminal work of Elinor Ostrom (1990), common goods are primarily created and governed by communities. This prompts the question: How can markets and states in both developed and developing countries promote knowledge as a common good? A way to address this question could be twofold. First, it is necessary to engage in an empirical analysis to understand how specific communities generate knowledge as a common good. Second, it is crucial to explore, both nationally and globally, how these communities organize themselves within specific institutional settings to create and distribute “common goods”. This research project addressed the first question. As the concept of the common good is “relational”, according to Mazzucato (cited in Marginson, 2024:25), two relations were identified within nine higher educations of Mexico: (1) Teaching Relationship (TR) and (2) Research Relationship (RR). These relationships describe how students, teachers and administrative staff collaborate to educate young people academically and how they act collectively to create knowledge. These two dimensions then were operationalized by defining five key dimensions of university life: agency, institutional stability, governance, fairness and human flourishing (ASGFH). Empirical data were gathered via a survey sent to probabilistic samples of students, teachers and administrative staff across the nine selected universities in Mexico. The questionnaire included questions about each of the ASGFH dimensions, using a Likert scale. This project highlighted the importance of viewing higher education as a common good by focusing on the “quality” of institutional processes, rather than merely on output indicators. Central concerns for promoting institutional quality, thus, may lie in how members of a university community act, relate and organize themselves daily—not just in how much they produce by the end of the academic year. As anticipated, the aggregate measure of common good across universities varied significantly. However, it was interesting that the most prestigious and productive universities did not necessarily register the highest value of common good. Processes matter. In this regard, human agency emerged as a central factor for the formation of the common good within universities. The “freedom to advance whatever goals and values a person has reason to advance” (Sen, 2009:289) was positively and significantly related to the other four dimensions of the ASGFH model. Focusing on human agency as a key component of the common good in the university allows a more imaginative way to discuss and promote institutional changes within the university. Since processes matter, teaching and research relations between the members of a university community do so too. If these relationships are altered, so too may the quality of the university. To forge such changes, governments can intervene, but only once the common good is observed empirically and better understood globally: “the more people who share useful knowledge, the greater the common good” (Hess & Ostrom, 2007:5). References Hess, C. y Ostrom, E. (2007). Understanding knowledge as a commons. From theory to practice. London, Cambridge: MIT. Marginson, S. (2024). Higher Education and Public and Common Good. Working paper no. 114, April 2024. Oxford: Centre for Global Higher Education. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Sen, A. (2009). The idea of justice. England: Allen Lane. UNESCO (2015). Replantear la educación. ¿Hacia un bien común global? Paris: Unesco.
The seminar explores the discursive mapping of far-right constituents within the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history, formed under Benjamin Netanyahu's premiership after the five elections held between 2019 and 2022. The Religious Zionism Party and Jewish Power have consistently been at the centre of heated debate—not only because their leaders hold critical ministerial positions, including finance and national security, which gained heightened relevance in the aftermath of October 7th, but also due to their self-positioning within Israel’s shifting political landscape and their anti-establishment push for political and legal changes, even before these events. The seminar examines their shared and divergent motivations during the 2021 and 2022 elections, with a focus on the division of labour between these two factions. Drawing on campaign data from X (formerly Twitter) by key leaders Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, it offers a comparative analysis of their articulation of the key issues such as legitimacy, sovereignty, and the judiciary. Dr Ferit Belder is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey. He earned his MSc from SOAS, University of London, in 2016, and completed his PhD at Istanbul University in 2019. His doctoral research analyzed the political behavior of ultra-Orthodox political parties in Israel through the framework of societal security. During his PhD studies, he was a visiting researcher at Bar-Ilan University from November 2017 to July 2018. His academic expertise focuses on Israeli politics, including elections and political parties; the identity-security relationship; Israel-Palestine relations; and Jewish settlements. He is currently conducting his postdoctoral research, titled Identifying Multiple Frames of the Israeli “Settlements”, at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. His work has been published in journals such as Middle Eastern Studies, International Affairs, and the Contemporary Review of the Middle East, among others. Dr Belder has also presented his research at various academic conferences.
Measuring beliefs has always been a central aspect of economic decision-making. This presentation combines two research projects that develop and apply a new method to measure belief distributions: The first paper introduces the method and applies it to the measurement of inflation expectations, showing how it improves upon traditional techniques and mitigates some of the biases of previous methods. Specifically, our approach yields higher mean inflation estimates and substantially reduces the standard deviations of the distributions, while using a method which respondents find both easier and more engaging.In the second paper, the method is applied within a broader theoretical framework to identify and disentangle multiple belief-updating biases. This framework is then tested in a laboratory experiment and find that, while all tested biases are present to a certain extent, sequence-related biases (gambler’s fallacy and hot hand fallacy) and motivated-belief biases (optimism and pessimism) are the most commonly exhibited biases.
Clinical records in neuropsychiatry predominantly consist of rich, yet unstructured textual data, significantly limiting their utility for rigorous scientific analysis and clinical decision-making. Holmusk's NeuroBlu NLP leverages advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) methodologies, specifically transformer-based deep learning models such as BERT, to systematically extract structured clinical information from these notes. This research-oriented overview highlights the development of sophisticated NLP techniques within the NeuroBlu framework, designed to systematically extract symptomatology and clinical indicators from psychiatric patient records. We discuss the methodological underpinnings of symptom identification models, their validation, and their application across diverse psychiatric disorders including depressive and psychotic conditions. By transforming previously inaccessible textual information into structured, analyzable data, NeuroBlu NLP methods enhance clinical research capabilities, improve patient cohort identification, and allow more nuanced retrospective analyses. Key challenges including model generalizability, interpretability, and maintenance are critically examined, alongside potential strategies for addressing these issues. The implications of NLP-driven data structuring through NeuroBlu NLP are significant, demonstrating clear potential to substantially advance psychiatric research and enhance real-world clinical practice through improved data accessibility and analytic depth.
Dual resident companies in tax treaties Double tax treaties rely on the distinction between residence countries and source countries to allocate taxing rights. Determining residence is therefore crucial, and dual resident companies in particular pose significant challenges in this context. To address these challenges, tie-breaker rules are employed. Prior to 2017, Article 4(3) of the OECD Model Tax Convention (OECD-MC) relied on the Place of Effective Management (POEM) to decide dual residency cases. However, concerns over the definition of POEM and the potential for treaty abuse and tax avoidance led to the 2017 OECD-MC revision. The new rule employs a Mutual Agreement Procedure (MAP), allowing competent authorities to resolve dual residency case-by-case while denying treaty benefits. We examine dual residency under the lenses of state double tax treaty practice after the OECD reform, and critically evaluate the impact of the 2017 amendments to Article4(3) OECD-MC. We conduct a normative legal analysis of the POEM concept and the case-by-case MAP approach, alongside other potential tie-breakers, which is informed by a new empirical inventory of how the tie-breaker rules for dual resident companies have been negotiated and implemented in practice, considering the added perspective of the passage of several years since the amendment of Article 4(3) OECD-MC.
Simon Leedham - Using spatial biology to map cell interactions in colorectal adenoma to carcinoma transition David Withers - Capturing temporal changes within the tumour microenvironment to better interrogate immune cell fate
Socially responsible investment (SRI) has been extremely popular among investors in the past decade. However, the reasons for this interest are not completely clear. The prevailing theoretical explanations rely on assumptions of some form of altruistic preferences that nevertheless fall short of accounting for various known phenomena related to SRI. Using well-known and well-documented experimental tasks, we test the alternative hypothesis that SRI behavior is motivated by the desire to comply with social norms. In our experiment, the behavior of our participants goes against the predictions of pure social preferences models. However, it fits well with the idea of choosing SRI because it is socially appropriate. We provide multiple lines of evidence that corroborate this hypothesis. Our results suggest that promoting norms related to SRI is the key to sustain high interest in SRI.
The seminar will explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, AI, and technological innovation, co-taught by a philosopher and a technologist. The seminar will welcome a variety of visiting discussants from philosophy, computer science, and the technology industry throughout term. The focus will be on how a concern for human flourishing can be embedded in the global technology development pipeline, and on exploring how broader bridges can be built between philosophy and technology. The seminar is primarily aimed at philosophy graduate students and computer science graduate students but participants from other levels and areas are welcome. Topics include: truth-seeking AI, privacy, collective intelligence, decentralization in science and AI, and approaches to human autonomy. The seminar culminates in a clinic to facilitate grant applications for independent summer projects on the themes of the seminar. Fast grants: New for this year, Cosmos Ventures has established a dedicated funding pool that seminar participants can apply to for independent summer building projects on related themes. Prerequisites: please email HAI Lab philipp.koralus@philosophy.ox.ac.uk no later than April 27th with a (very) brief explanation of your interest in the seminar to reserve a spot, and the subject line “TT Seminar”. Space limited to maintain quality of discussion. Readings: ● Mill, On Liberty, Ch. 2, “Of Liberty of Thought and Discussion” (excerpts) ● Plato, Theaetetus, excerpts (149A-152A; 189A-190A) ● Koralus, “The Philosophic Turn for AI Agents: Replacing Centralized Digital Rhetoric with Decentralized Truth-Seeking” ● Sarkar, "AI Should Challenge, Not Obey," <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02263>
Join us for a free in-person twilight (after school) workshop on Tuesday 29 April 2025, 4:30-6:30pm @ the Cherwell School for practitioners and educators engaged or interested in organising biology field trips, making use of their own school grounds. There are so many good reasons to take your students outside - gaining a different perspective on the subject, building their enthusiasm for it, improving manual dexterity, developing practical problem solving skills, supporting their mental health and wellbeing, and enhancing your relationship with them. But biology field trips can be expensive, and time consuming. So what if you could gain some of the same benefits in your own school grounds - however "grey" they might seem? This in-person workshop at The Cherwell School in Oxford, led by nature education practitioner and researcher Dr Kim Polgreen, and colleagues from Oxford University and local schools, will discuss biology field trips to your own school grounds. We will look at opportunities, risks, techniques, and equipment. It will give biology teachers the opportunity to learn some new skills, share their own tips and techniques with others, and have a fun couple of hours in Cherwell's new ecology garden with a cup of tea and biscuits.
Domestic Energy Models have been used in the UK to energy rate buildings since the 1980’s. They have become a critical tool for policy makers, building regulations and helping homeowners decide what homes to purchase, rent and refurbish. Domestic energy models all need grounding in empirical data. The roll-out of smart meters has radically changed the accessibility of empirical data. This presentation reviews results from 13,000 homes where metered and modelled data with is compared.
Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial fiction. But how to understand the politics of this literature remains contested, in part because many of its defining characteristics—formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic play, and heavy allusion to literary canon—can seem to hold social and political realities at arm’s length. Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature offers a new approach to understanding the relationship between the challenging formal features of early modern fiction and the world beyond its pages. Focusing on depictions of violence, Atherton shows how the formal dimensions of early modern literature had the potential to alter the perception of time and space, make social and economic forces visible, defamiliarize conventions, give voice to the socially peripheral, and reshape the contours of community. Writing Violence reveals the essential role of literary form in constructing the world—and in seeing it anew. David C. Atherton is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His work focuses on the literature of early modern Japan (ca. 1600-1868), and he has published on commercial authorship, the representation of violence, and the dynamics of early modern literary form. His book Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2024. He is currently writing a book that explores early modern authorship through the experimental, self-referential late works of Ueda Akinari (1734-1809).
Defending Dignity: Black Women, Family, and Crafting Testimonies in Colonial Mexico Since the 1500s, free Black women navigated life while confronting the landscape of slavery in Mexico. Demonstrating their prowess as business owners, matriarchs, and patrons, the histories of Black women in the 17th century underscore the complexity of a gendered history of freedom. The talk will highlight what mattered to them most when they engaged with a state apparatus: the dignity of their families, the paths to economic solvency, and the realities of living in a world where slavery economically enriched or doomed others.
*If you would like to meet the speaker before the seminar, please sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/23druvdp*
Sarah A. Radcliffe is Professor Emerita of Latin American Geography at the University of Cambridge. She has undertaken extensive collaborative research in Latin America, largely in Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Mexico. Her research addresses sociospatial dynamics of exclusion and contestation around development, nation-state formation, cartography and counter-cartography, as well as gender and Indigenous intersectionality. In addition to numerous journal articles and chapters on these topics, her publications include Re-Making the Nation (1996 co-authored), Indigenous Development in the Andes (2009, co-authored), and Dilemmas of Difference (2015). In addition to Latin American research, she engaged discussions at departmental and national levels on processes of decolonizing geography, some of which were published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2017) and Decolonizing Geography: an introduction (Wiley & Sons, 2022). Her current project, funded by The Leverhulme Trust, works collaboratively with indigenous researchers and organisations to understand everyday citizenships among Kichwa in Ecuador and Awajun in Peru.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘who is to be master – that’s all.’ Thus Lewis Caroll. Money is power, but not all power takes the form of money. Who was to be master in the urban centers – London, Livorno, Hamburg, Amsterdam – of the early modern Sephardic Diaspora in Western Europe? What did it mean to be a rabbi in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Who decided and why? In this lecture we will look at these contentious and vexed questions in the lives of Hezekiah da Silva, Jacob Sasportas, and Hayim Joseph David Azulai. _Refreshments to follow_ Please register for online attendance here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/EgBlK1bLQ96SykP9dq6nDA
Faced with the war in Ukraine and the attitude of the Trump administration, European defence is now a top priority for the EU. At the same time, security is a central theme of the British government’s ‘reset’ with Brussels. As the EU argues internally about how to structure its defence procurement and we approach a potentially crucial EU-UK summit on May 19, speakers will discuss how the EU can best work with the UK and other non-EU states (e.g. Norway, Canada, Ukraine itself) for a more coherent, effective and self-sufficient European defence. And what is in fact likely to happen, at the May summit and beyond.
All welcome; refreshments provided
In this presentation, I will offer an overview of some of the primary materials and questions that have motivated my Leverhulme-funded project on the history and cultural impact of amplification technologies. The Amplification Project, as the study is currently named, arises from my career of research spent examining intersections of popular music and technology, much of which has revolved around the electric guitar. How is guitar amplification related to a wider set of innovations and interrelationships involving audio technology, musical practice, and public life since the late 19th century? My talk will examine historical documents and media representations to posit a framework for thinking about the varied impacts of amplification and how it has become socially meaningful in a range of settings. In particular, I will highlight two strains of investigation: the early history of public address systems, and the advent of solid state guitar amplifiers.
Join Worcester College Provost, David Isaac CBE, as he interviews leading role models about their lives and careers. Sir McKellen is the recipient of a Golden Globe, Tony and six Olivier Awards for his work on stage and screen. Since making his stage debut in 1961, Sir Ian has appeared in countless productions, most recently playing John Falstaff in Player Kings on the West End in 2024. Sir Ian has championed LGBTQ+ rights since ‘coming out’ in 1988 and was a co-founder of Stonewall, campaigning for legal and social equality for LGBTQ+ people worldwide. Sir Ian was awarded a CBE in 1979 and was knighted in 1991 for services to the performing arts. In 2008 he was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to drama and to equality. Join us in the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre at Worcester College. All are welcome to join for drinks after the event. Please note that entry to the venue is via the Worcester College Porters’ Lodge on Walton Street and that the auditorium is approximately five minutes’ walk from this entrance.
With the rapid development of AI and biotechnologies (including those relating to germline gene editing, brain-computer Interfaces, life extension, etc.) come vast powers to reshape ourselves and the natural world. As technological advances grant us new powers, so do they blur some boundaries between humans, animals, and machines, prodding us to ask the question: what does it mean to be human? Drawing upon readings in the humanities (including philosophy, theology, literature, etc.) and the sciences, this group will attempt to bridge the existential and empirical study of human identity - and within that context, ask if and how such reflections might help chart a path forward in relation to the right uses of new and potent technologies. We will focus in particular on questions of human purpose, place, and flourishing within the natural order. The reading group is open to students at all levels of study (including medical students), as well as faculty.
With the rapid development of AI and biotechnologies (including those relating to germline gene editing, brain-computer Interfaces, life extension, etc.) come vast powers to reshape ourselves and the natural world. As technological advances grant us new powers, so do they blur some boundaries between humans, animals, and machines, prodding us to ask the question: what does it mean to be human? Drawing upon readings in the humanities (including philosophy, theology, literature, etc.) and the sciences, this group will attempt to bridge the existential and empirical study of human identity - and within that context, ask if and how such reflections might help chart a path forward in relation to the right uses of new and potent technologies. We will focus in particular on questions of human purpose, place, and flourishing within the natural order. The reading group is open to students at all levels of study (including medical students), as well as faculty.
This event brings together key people involved in the discovery of ReNU syndrome, a condition affecting development and learning which was first identified last year yet potentially impacts tens of thousands of families across the world. Hearing from experts involved in the discovery, this event will reflect on the importance of genomic diagnosis for rare conditions and the factors necessary both to identify new conditions, and to learn about what they might mean for patients and families. Please be aware the focus of the evening will be around the discovery process and the broader implications of receiving a genetic diagnosis, rather than specific practical implications of a ReNU syndrome diagnosis. Where speakers give permission, talks will be available on our website shortly after the event. This is an in-person event, please only sign up if you are able to attend the event at St Anne's College. Agenda 17:30 The discovery of ReNU syndrome: an overview Dr Nicola Whiffin, Associate Professor and Group Leader at the Big Data Institute and Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford 17:45 Discovering RNU4-2 variants Yuyang Chen, DPhil student, Computational Rare Disease Genomics Group, University of Oxford 17:55 Clarifying the clinical picture of ReNU syndrome and looking to the future Professor Stephan Sanders, Professor of Paediatric Neurogenetics, Department of Paediatrics, University of Oxford 18:05 The clinical – research interface: returning results to families Dr Susan Walker, Director of Translational Genomics, Genomics England 18:15 How the discovery of ReNU syndrome is impacting patients and families Dr Sarah Wynn, Chief Executive Officer, Unique 18:30 Questions/discussion The questions will be followed by a drinks reception until 19:30.
About Alexandra Pringle: Writer, editor, literary agent and publisher. She was the fourth person to join Virago Press in the '70s. As agent she represented Deborah Levy, Ali Smith, Maggie O’Farrell, Amanda Foreman and others. She was editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury Publishing for more than two decades, working with bestselling authors Khaled Hosseini, Donna Tartt and Elizabeth Gilbert; Women’s Prize winners Ann Patchett, Madeline Miller, Kamila Shamsie and Susanna Clarke; Booker Prize winners George Saunders and Margaret Atwood, and Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah. Alexandra comes from the Afriats, an ancient family of Berber Jewish traders whose caravans travelled from Timbuktu to Mogador bringing spices, indigo and gold. She is writing a memoir, Caravan, to be published by Canongate in the UK and Simon & Schuster in the US. She is Visiting Professor at the Centre for Fiction at Manchester Metropolitan University. Alexandra will be in-conversation with Claire Wilcox discussing her progression from publisher to writer, and from working with authors to trying to be one.
The sense of defeat of the old West European left during the late twentieth century tends to be explained as the inevitable result of de-industrialisation or, more precisely, the transition to a globalised world that abolished class as a great historical actor. This book suggests that choices that were made during a concentrated but pivotal transition during the 1970s also mattered. It offers a bold reinterpretation of contemporary European history and a feel for the culture of three leading states using 27 archives, primary and secondary literature from multiple countries, and a transnational and comparative approach. It explores how British, French, and Italian social democratic and Communist parties helped to stabilise their societies during a moment of crisis and manage the shift to a new era. It also analyses why the left encountered the dissolution of the idea of a community of fate amongst a diverse new generation of workers. The book concludes that the denouement of a certain kind of industrial politics had a lasting impact on European society. More about the book can be found here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-halted-march-of-the-european-left-9780198944614?cc=gb&lang=en& If you cannot make the launch in person and would like to join online, please email "$":mailto:matt.myers@history.ox.ac.uk
Ever wondered what quantum technologies actually are? Or who’s building them and why? Join us for Quantum in a Flash, an evening of fast-paced public talks and a panel discussion with early-career researchers working at the forefront of quantum science.
Find out everything you need to know about working in the UK after your studies. We will be covering the new Graduate Route, the new Skilled worker visa (for those hoping to stay longer term and secure permanent roles) and information on the GAE visa (offering internships via sponsorship organisations available to all UK graduates including those who finished in 2020) will also be included. We'll also be covering crucial information for EU students and what will have changed from January 1st 2021. We hope to answer lots of your questions and clarify the new visas which, we hope, offer much more flexibility and opportunity to work in the UK after your studies. Looking forward to seeing you!
This session will focus on a range of practical activities to support people in improving and developing their neurodivergent awareness, and ability to build reasonable adjustments into everyday inclusive practice. We will work on topics including: 1. Accessible space and place 2. Cognitive load 3. Clarity in communications 4. Addressing myths and stereotypes 5. Building confidence in working across the neurotypical / neurodivergent split (the “double empathy” problem) 6. Identifying neurodivergent traits and building in workplace adjustments to cater for those at all stages of the awareness and diagnosis process
This talk is designed to help master's and DPhil students identify and apply for internship opportunities; either related to their academic interests, or in a different field. The presentation will also help students think about how to find organisations of interests and how to approach them for opportunities.
Last updated:2024/10/03 15:38 This session throws out the textbook and replaces it with blocks and pixels! Explore the pedagogical potential of Minecraft Education's immersive and engaging environment, how this can develop computational thinking, and how students can creatively apply programming concepts to solve real-world challenges, demonstrating that Minecraft Education is not just a theoretical concept, but a practical and effective learning tool. Participants will discover how Minecraft Education can serve as a catalyst for developing problem-solving abilities, logical reasoning, and a growth mindset. Kate Whyles is a driving force in exploring innovative educational learning technologies. Her creative approach as a digital innovation and development coach at Nottingham College, UK, has successfully integrated Minecraft Education and "The Hour of Code" into further education, underscoring the transformative power of game-based learning and the imperative of digital literacy. Her recent publication in the English Association Newsletter further highlights her expertise in the field. Driven by her passion for promoting inclusivity, Kate is a STEM Ambassador. She actively mentors young women in tech through the Technovation and TechUp programs and advocates for accessible computer science education.
TORCH Book at Lunchtime is privileged to welcome Professor Tamsin Mather (Earth Sciences) to discuss her highly acclaimed book Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us about the World and Ourselves. The reviews of Professor Mather's book provide wonderful insights into how captivating this discussion will be - "A real treasure, a fascinating, beautiful book on volcanology...." "a powerful new voice erupts onto the scene of popular science" "A collision of high adventure and vital sciences" Join Professor Mather and an expert panel for what promises to be a truly inter-disciplinary journey across time, space and cultures.
Proponents of AI governance often look to the past for examples of how AI might be governed multilaterally. Individuals concerned about AI arms races borrow from nuclear institutions, while those who worry about uncertainty support a scientific panel akin to the IPCC. Others draw on issue areas as diverse as particle physics, civil aviation, and financial regulation. In this talk, Dr Julia Morse, Visiting Fellow of the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, will discuss the value and limitations of such approaches. Historical analogies offer an easy template for policymakers to envision AI governance. Yet each governance body reflects a distinct set of political opportunities and constraints, many of which map uneasily onto the challenge of AI. Dr Morse will highlight such considerations and offer a framework for deciding if, when, and how to borrow from historical examples when designing AI governance. Register to attend in-person:https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/events/historical-analogies-in-ai-governance Register to watch online: https://www.crowdcast.io/c/historical-analogies-in-ai-governance
RGEA is pleased to announce the launch of a new course ‘Good Clinical Practice (GCP) for laboratory staff’. The course is for University of Oxford staff working in laboratories handling samples derived from clinical trials, and outlines the principles of GCP from the perspective of the laboratory. It will be delivered in-person at Boundary Brook House (Old Road Campus), by members of RGEA who have previous experience of working in laboratories.
Are you an early career researcher, fixed-term lecturer, or doctoral student trying to get some writing done? Do you research on a topic related to health, medicine, the body, or mind using Humanities or Social Sciences approaches? The Medical Humanities Writing Group is an inclusive, interdisciplinary and casual gathering, encouraging writing as well as meeting others: all are welcome. We have timed writing blocks and coffee/tea/light refreshments, and are focused on setting writing goals and getting work done in a positive and supportive environment. Attendance is free and you are welcome to join us for anything from a single session, to a few, or even the whole term.
Alberto Kornblihtt is Emeritus Professor at the University of Buenos Aires, and Investigator of the National Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina. He is a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences, EMBO, the French Academy of Sciencies, and other Latin American academies. He obtaied his PhD in Argentina and did a postdoc at the Dunn School of Pathology of Oxford with Tito Baralle in the early 80s. His work focuses on the coupling of RNA polymerase II transcription with alternative splicing and how this mechanism is regulated by chromatin changes. Webpage: http://ark.fbmc.fcen.uba.ar/home_eng.php
The Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network (MPPN) is hosting a webinar on the transformative power of official multidimensional poverty statistics for social development. Directors of government statistics departments across the globe and international organisations, will share their experiences of how MPIs that are rigorous, transparent, and regularly updated have policy traction – and why this matters, especially in fiscally-constrained times. The aim of the event is to foster dialogue, build capacity, and strengthen cooperation to make progress towards sustainable development. Understanding interlinkages across poverty-related deprivations, and responding with high-impact integrated policies, is pivotal in order to accelerate progress towards poverty eradication – SDG1. The Pact for the Future placed poverty eradication at the heart of efforts to achieve the 2030 Agenda, and called for measures that fully capture progress on sustainable development, and go beyond GDP. And this is the first theme of the World Summit on Social Development in Qatar. So how can statistics contribute vigorously now, in new and powerful ways? Register to join this webinar via the Zoom link below. You can find out more information about the event on the OPHI website: https://ophi.org.uk/event/transformative-power-multidimensional-poverty-statistics-social-development
Our work has recently shown that cholera outbreaks in Yemen are closely linked to reported air raids. Governorates experiencing severe air strikes had more than double the cholera incidence compared to those without air strikes. However, traditional conflict measures rely on incomplete reporting and often fail to capture infrastructure destruction and rebuilding, or population displacement. Using nighttime lights (NTL) data, we analyse conflict-related disruptions in Yemen and Ukraine, demonstrating their potential as a scalable alternative for measuring conflict intensity. By incorporating NTL into models of cholera incidence, we address biases in conflict reporting and provide an objective method for assessing the health impacts of conflict in real time. Dr. Daniel Parker is a medical geographer and spatial epidemiologist specializing in infectious disease dynamics, human movement, and spatial interventions, particularly in under-resourced and conflict-affected regions. His research integrates geographic information systems (GIS), Earth observation data, molecular epidemiology, and advanced statistical modelling to examine disease transmission and barriers to healthcare. He has led large-scale geographic reconnaissance efforts for malaria interventions in Eastern Myanmar; worked on vector-borne disease ecology in Asia, East Africa, and the U.S.A.; and conducted research on displaced populations’ access to healthcare. Through collaborations with NGOs, governments, and academic institutions, his work directly informs scalable public health interventions, using geospatial technologies to analyse mobility patterns and model disease distributions across space and time, and to enhance healthcare delivery in vulnerable populations.
Recent, dramatic shifts in global health funding include cuts to US and UK foreign aid. This has had a cascade of devasting consequences on treatment and prevention programmes, including for HIV and TB across the globe. Mitchell Warren will provide updates on AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition's (AVAC) court challenge against the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID and offer his insights into what a more resilient global health funding infrastructure could look like. About the speaker: Mitchell Warren has spent nearly 30 years devoted to expanding access to HIV prevention, working with a wide range of activists and advocates, researchers and scientists, product developers and deliverers, policy makers, community advisory boards and the media from across the globe. This has often been as a translator, helping these often-diverse groups with diverse points of view understand each other better. Since 2004, Mitchell has been the Executive Director of AVAC, an international non-governmental organization that works to accelerate the ethical development and global delivery of HIV prevention options as part of a comprehensive and integrated pathway to global health equity. Through communications, education, policy analysis, advocacy and a network of global collaborations, it mobilizes and supports efforts to deliver proven HIV prevention tools for immediate impact, demonstrates and rolls out new HIV prevention options, and develops long-term solutions needed to end the epidemic.
The Gender Recognition Act 2004 at 20: The state of the field The Gender Recognition Act (GRA) has often been described as a groundbreaking and progressive legal framework for allowing people to legally change their gender. Yet, from the outset, the law has been frequently criticised by trans people and academics as it does not accurately reflect many trans people's own understanding of their gender identity or their sexuality. It is designed to create subjects that govern their behaviour and self-expression in a way that aligns with a purely binary model of sex/gender and sexuality. Although a deviation from these norms does not incur any direct punishment, it indirectly leads to a denial of rights and legal protections. Within a decade of its inception even the then conservative government agreed that the law required reform to make it less regressive and more accessible and transparent. However, since then all reform efforts have been mired in controversy and ultimately stalled. Reflecting on more recent case law including For Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent), which has fundamentally changed non-discrimination principles for trans people as well as the purpose of the Gender Recognition Act, this talk will reflect on the value and place of gender certification in contemporary law for England & Wales. About the Speaker - Dr Flora Renz Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Kent Co-Director of the Centre for Sexuality, Race and Gender Justice, University of Kent Dr Renz is a socio-legal scholar whose research interests lie broadly in the area of gender, disability and social and legal inequalities. Her approach to law is influenced by feminist theory and critical disability studies; it uses a mix of empirical methods and theoretical analysis. Her publications include the monograph Gender Recognition and the Law: Troubling Transgender Peoples' Engagement with Legal Regulation (Taylor & Francis, 2024). Flora’s work on trans issues, including the regulation of single-sex spaces, access to health care and the introduction of third gender markers has been published in leading legal journals including the Journal of Law and Society and Feminist Legal Studies and has been referred to in high quality news sources including The Guardian, BBC News and Channel 4 News. Flora’s work with Dr Avi Boukli on the public health dimension of LGBT people as human trafficking victims/survivors has been cited by the UNODC. From 2018-2022 Flora was a Co-I with Professors Davina Cooper (PI), Emily Grabham and Elizabeth Peel on the ESRC funded socio-legal project The Future of Legal Gender. Drawing on prefigurative methodologies, this project asked whether government should retain the current system of a legal gender assigned at birth and what the continuing relevance of this is in different legal and social areas such as single-sex spaces.
One important question is how microglia detect and determine which synapses to eliminate and which ones to spare. Emerging data suggest that microglial cell states, including the synapse phagocytosing ones, are influenced not only by changes in neuronal activity but also by surrounding astrocytes and perivascular macrophages. Further, cell-cell crosstalk influencing synaptic fate can also involve adaptive immune signalling along brain borders. I will discuss potential modulators of microglia-synapse interactions with relevance in neurodegenerative diseases.
Fisheries are one of the last remaining systems of wild food, contributing vast benefits in the form of nutritious food, livelihoods, foreign revenue, and cultural identity. When orientated towards supporting territorial markets, these systems maintain a wealth of knowledge on who has the rights, powers and responsibilities to decide how areas and resources are used, shared, conserved, and developed. However, over the past few decades these systems of tenure have eroded, as the ability to access fishery benefits has been determined by the economic capacity of often distant nation's fleets and levels of state support. These changes have in turn undermined food security and exacerbated malnutrition in many regions of the world. In this talk I will explore the role and importance of fish to people's cultures, diets, and livelihoods around the world. I will then examine the political, economic and environmental challenges that are undermining these contributions; challenges that have exacerbated considerably in recent months and years, and end with some reflections on promising directions of change to support the role of fisheries for local food systems.
In our April event, Professor Sara Bronin (Texas & Magdalen 2001) in conversation with Jennifer Bradley (Texas & Balliol 1992) will discuss her book Key to the City. Sara is a Mexican-American architect, attorney, Cornell University professor, and policymaker whose interdisciplinary work focuses on how law and policy can foster more equitable, sustainable, well-designed, and connected places. She wrote Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World, and she founded and leads the National Zoning Atlas, which is digitizing, demystifying, and democratizing information about zoning in the United States. She also served in a Presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed role chairing the federal historic preservation agency. Jennifer Bradley is a senior fellow at The Kresge Foundation. Jennifer supports the American Cities Program at Kresge through convenings and thought leadership. She joined the foundation in 2021. Previously, Jennifer served as the director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Aspen Institute, where she focused on inclusive innovation and equitable economic development strategies in cities. Jennifer has also held positions with the Brookings Institution, where she co-authored The Metropolitan Revolution and developed state-level strategies to support metropolitan economic growth, and with the Constitutional Accountability Center, where she co-authored amicus briefs in major appellate cases that supported environmental protections and community development. A native of Austin, Texas, Jennifer earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas, a Master of Philosophy from the University of Oxford and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center. She serves on the boards of the Edlavitch D.C. Jewish Community Center and the Open Contracting Partnership.
What happens if a person who rejects all rules and conventions finds himself in the position of the ruler? The Prussian ‘Soldier King’ Frederick William I (1688-1740), father of Frederick the Great, is a legendary figure of German history. He is known for state reforms, the vast expansion of his army, and for almost sentencing his son to death. Frederick William I demonstratively challenged almost all political, legal, moral, and aesthetic norms of the time: he humiliated the elites, distrusted his officials, avoided the company of women, and traumatized his son. Contemporaries such as Montesquieu regarded him as a ridiculous outsider and a pathological despot. Later historians, however, transformed him into the ‘educator of the German people.’ This bizarre case can serve as an example of the social logic of autocracy and the power of retrospective rationalization. *Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger* was, from 1997 to 2021, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Münster, where she led collaborative research groups on ‘Symbolic Communication and Social Value Systems’ and ‘Religion and Politics.’ Since 2018 she is Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Institute of Advanced Study. She is a member of various academies and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her field of research is the constitutional, political and cultural history of Europe from the 16th century to the 18th, especially the Holy Roman Empire. Her main research focus is on political rituals and procedures, metaphors and symbols.
Emancipating International Law: Confronting the Violence of Racialised Boundaries (OUP, 2025), edited by Mohsen al Attar and Claire Smith, critically examines the entanglements of race, racism, and international law. Across twenty-four chapters, authored by scholars from across the world, reveals how racial hierarchies and white supremacy are embedded within the discipline’s doctrines, institutions, and frameworks. In its own way, each contribution challenges the orthodoxy of international legal scholarship and offers insights for dismantling systemic oppression. Each of the speakers will speak for 10-12 minutes to their chapter or to the theme more broadly, followed by a Q&A section. The event will last 90 minutes. All welcome.
Abstract: Western metaphysics is based on the opposition between reality and appearance. This construction essentially rests on a visual model, or more exactly on a particular staging of what visual experience is. Jocelyn Benoist will question the basis of this metaphysics, by taking into account the reality of appearances and reflecting on their various uses, in particular artistic ones. This path will be taken in the first place by shifting the focus of philosophical analysis from visual to acoustic models. Thus, Jocelyn Benoist will envisage a realism of echoes, as opposed to the metaphysics of shadows. Jocelyn Benoist, born in 1968, is Professor at the university Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he teaches Contemporary Philosophy, and currently a member of the 'Institut Universitaire de France'. He has dedicated his early work to phenomenology and the bridges between phenomenology and early Analytic philosophy. For some time he was the Director of the Husserl Archive of Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Then, he developed a personal investigation into the meaning of realism in philosophy. He has published many books, including recently: Toward a Contextual Realism, H.U.P., 2021, Von der Phänomenologie zum Realismus, Mohr Siebeck, 2022, and Sans Anesthésie: la réalité des apparences, Vrin, 2024.
Gábor Domokos will use the geometric theory of tilings to describe natural patterns ranging from nanoscale to planetary scale, appearing in physics, biology, and geology. Rock fragments can be modelled by polyhedra having, on average, six flat faces and eight sharp vertices. If we depart from polyhedra and admit curved faces then we can tile space without any sharp corners with a new class of shapes, called soft cells, which appear in both living and non-living nature. Mathematics is learning from nature. Gábor Domokos is a research professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He is best known for proving a conjecture of V.I. Arnold by constructing, with Péter Várkonyi, the Gömböc, the first homogeneous, convex shape with just one stable and one unstable static equilibrium. Please email external-relations@maths.ox.ac.uk to this email to register to attend in person. The lecture will be broadcast on the Oxford Mathematics YouTube Channel on Thursday 22 May at 5-6pm and any time after (no need to register for the online version). The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.
Join via Microsoft Teams here: https://tinyurl.com/5d5s7x5k
In response to the Hungarian government’s recent ban of Pride events, the LGBTQ+ History Network is organising a special edition of our reading group, where we will discuss the history of Hungarian queer activism and the LGBTQ+ community. Reading: Judit Takács, ‘Queering Budapest’, in _Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945_, eds. Matt Cook and Jennifer V. Evans, pages 191-210.
Following a recent simulation of a scenario where there was a ‘failure of deterrence’, Rob Johnson examines the implications of recent geopolitical developments, asking how accurate our analyses are. He examines the challenges of critical evaluation in this period of change in the international situation and how urgent it is for scholars to develop a better understanding of escalation, deterrence, and coercion. He offers an assessment based on the interactions of recent policy trajectories, highlighting where there are threats and opportunities, and advocates a new approach to the study of strategic decision-making. Dr Rob Johnson is the Director of SST-CCW and a Senior Research Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Oxford. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian Defence University Staff College and Adjunct Professor of Strategic Studies at Rennes School of Business in France. He is a historian, strategic studies and International Relations scholar combining academic analyses with ‘knowledge exchange’ policy impact. Dr Johnson was the first Director of the UK Office of Net Assessment and Challenge, working closely with the Secretary of State for Defence, Ministers, and Cabinet Office. He continues to advise and delivers direct support to government and armed forces in defence and security matters. His bespoke advisory support is not limited to the United Kingdom, but is requested by governments and armed forces in the United States, Europe, and Australia. He is prominent within professional military education, as a member of the advisory panel of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, lecturer for the Royal College of Defence Studies, and as the director of ‘insight and understanding’ study days and workshops. His former military career involved innovations in counter-terrorism, counterinsurgency, and a clear understanding of the requirements and thinking of the armed services. He is specialist in military strategy, operations, military conceptual developments, and strategic decision making.
One of the distinctive features of modern historical studies at the University of Oxford is its use of methodologies that employ broad perspectives and frameworks of the global dynamism of people and states. Such endeavors have resulted in new understandings in the field of East Asian history, revealing its transnational connections beyond the region as well as historical continuities with the pre-modern period. This half-day workshop will discuss how new images and understandings of history, politics, and culture can be achieved, showcasing several studies on transnationalism in East Asia. The presenters are scholars of Chinese and Japanese studies of modern history who research the transnational movements of people. These scholars all actively engage in discussions of the dynamic transnationalism within and beyond East Asia that they connect with the rest of the world. The workshop will be hybrid style with active in-person and online discussions. Everyone who is interested in this topic is welcome to participate in the discussions on transnationalism. Each presentation will be twenty minutes, followed by a general discussion.
This workshop will introduce participants to the key catalogues and finding aids for post-1800 archives and manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries. In particular the session will focus on Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts, the online catalogue for post-1800 archives and manuscripts. The session will also briefly introduce some of the major UK online gateways for discovering archives. The topics covered include: how to use the Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts online catalogue; other printed archive catalogues in the Bodleian Libraries; major subject areas covered in Bodleian archives and modern manuscripts; and national archive gateways. The workshop will also include a question and answer session with Bodleian archivists. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
The mainstream narrative in the West posits that Donald Trump has upended the 'rules-based international order'. However, a transition in the international order was already in full swing long before Trump came to office, driven by an increasingly multi-polar balance of power and a series of actions that revealed the hypocrisy of Western foreign policy — both developments that called into question the legitimacy of Western leadership in the world. In addition to transnational challenges such as climate change, the world now faces Trump's iconoclasm and the conflicts he inherited (from Ukraine to Gaza) at the same time. For 18 months, the Quincy Institute under the aegis of the Better Order Project convened more than 130 leading experts and practitioners from across the world to generate concrete recommendations for how to stabilize an international order that is transitioning away from unipolarity and Western leadership. Its landmark report was published in November 2024. Please join us for a discussion on how the world might construct a more durable and inclusive order amid today's varied sources of chaos and change.
In this talk, Dr Harrison will reflect on his first year working as The Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence at Oxford. He will share his views on the current challenges and opportunities in digital healthcare, and where the sector is moving in terms of AI. The talk will set-out examples of exciting health innovation in the Oxford ecosystem, and provide specific advice on translation, commercialisation, and scale-up.
“Local histories” from the eastern Islamic world are a rich potential source for environmental history. My thesis focuses on three such texts produced between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries AD and interrogates how the “local” was framed and defined in reference to geography, the land, and its natural (and supernatural!) features. The exploitation of natural resources—most notably water—is also a subject of concern for the authors of these histories, and the link between control of the environment, prosperity, and just government forms an important part of the ethical dimension of the texts. In this presentation I will give a quick overview of my thesis—with plenty of context for non-specialists—and discuss broader questions about writing the environmental history of the Middle East and Islamic world in this period, and what the possibilities (and limitations) of the available sources are.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
Synucleinopathies consist of several neurodegenerative disorders which have in common the progressive loss of brain cells, accompanied by the formation of microscopic protein aggregates within remaining neurons. Although symptoms and neuropathological features overlap to some extent, patho-clinical features are also distinct between the syndromes, indicating different underlying disease mechanisms. We previously conducted single-cell analyses of neurons taken from Parkinson’s disease (PD) post-mortem brains. The results revealed profound mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) differences between remaining (but susceptible to undergoing neurodegeneration) neurons of different neurochemical types, namely mesencephalic dopaminergic compared to PPN cholinergic neurons. This indicates that mtDNA are affected differently, depending on neuronal type, in synucleinopathy patients. My talk will cover recent and ongoing studies in my lab that analyse single-cell, type specific neurons from post-mortem synucleinopathy brains, to better understand mDNA variance patterns between vulnerable neurons, particularly catecholaminergic (i.e. dopaminergic and noradrenergic) and cholinergic neurons. In addition, I will report on a new cholinergic-synucleinopathy model system we are developing, which shows mitochondrial dysfunction. Understanding the underlying mechanisms to explain differential neurotype-specific vulnerabilities for synucleinpathy disorders may allow for improved therapies that are tailored to correct mtDNA deficiencies in a cell-type specific manner, hence avoiding side-effects from non-intended cellular targets.
Puzzled by PICO? Daunted by databases? Baffled by Boolean? This one-hour online introductory class will offer top tips and advice on how to find literature to answer a research question. No prior experience necessary! Together, we will break down a question into the PICO format, put together a structured search, and try it out in PubMed. By the end of this session, you will be able to: explain what structured searching is, and when to use it; break your research question down into searchable concepts; and make use of Boolean operators (ANDs/ORs) in your structured searches. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Are you wanting to apply for job roles beyond academia? Creating a strong CV is vital to unlocking the next stage of the job application process. However, there can be many differences in the format and content of a CV focused towards a role beyond academia compared to one for university research positions. This online session will outline the key building blocks of a CV structured for careers outside of academia research, share examples to help with formatting and language, and briefly guide on how best translate your research skills and experience. This session will focus on application materials for roles beyond academia only. Workshop objectives: *Provide an overview of the variation in CV formats for job roles beyond academia *Provide tips for visually formatting your CV to best communicate your experience *Share methods for identifying the language and skills employers wants to see This event is open to Research staff and DPhil students.
Recent advances in neuroanatomy and physiology make it possible to probe whole-brain mechanisms of cognition and behavior. However, as yet, few models in computational neuroscience have tackled the mechanisms underlying highly distributed neural activity during cognitive tasks. In this talk I will describe our anatomy-led approach to developing cortex-wide models of neural dynamics during cognitive tasks and our recent anatomical findings of gradients of neurotransmitter receptors in the cortex. I will highlight our investigations into how inputs from neuromodulatory systems may shift the cortical dynamical landscape, affecting cell-type specific interactions, and how this may confer flexibility on distributed cognitive functions such as conscious perception and working memory.
Development of Motion Vision
Panel Discussion followed by Q&A. An essential, yet sometimes overlooked, part of migration research is ‘lived experience’ – the unique and individual stories of migrants in the UK. Particular examples of these stories, which can deepen and contribute to migration scholarship, are those of migrant artists and individuals working in the UK arts sector, where much of their artistic work, whether intentional or not, centres on themes of migration or mobility. Joining an already precarious and competitive industry, theatremakers, producers, and performers from outside the UK can face potential barriers: an absence of the ‘right’ network when they arrive, language and cultural challenges, and being seen as 'other'. Having entered the UK, they must still make it through the Customs Gates of the ‘British’ Arts scene. However, creating and presenting artistic work in another language or bringing skills and techniques from different cultural perspectives can offer opportunities to spotlight alternative forms of creativity, broaden audience experience, and enhance an industry that thrives on constant evolution. This panel discussion is a chance to hear directly from individuals working in the UK as artists and arts professionals and how their experiences of migration inform their work and creativity (and vice versa).
Evidence-based interventions constitute a critical advancement in the mental health field. However, there is a high risk of engaging in oppressive practices, particularly if these interventions – and associated evaluation methods – are not co-designed nor co-implemented in close collaboration with community leaders and allies. Equally critical is to ensure that adapted interventions and research tools are contextually and culturally responsive to focus populations. In this presentation, Professor Parra-Cardona will describe 20+ years of clinical and prevention work focused on the cultural adaptation of evidence-based parenting interventions for Latinx populations in the US and Latin America. He will describe how the foundation of this work has been grounded in strong community alliances and co-leadership. In addition, he will demonstrate the need to culturally adapt interventions and research tools originally developed with majority populations, in an effort to prevent ethnocentric and imperialistic practices in mental health research and practice. He will also reflect on the critical importance of guiding clinical and prevention interventions according to solid theories of clinical change, as well as social justice values and principles. Finally, he will invite the audience to reflect about the ways in which clinical and prevention intervention implemented in the midst of intense contextual adversity, constitute a powerful opportunity for healing, not only for the beneficiaries of interventions, but also for providers committed to clinical and community-based practice. Booking is required for people outside of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI). A booking link will be available shortly. DSPI Members do not need to register.
One of the biggest challenges in battery development is how to increase their energy density. The cathode material represents a major fundamental limitation. Layered oxides, such as LiNi0.9Mn0.05Co0.05O2 and NaNi1/3Mn1/3Fe1/3O2, remain the best class of materials for the highest energy density Li-ion and Na-ion cells. However, to increase further the amount of energy they can store requires moving to alkali-rich cathodes (ie Li:TM>1) and contending with structural instability at high states of charge. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances we have made in understanding the behaviour of next generation cathode materials. I will explore how oxide ions in the structure participate in the energy storage reaction to store extra charge. I will show how this O-redox reaction drives structural order-disorder transitions and results in the formation of O2 molecules trapped within the structure. I will illustrate how we have applied this understanding to overcome some of the critical issues they face and to develop improved Li-rich cathode materials. I will also look beyond layered oxides to discuss advances and opportunities in alkali-rich disordered rocksalt cathodes for beyond Li batteries.
You are cordially invited to a special lecture & reception celebrating the publication of _The Forger’s Creed: Reinventing Art History in Early Modern China_ by J P Park. A limited number of copies will be available at the reduced price of £30. *Please note that we can only accept cash*. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-forgers-creed/hardcover
The panel will explore the changing dynamics between Europe and China. The sharp turn in US foreign policy under the second Trump administration is pushing for a rethink of Beijing’s ties with both the EU and key European countries, UK included. At the same time, the EU continues to define China as a partner, economic competitor and a systemic rival. The panel discussion will explore the challenges and opportunities defining the relationship across various policy areas including trade and investment, security, technology, climate and global governance.
Maidservant has been a staple character in Chinese stories where a lady is caught up in incidents of romances and desire. Despite being similarly subject to portrayal as objects of desire, the maidservants were often further subject to additional stereotypes due to their inferior social status. This talk chiefly investigates the narratives about maidservant characters in the late Ming erotic novel Langshi 浪史 (Chronicles of the Libertine), an idealised erotic tale noted for the vulgarity and adaption from other texts. Treating the text as a product romanticising literati fashion, this paper investigates the roles and image painted by the writer, the implied expectations and exploitation of maidservants, and the underlying prejudices towards maidservants as a gendered lower social class as revealed in the novel. Dr Cheuk Yee Wai obtained her DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford in 2023. She holds an MPhil in Gender Studies and BA in Religious Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her general research interests revolve around representations of the erotic, females and taboos. She is currently working as Junior Postdoctoral Researcher for the TEXTCOURT project.
Please contact "$":mailto:sarah.apetrei@campion.ox.ac.uk for the Teams link to join remotely.
'Anshan Iron and Steel Works (Angang), located in China’s largest heavy industry region, Manchuria (Northeast China), was the largest steel-making enterprise of the Mao era (1949–1976). Drawing on archives in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and English, my recently published book, _Making Mao's Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism_ (Cambridge University Press, 2024), offers the first comprehensive history of Angang before, during, and after the Mao era. Among other themes, it traces the pre-Communist roots of China’s socialist industrialisation, showing how the Chinese Communist Party developed a new system of industrialisation in Manchuria by combining Soviet-style economic planning with industrial legacies inherited from the Japanese and Nationalists. By highlighting the symbiotic relationship between socialism and capitalism, the book situates China’s socialist industrialisation within the global history of late industrialisation.'
The aim of the seminar is to foster a dynamic and interdisciplinary postcolonial research culture supportive of individual scholarship. Finalists, M.St. and D.Phil. students, lecturers, fellows, scholars from across the university community – all are welcome. If you’d like to appear on the seminar mailing list, please email zana.mody@kellogg.ox.ac.uk, riley.faulds@worc.ox.ac.uk OR hannah.fagan@mansfield.ox.ac.uk
In 2016, writing in The Washington Post, Daniel Drezner asked: “where have all the big IR theories gone?” Since then, many other IR scholars have confirmed that IR theorising appears to have reached a dead end. Given that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory” (Kurt Lewin), the current impasse of IR theory is not just an academic matter – especially not in a world characterised by resurgent authoritarianism, pressing global environmental threats, and the spread of life-altering technologies. In this talk, Marco Verweij will argue that the development of IR theory has come to a standstill as many IR scholars have agreed with Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie’s opinion that it is not possible to generalise about the social and linguistic construction of international politics. According to this view, recognising that international relations are constructed also implies that international relations can only be ‘understood’ and not ‘explained’. In his recent work, Alexander Wendt has tried to solve this conundrum but has done so by misrepresenting quantum science. Verweij will show that the ‘cultural theory’ pioneered by anthropologist Dame Mary Douglas offers a much more productive and policy-relevant way forward. Marco Verweij is Professor of Political Science at Constructor University Bremen. Previously, he earned his keep at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and the Singapore Management University and served as co-editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies. In his research, he aims to understand how complex (or ‘wicked’) social and environmental problems can be resolved through the combined forces of (inter)governmental action, entrepreneurship, technological innovation, as well as civil society engagement. Moreover, he explores how political theory and neuroscience can strengthen one another. As an ‘undisciplined’ social scientist, he has published in leading journals in political science, public administration, sociology, geography, environmental studies, philosophy of science, engineering and neuroscience (and in not so leading journals in economics).
The Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that attendance at the Surgical Grand Rounds can count toward internal CPD, with 1 point awarded per hour. Please note that in-person attendance is required, and you will need to sign the attendance register. Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend online.
The Brazilian Studies Programme Annual Conference brings together scholars from across the UK to explore critical issues shaping Brazil’s development trajectory. This year’s event, titled “Pathways to Development,” will feature panels on contested geographies, democracy and human rights, and foreign policy, alongside a keynote address and ample opportunity for discussion. Open to students, academics, and the wider public, the conference offers a vibrant space for debate and exchange on Brazil’s evolving role in the world.
The question can be formulated as a statistical hypothesis asserting that the distribution of the shapes of closed curves representing outlines of cell nuclei in a spatial domain is independent of the distribution of their locations. The key challenge in developing a procedure to test the hypothesis from a sample of spatially indexed curves (e.g. from an image) lies in how symmetries in the data are accounted for: shape of a curve is a property that is invariant to similarity transformations and reparameterization, and the shape space is thus an infinite-dimensional quotient space. Starting with a convenient geometry for the shape space developed over the last few years, I will discuss dependence measures and their estimates for spatial point processes with shape-valued marks, and demonstrate their use in testing for spatial independence of marks in a breast cancer application.
Marc Adams CPsychol AFBPsS, from People Organisation and Development will introduce the career development review and provide hints, tips and suggestions on how to get the most out it for your career development (for postdocs and other research staff who are not students). The session will include a short Q&A. The Postdoc Power Hour (PoPoH) is a series of monthly one-hour online events designed specifically for postdocs and other research staff who are not students and takes place on the first Friday of every month, 11 am to 12 pm. Join the event on Teams "here":https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MGQ4NzIyMGItOWJiNy00OWU0LTkxZTctNzg1YWIyMzViZTgx%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22febbad3b-db95-4b59-a93a-344e16f4dee5%22%7d Each PoPoH session covers: * a brief overview of career and training support available to postdocs and other research staff across the University * a 30-minute lecture by an expert on the session’s theme * a Career Chat where a Careers Adviser for Research Staff will address careers concerns and questions * ideas for simple things you can do now for your career and work/life balance
The modelling of rock systems in chemical equilibrium provides one of the few quantitative links between petrology and other geoscience disciplines. Mineral equilibrium modelling may be used to estimate the pressures and temperatures recorded in igneous or metamorphic rocks, or to simulate the mineralogical changes by which a rock responds to changes in pressure, temperature, or bulk chemistry. In this talk I will discuss some recent developments in mineral equilibrium modelling. AvPT+ is new method in geothermobarometry, implemented in the software THERMOCALC, which is in some sense a hybrid between two established methods: multiple-reaction thermobarometry and pseudosection modelling. A comparison of results from avPT+ and pseudosection modelling suggests that “just one more generation” of mineral equations of state is needed, reproducing observed mineral compositions more faithfully than the current generation. I will discuss the experiment-based approach that my research group is taking to this task, before outlining the fundamental experimental and modelling limitations on mineral equilibrium calculations.
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder marked by selective neuronal loss. Here, we integrate deep, full-length single-nuclei sequencing of the human substantia nigra across PD stages with genome-wide association studies to uncover genetic and cellular interactions driving neurodegeneration. We find that PD genetic risk converges in AGTR1+ dopaminergic neurons and perineuronal satellite oligodendrocytes (psODCs), both reduced in PD, alongside oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) that exhibit altered isoform usage within OPC-psODCs differentiation. These cell subtypes form a genetic risk-enriched network of interactions, lost early in disease progression. We identify AGTR1+ neurons as a metabolically stressed state, not a distinct cell type, exhibiting renin-angiotensin system (RAS) and MAPK activation, oxidative stress, and mitochondrial dysfunction. A GWAS of coincident PD and type 2 diabetes (T2D) identifies significant loci in AGTR1 and TCF7L2, establishing a mechanistic explanation for their comorbidity, while AGTR1+ neurons appear directly targeted by RAS and T2D therapeutics providing the missing mechanistic explanation for their repurposing to PD. SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY After obtaining his PhD from the European Bioinformatics Institute and Cambridge University, Caleb joined Oxford University contributing to almost all of the major large-scale genome projects. The group he established in Oxford in 2011 gained insights into complex neurological disorders using functional, integrative and network genomics, combined with statistical genetics and iPSC modelling. In 2018, he joined the UK Dementia Research Institute where his programme generates and interprets large-scale molecular data sets from human tissue in order to identify genes and processes that contribute to many complex neurodegenerative disorders, and then validates findings within iPSC models. Within the UK-DRI, he was appointed as the national Director of Informatics with a mission to democratise and integrate data to empower researchers within the UK Dementia Research Institute and beyond.
Welcome back! We are opening our Trinity term card with an exciting discussion group around the intellectual histories of Black women. To do this, we invite you all to consider two texts, both by Professor Mia Bay who will be joining us next week for a greater discussion around the topic. Mia Bay, ‘Looking Backward in Order to Go Forward: Black Women Historians and Black Women's History’, in Deborah Gray White (ed.) Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), pp. 182 - 199. Mia Bay, ‘The Battle for Womanhood Is the Battle for Race: Black Women and Nineteenth Century Racial Thought’ in Mia Bay, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Martha Jones (eds.) Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), pp. 75 - 92. We do ask attendees to consider the chosen materials, however, we welcome anyone who is interested, regardless of the extent you have engaged with the materials. The discussion will be guided by your thoughts and opinions, however, we will also come prepared with prompts to spark conversation. ------ Bluesky: raceresistance.bsky.social Subscribe to our mailing list by sending a blank email to: race-and-resistance-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
A workshop for all early career scholars working on any field of early modern global intellectual history. We will discuss methodological and practical challenges of studying global intellectual history at a post-graduate and post-doctoral level. We encourage any early career scholar with an interest in global intellectual history to participate. *Programme* 14:00 Welcome 14:10 Presentations 15:10 Coffee break 15:30 Discussion 17:00 Drinks
As the UK faces increasing risks from international cascading climate and nature-related shocks, it is critical to strengthen resilience across trade, supply chains, and the economy and increase mobilisation of finance to address the growing risks in emerging and developing economies. This event with distinguished panel of speakers will explore new evidence on the evolving global risk landscape and its implications for policy and finance. The event will launch the new report Towards UK Systemic Resilience to International Cascading Climate Risks, prepared by the Environmental Change Institute with support from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) under the Oxford Martin Systemic Resilience Initiative. The report presents new research on the scale of transboundary climate and nature risks using high-frequency trade data to assess how systemic shocks impact UK trade and competitiveness. The launch will be followed by an expert panel discussion focused on how to utilise key policy and financial levers to boost resilience domestically and internationally. Speakers and Panellists include: Rachel Kyte | UK Special Representative for Climate Jim Hall | Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks (ECI) Nicola Ranger | Executive Director of the Oxford Martin Systemic Resilience Initiative Jasper Verschuur | Assistant Professor in Engineering Systems and Climate Security at Delft University of Technology Sir Charles Godfray | Director of the Oxford Martin School Michael Obersteiner | Director of the Environmental Change Institute
A crucial input into causal inference is the imputed counterfactual outcome. Imputation error can arise because of sampling uncertainty from estimating the prediction model using the untreated observations, or from out-of-sample information not captured by the model. While the literature has focused on sampling uncertainty, it vanishes with the sample size. Often overlooked is the possibility that the out-of-sample error can be informative about the missing counterfactual outcome if it is mutually or serially correlated. Motivated by the best linear unbiased predictor (\blup) of \citet{goldberger:62} in a time series setting, we propose an improved predictor of potential outcome when the errors are correlated. The proposed \pup\; is practical as it is not restricted to linear models, can be used with consistent estimators already developed, and improves mean-squared error for a large class of strong mixing error processes. Ignoring predictability in the errors can distort conditional inference. However, the precise impact will depend on the choice of estimator as well as the realized values of the residuals.
The Insights for Action seminar series explores how researchers and practitioners within and beyond Oxford are using research insights to drive social change. This seminar will discuss the work of social entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings, and lessons from their work for anyone working in these uncertain times.
The Oxford Conservative Thought (OCT) Reading Group is a non-partisan group devoted to academic exploration of small-c conservative political thought. We welcome, and actively encourage, viewpoint diversity and constructive engagement across ideological divides (all good-willed participants are welcome!) Each week we read one assigned text, and we recommend more for anyone who is very keen! The OCT meets weekly in term time on Fridays from 4-5:30pm. Week 1 explores conservative views on private property and markets, and on the relationship between economic and social conservatism, with a reading from Roger Scruton. Please view the reading list here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-FnMPnWCQm3urAvD38jjRQkTEGA2EuSSjZjWm41Eszw/edit?usp=sharing Please use the form here to sign up, and we will send you the room details: forms.gle/22hEfZEQ2imbWXiE6
Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 1-3 Supplementary: William Morris, Review of Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889); ‘Why I am a Communist’ (1894); ‘How Shall We Live Then?’ (1889)
Seminar followed by Q&A and drinks - attend in person or online - all welcome Nature-based solutions (NbS) are actions to protect, sustainably manage, or restore natural ecosystems in ways that enhance their ability to reduce or remove carbon emissions. They are important to achieving net-zero climate goals, especially by reducing emissions from land use change. NbS credits feature prominently in carbon offset markets. Economics has an important role in assessing the unique benefits, costs, and distributional impacts of NbS; addressing the concerns raised over additionality, leakage, and permanence for the effectiveness of scaling up NbS; and evaluating the integrity of NbS offset credits. In addition, the long-term potential of NbS for climate mitigation will depend on their cost-effectiveness compared to conventional energy and technology-based solutions. More analysis is needed of how NbS could be supported by economy-wide policies and financing sources other than carbon markets. Edward B. Barbier is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics, Colorado State University and a Senior Scholar in the School of Global Environmental Sustainability. His main expertise is environmental and resource economics as well as international environmental policy. He has consulted for national, international and non-governmental agencies, including many UN organizations, the World Bank and the OECD. Professor Barbier has published widely in leading academic journals and is a highly cited scholar on global environmental and sustainability issues. His latest book is the award-winning Economics for a Fragile Planet, Cambridge University Press. http://www.edwardbbarbier.com/
River deltas are vital ecosystems supporting rich biodiversity, unique cultural traditions, and millions of livelihoods through fisheries and agriculture while also serving as critical buffers against storm surges and coastal erosion. Central to the development of the modern global trade and eco-system, they are increasingly threatened by climate change impacts; sea-level rise, altered river flows, extreme weather events and continuing forms of colonial and ethno-nationalist exploitation to name just a few. In this seminar, we will discuss the past and future of deltas and how we can ensure a sustainable future for their communities, biodiversity, and entire ecosystems.
Previous experience of handling medieval manuscripts is desirable.
Robert Kagan builds on his long-standing argument that the liberal international order—once seen as a “paradise” of stability and cooperation—is increasingly under threat. Drawing from his influential works such as Of Paradise and Power and The Jungle Grows Back, Kagan explores how the US, EU, and UK are navigating a world marked by rising authoritarianism, geopolitical rivalry, and the erosion of global norms. He warns that without active leadership and strategic engagement from the West, the postwar order may give way to a more chaotic and dangerous international landscape.
At the age of 25, Zoom Rockman is an award-winning political cartoonist, and the originator of a unique blend of animation and puppetry. His new film Survivor is the true story of Ivor Perl, a twelve-year-old child who lived through Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Zoom will present the film himself, and participate in a discussion afterwards.
In recent years, Japan has won World Heritage status for four industrial sites: the Iwami silver mine, the Tomioka silk filature, the cluster of Meiji Era Industrial Revolution sites of coal mining, ship building, and iron and steel production, and the Sado Island gold mines. In this talk Professor Gordon will examine a portion of Japan’s modern industrial heritage that has not been officially recognized: the monuments memorializing wartime foreign laborers brought to Japan under varying degrees of coercion between 1939 and 1945. These monuments are “dark” in three ways. They commemorate and mourn the negative heritage of war. Many are located well off the beaten path. And many of the sites of this labor, including mines, were located underground. Although these sites are triply dark and neither UNESCO nor the Japanese government has designated them as official sites of heritage, they are surprisingly numerous. Professor Gordon will examine the process of curating this dark heritage and the messages it conveys, with a comparative look at the way German heritage sites treat their similarly dark heritage. Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. His teaching and research focus primarily on modern Japan. In 2011, while serving as director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Gordon led the Institute in founding the Japan Disasters Digital Archive, a digital archive project that aims to preserve the vast array of digital records concerning the March 11, 2011 disaster in Japan and its aftermath. The archive makes those records available to a global community of citizens, students, and scholars. He is currently working on the public history of Japan’s industrial heritage in relation to local, national and global institutions (UNESCO). He gives particular attention to shuttered energy industries, including coal mines with their negative heritage of wartime labor exploitation and the recent emergence of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant as a site of negative heritage.
Oxford Political Review (OPR) is celebrating the launch of its 15th print issue, under the theme 'Home', with a panel discussion on the politics of place and belonging, featuring Richard Sennett and Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni. Richard Sennett is a sociologist and writer whose work over the past five decades has profoundly shaped how we think about cities and social life. His books include The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, The Culture of the New Capitalism, The Craftsman, and Building and Dwelling. He has advised the United Nations on urban issues and currently serves as a member of the UN Committee on Urban Initiatives. His past roles include founding the New York Institute for the Humanities and teaching at NYU and the LSE. Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in Oxford's Department of Politics and International Relations. Her research focuses on the politics of place in European countries. In the context of a growing recognition that spatial inequality affects political outcomes, she studies the institutional and socio-political factors that affect economic performance at the local level, and the impact of local economic trajectories on political attitudes and outcomes. Her work has been published in New Political Economy and the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, among other journals.
In this lecture, Professor Kinsella will evaluate the United States military’s detailed Instruction on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR). What are its implications for conceptualizing CHMR as a strategic and moral military imperative and assessing the preeminent role of the United States under both the Biden and Trump administrations? What are its implications for democratic accountability and for engagement with civilian casualties and civilian harm? Helen M. Kinsella is Professor of Political Science & Law at the University of Minnesota. She is also an Affiliate Faculty of Minnesota's Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Human Rights Center, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queens University, Belfast. Event Schedule 4 :45pm - 4:59pm: Registration 5pm: The 2025 Astor Lecture 'Beyond Mere Inconvenience: United States and Civilian Harm', followed by a Q&A 6 :30pm - 7:30pm: Drinks Reception
As satellite technologies and space exploration expand, the need for sustainable practices has never been more urgent. Join us for an engaging discussion on the United Nations’ Guidelines for the Long-Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities, a landmark framework shaping how we use and govern space responsibly. This conversation brings together leading voices in the field — Prof. Kai-Uwe Schrogl, Prof. Rosanna Deplano, and Dr. P.J. Blount, moderated by Prof. Marc Ventresca — to unpack the legal, political, and technological challenges of building a sustainable future beyond Earth. This event is for anyone interested in space governance, sustainability and international cooperation.
My mother told me …” Indigenous and decolonial approaches to maternal mental health in the Global South- Dr Sarah Mlambo The significance of alternative Global South narratives is a critical determinant in shaping and identifying a community often not given a place and value in promoting maternal mental well-being. Decolonisation of Health aims to achieve more significant equity and justice by creating a myriad of perspectives and knowledge systems that may have been marginalised yet having positive and practical impacts on women’s health. Diversity, access, equity, and inclusion initiatives are critical in identifying and enhancing context-specific maternal mental health well-being interventions. Drawing from a range of global south perspectives like ‘Masungiro’, the integration and inclusion of alternative narratives into mainstream mental health practices to uphold inclusive, complementary, and culturally sensitive care models. Advocating for and recognising Indigenous-alternative knowledge as a tool in advancing maternal mental well-being should be prioritised in ensuring cultural safety and inclusivity. The resilience and healing wisdom that is embedded in alternative knowledge seeks to include the excluded in promoting maternal mental health and wellbeing. This presentation, therefore, narrates the social alternatives to promoting maternal mental well-being through a bottom-up approach with intergenerational knowledge and practices, UBUNTU, community, and family support structures, and the effects of social isolation among displaced women. Distribution of dark matter in galaxies-Dr Marie Korsage Stars, galaxies and everything else we observe with the naked eye and through telescopes make up only a small fraction of all the matter contained in the Universe. The unseen component, referred to as Dark Matter, cannot be detected by direct observations; rather, its shape and distribution are inferred from the study of visible matter. Interestingly, an important fraction of the Universe’s matter content is found within galaxies, making them ideal laboratories for investigating the properties of dark matter and uncovering the secrets of the Universe. Understanding dark matter distribution is crucial to solving fundamental questions about galaxy formation and the structure of the universe. In fact, this constitutes a key science goal of the upcoming SKA (Square Kilometre Array, located in South Africa and Australia), the most ambitious project in radio astronomy to date. In this talk, I will discuss methods used to investigate mass distribution in galaxies with an emphasis on Dark Matter and present results of a study we conducted on the relationship between the mass of gas in galaxies and that of the Dark Matter. The study was performed using state-of-the-art instruments, and the results it provides constitute an important step in our understanding of the dark matter properties. From Pastoral to Displacement Economy? Protracted displacement and livelihood in the Somali Region of Ethiopia-Dr Fekadu Adguna Conflict and climate change displaced millions across the Horn and East Africa. The region is currently hosting over 18 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) and 5.3 million refugees and asylum seekers – close to a third of the global IDP and 17% of refugees. Mobility has been part of the pastoral way of life. Pastoral mobility had established the Somali population in Northeast Africa across the present national borders of Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and Somalia. Since the 1960s, however, conflict and displacement have significantly affected the Somali inhabited territories. Most of the inhabitants have experienced multiple displacements and lived as ‘refugee’, ‘host’ ‘IDP’ etc. due to conflict, drought and flood. The longstanding vulnerability created livelihood that very much depend on socio-cultural, kinship and informal cross-border relationships. By setting the context of displacement in the region and among the Somali population in the Horn of Africa, the presentation will highlight the complex layers of displacement and criticize the simplistic approaches in the humanitarian/development response.
Join us, with playwright Karim Khan and the Old Fire Station (OFS) theatre team for an engaging event exploring the rich and diverse histories of Oxford’s Muslim and migrant women. Hear from Karim Khan about his upcoming play, which is currently in production with the OFS, and take part in a creative activity that contributes to an evolving archive project in collaboration with Everyday Muslim and the University of Oxford’s Community History Hub. Share and discover personal stories and community experiences through thought-provoking migration, faith, and identity discussions. Take a tour of the theatre. Bring your stories or photographs and be part of preserving and sharing Oxford’s Muslim heritage.
Join us for a one mile road run open to all of the public, as we celebrate the anniversary of Roger Bannister running the first ever sub 4-minute mile, on 6 May 1954 in Oxford. Bespoke finisher medal and a free ticket to watch the elite track races in the afternoon. Find us on Instagram and Facebook @bannistermiles2025.
Possession of individuals by a God/ Goddess, a ghost, or the spirit of a late ancestor or neighbour is a commonly reported phenomenon in India. Women have a very specific experience of the ritual of possession often reflecting unequal power relations within family or society. The power relation analysis can be extended to understand possession among not just women but any vulnerable group, caste or class. Anthropologists have explained potential causes, effects and the functions that possession plays in the lives of the people and some ethnographic studies have also produced broadly functionalist understandings of possession in frameworks of power, resistance, or as cathartic release. Sometimes these stories of possession where death has occurred trickle into courts as cases of murder. Spirit possession, here, could be attributed to the killer or the killed. This paper will demonstrate that cultural explanations are often given psychological or practical foundations in courts – insanity, incapacity, madness or mental breakdown, or illiteracy and superstition. The presence of the supernatural in courts carries a particular and peculiar invocation of the trope of tradition versus modernity where the ‘rational’ law is being administered against ‘believing’ citizens. The presentation of incidents of spirit possession as ‘unconscious crimes’ where motives are harder to establish affects both conviction and sentencing. This article analyses cases where evidence of the supernatural is presented before Indian courts to understand attitudes of the administration and the judiciary in dealing with ghosts, gods and spirits.
How should Muslims address moral arguments to non-Muslims? If there is no moral knowledge outside revelation, then it seems such arguments, which are saliently addressed by Muslims to non-Muslim interlocutors on topics including justice for Palestine, anti-Muslim prejudice, and many other issues, must be something other than good faith appeals to reason. This has disturbing implications for co-operation in pursuit of justice along religious lines. However, many Muslim theologians have held that humans can, independently of revelation, at least discern in broad outlines the goodness or badness of certain features of the world. Does this position permit sufficiently determinate knowledge to ground a shared moral standpoint between Muslims and others? If so, what is the content of this standpoint and what are its political implications? Dr Ramon Harvey, Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Cambridge Muslim College, is a leading expert in the Maturidi school of Islamic theology and in the philosophical tradition of 'natural law', which holds that determinate knowledge of right and wrong, grounded in God's wisdom, is accessible outside revelation and can serve as the basis for a shared moral standpoint across religious lines. Dr Harvey will address the Seminar (in person), followed by open discussion and questions. To gain maximum benefit from the session, participants are encouraged to read a short paper by Dr Harvey beforehand, which will be provided upon registration. Additional readings will also be provided for those wishing to go deeper into the topic. This Seminar is part of the Oxford Islam and Justice Programme, which explores fundamental questions about the relationship between the Islamic intellectual tradition and conceptions of justice appropriate for religiously plural societies. More information on the series can be found at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10KAf2zssJd8J1KquEDTcC2WRBtWn45KLkvkqNMbVBio/edit?usp=sharing
In this paper I extend previous research on the history of mid-twentieth-century Burmese vipassanā (insight) meditation through an exploration of some of the particularities of the meditation-teaching models of the lay meditation master and first Accountant General of Independent Burma, Sayagyi U Ba Khin (1899–1971). While much scholarship has glossed over the charismatic healing modalities of U Ba Khin and his students, I argue here that charismatic healing was at the center of U Ba Khin’s teaching practices. What is more, U Ba Khin’s charismatic approach to meditation and meditation teaching was embedded in a missionary theory that shared thematic elements with esoteric weizzā (wisdom-power) traditions oriented to spiritual practices that might lead to world-domination in a postcolonial Burmese context. Drawing primarily on U Ba Khin’s oral Burmese Dharma talks, I suggest that U Ba Khin’s mission to spread vipassanā in the twentieth century can best be understood as the project of a weizzā-dho (Pāli: vijjādhara), a wizard wielding a particularly powerful form of vipassanā-vijjā (the wisdom-power of insight meditation). I also explore how the post-war context of U Ba Khin’s mission, his concerns around the fallout of the use of nuclear weapons in the Asian theatre, and his attempt to scientize Buddhist theories of matter, influenced how he understood the process of vipassanā meditation.
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/WdBfO6PwTi-kG-8kkmaDVQ#/registration Global Conversations on the Movement for Reparations The African Union proclaimed this year to be the year of “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations,” to promote engagement on reparations. The organisation has spearheaded several programmes and conversations as efforts towards this. To take stock of the efforts and bring the conversation to Oxford, a cross-cultural committee of African scholars and scholars of African descent have partnered with the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD) to curate a global conversation on the burgeoning reparations movement. This programme will bring together a global panel, inclusive of representatives from CARICOM, the UN Permanent Forum for People of African Descent, the Atlantic Institute, and the All Party Group for Afrikan Reparation, to discuss the contemporary calls and proposals for reparations. A small drinks reception will be held following the panel discussion. This event is sponsored by the Atlantic Institute, the Rhodes Trust, the Black Association of Rhodes Scholars, the Rhodes Scholar Africa Forum, and the Oxford Africa Society (AfriSoc)
Andy Ratcliffe is the Chief Executive of MQ: Mental Health Research, a global funder of, and advocate for, mental health research. MQ has a number of partnerships with Departmental colleagues, notably the GALENOS project. Andy will set out how the mental health funding landscape is changing and how departmental colleagues might work with MQ to further their research agendas. This seminar is hosted in person at the Department of Psychiatry, Seminar Room & online. To join online, please use the Zoom details below: zoom.us/j/92620728590?pwd=s1JefrGff6bN0nZZcHSTBkCw8Z1RlT.1 Meeting ID: 926 2072 8590 Passcode: 196542
This course covers methods of managing and controlling the process of thesis and report writing, as well as meeting deadlines. It also discusses the principles and practice of high-quality scholarly writing. It includes: The production of reports, papers and theses from a time and project management point of view. The writing task itself: this includes logical argument construction, the importance of structure in a document, appropriate style to be used in academic writing, and how to make the actual writing process as pain-free and effective as possible. An opportunity for you to critique a short paper with your group.
Are you baffled by open, confused by embargoes? Does the mention of the colour gold or green catapult you into a realm of perplexed irritation? Come to this session, where we’ll break down open access and all its many jargon terms, confusing publishing structures and hint at the advantages you can reap by publishing open. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers, other staff.
So, you’ve got a great idea for a research study – but what approvals do you need before you can start? Who do you apply to? And how do you go about doing this? Join an online presentation through Microsoft Teams for an overview of: • how research is governed in the UK • which approval bodies are involved • a step-by-step guide on how to apply for approval • handling amendments to your study
Leading and Managing People in Research (formerly “Essentials of People Management in Research”) is a module in The Confident Manager Series, designed to equip PIs/academic managers with knowledge of their responsibilities when managing research staff and with key people skills needed to create a healthy and productive research environment. Topics covered include recruiting effectively, leading and managing a team, having productive career conversations/annual reviews, supporting those on fixed-term contracts, and fostering positive research cultures, including excellence in research practice. This module is specifically for new PIs (Principal Investigators) / Academic Managers / Researchers who have secured a grant that will involve recruiting and managing others or experienced PIs looking to update their knowledge and skills. Objectives - Understand what is expected of PIs/academic managers at Oxford – Clarify HR essentials for recruiting and leading your team – Learn how to facilitate effective career development conversations / annual reviews (CDR/PCDR) and to manage fixed-term contracts – Explore your role in fostering a positive research culture and enabling excellence in research practice Please note: Professional services colleagues working in research or clinical trials are advised to enrol on the more appropriate module in The Confident Manager Series titled ‘Managing at Oxford’.
Join us for a digital scholarship coffee gathering - tea and coffee will be provided. If you'd like to get an email reminder of these coffee mornings please sign up for that here: https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/oxford/digital-scholarship-coffee-morning-keep-in-touch
Seminars followed by a sandwich lunch. All welcome!
Can legal empowerment support forcibly displaced people when they face high levels of violence and exploitation and few incentives to report? We study demand for and impact of legal empowerment through a randomized control trial with 1,707 displaced people in Greece. Using an encouragement design, we explore variation in information seeking behavior and the impact of information. At baseline, nearly half of the study participants were unaware of how to seek help after experiencing violence. Comparing generic and personalized legal information against a control, we find a higher demand for generic than personalized legal information. Both improved participants’ knowledge of exploitation under Greek law (0.23–0.7 SD) and increased confidence in responding to violence (0.26–0.57 SD) three months after treatment, but local average treatment effects are larger for personalized information. Impacts on other outcomes were limited. We identify a trade-off between higher uptake of generic information and more effective personalized conversations, with implications for supporting forcibly displaced people.
‘Political Theology’ is most well known as the book where Schmitt offers his famous definition of the sovereign as he who decides the exception. However, sandwiched between byzantine early 20th century German jurisprudential debates and commentary about obscure anti-modern Catholic reactionaries are less well known but equally important concepts. This seminar will explore Schmitt’s concepts of the state of exception, sovereignty, and decisionism. We will also spend some time examining Schmitt’s critique of the liberal account of the rule of law within ‘Political Theology’.
TBC
We analyze how a negative shock to the profitability of oil-extracting firms may lead to a shift from dirty to clean R&D along the supply chain. First, we develop a theoretical framework, showing that adjustment costs in R&D give firms in the fossil energy supply chain an additional incentive to shift R&D activity towards clean innovation as a consequence of a negative shock. Next, we leverage the 2014 oil price drop to empirically investigate the impact of reduced profitability in the fossil energy supply chain on clean R&D. We propose a novel method to identify firms’ exposure to the shock. In line with the predictions from the model, we find that more exposed firms increased their clean R&D more than other firms. Our findings imply that carbon pricing will induce clean innovation not only by increasing demand for clean technologies, but also by lowering profitability in the fossil energy supply chain.
The story of Black Hawk Down is a familiar one. On 3 October 1993 two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, and in the ensuing Battle of Mogadishu eighteen Americans and hundreds of Somalis were killed. But very few appreciate that this was just one day in a two-and-a-half-year operation; the most ambitious attempt in history to rebuild a nation. The United States sought to show the world that the UN could rebuild a country, but in a dire foreshadowing of the failed efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade later, the intervention in Somalia was plagued with political infighting, policy mismatch, confusion, and fatal assumptions. In 1992 Somalia saw the largest ever deployment of American troops to the continent of Africa, and 1993 brought the first UN-led peace enforcement mission and the most ambitious experiment in nation-building. In his book Beyond Black Hawk Down, Jonathan Carroll provides the first scholarly military history of the entire intervention, from its early and largely successful humanitarian phase in 1992 through to the ultimate withdrawal of UN forces in 1995. Carroll dispels the myths and misunderstandings surrounding one of the most infamous episodes of the 1990s to present a new interpretation of events, most notably by including the Somali perspective, to argue what went so wrong in Somalia, and more importantly, why. Understanding the intervention in Somalia, its successes and the roots of its failures, is invaluable to contemporary debates on concepts of nation-building and counterinsurgency. Moreover, the increasing regularity of inter-state and intra-state conflicts across the world means the international community will continue to be called upon to intervene in other failed or failing states in the future. Beyond Black Hawk Down is an important new history that will inform the shape and nature of future military interventions. Jonathan Carroll is a former officer in the Irish Defence Forces who earned a PhD from Texas A&M University. He is an associate professor of military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.
SeedWISE is a dynamic enterprise programme for women* DPhil students in STEM, running from April 29th to June 9th, 2025. Through a blend of in-person and online sessions, participants will explore industrial and enterprise career paths, build connections, and gain practical skills to enhance their career development. *We also welcome non-binary people who are comfortable in a space that will discuss women focused experiences.
Childhood maltreatment is the world’s costliest and least discussed public health problem. It is perhaps the principal preventable cause of mental illness, addiction, criminality and violence and a major risk factor for worse life outcomes in health, education and human relationships. At a conservative estimate, violence against children costs 8% of Global GDP, though probably much more. We are the first generation in history to know the causes and the costs of child trauma, but also to have clear solutions that are scale-able for a fraction of the cost of inaction. In the 1980s The Child Survival Revolution increased global vaccine coverage from 15% to 80% of the world’s children which, along with other focussed interventions led to a 61% reduction in child mortality. Millions of children live each year, who otherwise wouldn’t. Has the time come for a Child Development/Protection Revolution to eradicate child maltreatment. How we can generate more attention and belief that change is possible and what should be the priority interventions to take to scale?
Student Presentations
Choreographer William Forsythe (2024 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Arts and Philosophy), who opened a new horizon of performing arts by radically renewing methodologies and aesthetics of ballet and dance, delivers a lecture as part of the Kyoto Prize at Oxford 2025. He radically questions and deconstructs the structure and style of traditional ballet to create new methodologies and aesthetics of theatrical dance. He continues to go beyond the conventional concept of choreography and to extend the potential of the art form using human bodies through various innovative works. Mr Forsythe’s lecture will be introduced by Dean of the Blavatnik School Professor Ngaire Woods. The lecture will be followed by a Q&S session moderated by former professional ballet dancer, choreographer, and teacher, Dr Meindert Peters, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford. "Hard to say, not knowin..." Considerations of an Autodidact Choreography not just as a discipline, but as an entire system of inquiry, transformation, and expertise - a way of thinking, making and being.
One of the modern disciplines where Sanskrit finds fertile ground is psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis gets established in India by the early 1920s, thanks to Girindrasekhar Bose and Romain Rolland, both of whom are closely connected to Freud in the final years of his life, and try to get him interested in Indian philosophy, psychology and spirituality. While Freudian psychoanalysis as a clinical practice peters out for the most part after independence, it enjoys a renaissance in Indology, through the work of A.K. Ramanujan, Robert Goldman and Wendy Doniger, among others. I try to understand why certain genres of Sanskrit texts lend themselves to psychoanalytic reading, and what the limits are of psychoanalysis as a text-critical practice in Indology. I focus particularly on the role of the maverick scholar Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (b. 1941), a student of Daniel Ingalls and collaborator of D.D. Kosambi, almost the keeper of the Freud Archive, who for a time appears to bridge the Indological and Freudian worlds, before breaking decisively with both. Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow and Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, working at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is also a Research Consultant with the Nilgiri Archaeological Project at the University of Ghent, Belgium, and a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, where she teaches a Foundation Course on Great Books.
Traditional theory demonstrates how firms can sustain high prices and profits through repeated game strategies but abstracts from the bounded rationality of human managers. Behavioral models posit that cognitive constraints lead to biased mental models, which underestimate competitor sophistication and thus result in overestimating the profitability of price cuts. We study a firm with over 20,000 gas stations where managers have significant discretion over fuel prices. Managers with lower cognitive skills tend to underestimate competitor sophistication in a lab-in-the-field beauty-contest game. Cognitive skills also explain divergent beliefs about optimal pricing: high-skill managers favor maintaining high prices at the market price ceiling, while low-skill managers prefer cutting prices. Turning to actual pricing, lower-skill managers set lower prices and engage more frequently in price wars, leading to reduced profits. Additional survey measures confirm the key underlying mechanism, showing that managers with low cognitive skills are less likely to think that price cuts trigger retaliatory price cuts by competitors. An implication is that cognitive constraints among firm managers may increase consumer surplus and market efficiency in markets with market power by inducing lower prices.
The UN Refugee Agency aims to double refugee enrollment in postsecondary education to 15% by 2030. In the U.S., this goal intersects with refugee resettlement and higher education policies. Examining the nexus of higher education, NGOs, and student experiences provides insight into the various policy structures influencing postsecondary access and success. This mixed-methods project draws on longitudinal data from displaced learners enrolled in higher education. It explores how individuals leverage distinct forms of capital to persist despite policy barriers that hinder their postsecondary pathways. The findings offer valuable insights for policymakers seeking to support increasing refugee participation in postsecondary education.
What emotional traits are essential for building a nation? More broadly, are there such things as 'national emotions,' and if so, what are they? In this lecture, I will explore these questions by analysing the Zionist case through the lens of the history of emotions. I will examine emotions where the national dimension is evident, such as honour and love of the homeland, alongside emotions that may seem less directly national, like fear and happiness. Yair completed his PhD through the Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, focusing on religious emotions in the Lithuanian Haredi community. He is currently a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Research Associate at Sidney Sussex College. His research focuses on the emotional dimensions of the Zionist 'negation of the diaspora.'
Abstract of Leo De Moura's Talk: How can mathematicians, software developers, and AI systems work together with complete confidence in each other’s contributions? The open-source Lean proof assistant and programming language provides an answer, offering a rigorous framework where proofs and programs are machine-checkable, shared, and extended by a broad community of collaborators. By removing the traditional reliance on trust-based verification and manual oversight, Lean not only accelerates research and development but also redefines how we collaborate. In this talk, I will highlight how Lean is being used to tackle challenging problems in mathematics, software verification, and AI research that depends on formally sound reasoning. I will also introduce the Lean Focused Research Organization (FRO), a non-profit dedicated to expanding Lean’s capabilities and community. By showcasing real-world examples, ranging from advanced research projects to industry-driven applications, I illustrate how Lean empowers us to innovate in a more reliable, transparent, and truly collective manner. Abstract of Kevin Buzzard's Talk: Will computers one day replace human mathematicians? Is this just around the corner, or decades away? Can neural networks spot patterns which humans have missed? Currently language models are great for brainstorming big ideas but are very poor when it comes to details. Can integrating a language model with a theorem prover like Lean solve these problems? Is the modern mathematical literature riddled with errors, and is it feasible to hope that a machine might find and even fix them? Is it possible to teach a computer the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem? And what do mathematicians make of all this? I'll talk about how modern developments in AI and theorem provers are beginning to affect mathematics.
Are you planning to present a poster at an upcoming conference, meeting or symposium? This introductory session will provide you with some top tips on how to create a poster presentation which will help you to communicate your research project and data effectively. There will be guidance on formatting, layout, content, use of text, references and images, as well as advice on printing and presenting your poster. This session will also provide help with locating resources such as templates, free-to-use images and poster guidelines. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Do you need help managing your references? Do you need help citing references in your documents? This online session will introduce you to EndNote, a subscription software programme which can help you to store, organise and retrieve your references and PDFs, as well as cite references in documents and create bibliographies quickly and easily. On completing the workshop you will be able to: understand the main features and benefits of EndNote; set up an EndNote account; import references from different sources into EndNote; organise your references in EndNote; insert citations into documents; and create a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Causal machine learning (ML) offers flexible, data-driven methods for predicting treatment outcomes including efficacy and toxicity, thereby supporting the assessment and safety of drugs. A key benefit of causal ML is that it allows for estimating individualized treatment effects, so that clinical decision-making can be personalized to individual patient profiles. Causal ML can be used in combination with both clinical trial data and real-world data, such as clinical registries and electronic health records, but caution is needed to avoid biased or incorrect predictions. In this Perspective, we discuss the benefits of causal ML (relative to traditional statistical or ML approaches) and outline the key components and steps. Finally, we provide recommendations for the reliable use of causal ML and effective translation into the clinic.
The seminar will explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, AI, and technological innovation, co-taught by a philosopher and a technologist. The seminar will welcome a variety of visiting discussants from philosophy, computer science, and the technology industry throughout term. The focus will be on how a concern for human flourishing can be embedded in the global technology development pipeline, and on exploring how broader bridges can be built between philosophy and technology. The seminar is primarily aimed at philosophy graduate students and computer science graduate students but participants from other levels and areas are welcome. Topics include: truth-seeking AI, privacy, collective intelligence, decentralization in science and AI, and approaches to human autonomy. The seminar culminates in a clinic to facilitate grant applications for independent summer projects on the themes of the seminar. Fast grants: New for this year, Cosmos Ventures has established a dedicated funding pool that seminar participants can apply to for independent summer building projects on related themes. Prerequisites: please email HAI Lab philipp.koralus@philosophy.ox.ac.uk no later than April 27th with a (very) brief explanation of your interest in the seminar to reserve a spot, and the subject line “TT Seminar”. Space limited to maintain quality of discussion. Readings: ● Plato, Meno (excerpt on Meno’s paradox) ● TBD
To examine the impact of social media promotion of job market papers on job outcomes, we conduct a field experiment on Twitter (now X). Specifically, we examine how having a prominent economist quote-tweet a job market paper in the field of economics impacts paper visibility and candidate job market outcomes. Our results show that papers assigned to be quote-tweeted in our experiment receive 442% more views and 303% more likes than those assigned to the control condition. We further find that those in the quote-tweet treatment receive one additional flyout and that the women in the treatment group receive 0.9 more job offers. These findings suggest that social media promotion can improve the visibility and success of job market candidates, especially for underrepresented groups in economics such as women.
This book seeks to replace a comforting European narrative of British missed opportunities with a chronicle of the complexity of UK/EC-EU relations. After nearly a decade of Brexit (2016), it revisits the historical evolution of the relationship between Britain and Europe since the 1970s. Building on an in-depth study of primary and secondary sources, the author sheds new light on the intricacies of that relationship.
In this seminar, Ben Hart explores the theoretical and empirical contributions of his completed doctoral thesis, which was entitled Pictures on Water: An Exploration of the Policy Cycle of Widening Participation in English Higher Education, this research conceptualises widening participation policy enactment as a dynamic and distorting process which is shaped by shifting market logics, increasingly prescriptive regulation, and institutional hierarchies. Drawing on a novel corpus of institutional policy texts (produced by Ben for this research) and interviews at five higher education institutions, the thesis investigates how access discourses have evolved over the past 15 years under increasing pressure to conform to ‘scientific’ standards. Teams link to join online: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3a18OaGI3jA9wWNWZypGss2TVS0W19TF1kWGj3R9rZz_M1%40thread.tacv2/1741950820728?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22eb621b4f-9226-4e31-ab66-1d8ecd405b9d%22%7d
For many years, scholars, politicians and activists have drawn comparisons between the partitions of India-Pakistan and Israel-Palestine, two seismic events which took place mere months apart. Yet they were far more than comparable: the two partitions were in fact deeply interconnected, and share origins in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. In East of Empire, Erin O’Halloran reveals how the crisis in British Mandate Palestine created a crucial bridge between the Indian Khilafat movement of the early 1920s and Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s demand, from March 1940 onward, that Muslims of the subcontinent be given a state of their own.
Araceli Mateos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Salamanca (Spain). She is currently the Director of the Political Science Master’s Program at that University, the Director of América Latina Hoy Journal, and a National Representative of the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR). Her general research and teaching interests include political attitudes and behavior, as well as research methods.
This paper presents a subsectoral analysis of historical occupational data. We describe a new way of coding and producing occupational data, using an occupational graph rather than specific schemes. We then employ compositional data analysis and new metrics derived from properties of ternary plots to offer a more detailed and complex and dynamic image of the relationship between economic growth and structural change. As a result of this, it highlights a series of core sub-sectoral patterns, which were until now often overlooked by traditional sectoral analysis or invisible due to higher levels of data aggregation. We find that longer historical series confirm Rodrik’s pattern of ‘premature deindustrialisation’ (Rodrik 2016), including the rapid movement towards tertiary subsectors for later developers and the diminishing gender gaps in structural change. We develop a typology to identify which subsectors are most correlated to economic growth and discuss what that may indicate in terms of theories of structural change. The empirical examination of economic development adds historical depth to ongoing academic and policy-oriented discussions on the nature and contribution of structural changes to economic development. *If you would like to meet the speaker before the seminar, please sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/23druvdp*
This paper presents a subsectoral analysis of historical occupational data. We describe a new way of coding and producing occupational data, using an occupational graph rather than specific schemes. We then employ compositional data analysis and new metrics derived from properties of ternary plots to offer a more detailed and complex and dynamic image of the relationship between economic growth and structural change. As a result of this, it highlights a series of core sub-sectoral patterns, which were until now often overlooked by traditional sectoral analysis or invisible due to higher levels of data aggregation. We find that longer historical series confirm Rodrik’s pattern of ‘premature deindustrialisation’ (Rodrik 2016), including the rapid movement towards tertiary subsectors for later developers and the diminishing gender gaps in structural change. We develop a typology to identify which subsectors are most correlated to economic growth and discuss what that may indicate in terms of theories of structural change. The empirical examination of economic development adds historical depth to ongoing academic and policy-oriented discussions on the nature and contribution of structural changes to economic development.
Dr Christine Cheng, Department of War Studies, King's College London; Dr Ibrahim Bangura; Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone; Dr John Gledhill, Oxford Department of International Development and more will discuss 'Research Ethics and the Study of Armed Actors'. More information to follow. Drinks reception to follow the panel discussion.
The transition to a hydrogen economy won’t happen all at once. It needs commercially viable solutions that work now, at scale. In this seminar, Ian Wilkinson, COO at GeoPura, will outline how the company is building a market for clean hydrogen through targeted, high-impact applications – from construction sites and live TV broadcasts to powering entire festivals. He will discuss the technical and commercial approach GeoPura takes across hydrogen production, storage and use, and how this integrated model is helping prove the business case for hydrogen while laying the groundwork for national and global scale-up.
For a long time, the concentration has been on attitudes to vaccination by those who are in opposition (the ‘anti-vax’), neglecting the majority who are supportive. In this talk, Samantha Vanderslott, author of Pro-vax Supporting Vaccines through Activism, Petitions, and Trials, aims to reconsider vaccination as a phenomenon from the perspective of those who are ‘pro-vax’, who actively support and vocally promote vaccines. Using historical research, qualitative analysis, and accessible storytelling to explore how these vaccine advocates influence public attitudes, shape health policies, and inspire community action, Professor Vanderslott will not only highlight their underappreciated efforts but also provide practical insights for healthcare professionals, public health advocates, and academics striving to build vaccine confidence.
Presentation and Panel Discussion, on recently published research: Christine Cheng and Chris Day (2024). Research Ethics and the Study of Armed Actors, Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development, 24(6), 501-779. With Dr Christine Cheng (KCL), Gloriana Rodriguez Alvarez (King's), Niloufer Siddiqui (SUNY- Albany), and Dr Ibrahim Bangura (University of Sierra Leone; AfOx Visiting Fellow, Oxford). Chair: Professor John Gledhill. Further details tba.
Presentation and Panel Discussion on recently published research: Christine Cheng and Chris Day (2024). 'Research Ethics and the Study of Armed Actors', Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development, 24(6), 501-779. With Dr Christine Cheng (KCL), Gloriana Rodriguez Alvarez (KCL), Niloufer Siddiqui (SUNY- Albany), and Dr Ibrahim Bangura (University of Sierra Leone; AfOx Visiting Fellow, Oxford). Chair: Professor John Gledhill (University of Oxford). A drinks reception will follow the panel discussion.
Have you ever felt nervous about public speaking? Have you wondered what makes a speaker capture an audience? This interactive lecture explores what makes someone an inspirational speaker, and will help you develop your presentation skills. It will also introduce some key tips on how to develop skills that increase confidence in public speaking whilst feeling relaxed and authentic. Whether you’re an experienced speaker or a nervous novice, join Artist in Residence Joy Richardson and be inspired! Joy Richardson is Artist in Residence at Kellogg College, and alumna of Kellogg’s MSt Creative Writing Course. She trained at Webber Douglas Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. As a workshop leader and communication coach, Joy has worked with numerous companies, including Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, The Royal National Theatre and Olivier Mythodrama Management Consultants. As an actor, Joy has been in productions in theatre, film, television and radio and worked with a wide range of directors including Sir Peter Hall, Sir Richard Eyre and Katie Mitchell. She is currently appearing in the BBC TV series Death in Paradise. This lecture is free, and open to all. Refreshments will be served from 5 pm in the Kellogg Hub. If you are unable to attend after booking to attend in person, please email events@kellogg.ox.ac.uk.
Visiting speakers, workshops, and in-house talks open to all researchers (graduate, postdoctoral, academics) and those with research interests in literature of the long eighteenth century 1660-1830
In this panel discussion as part of the Kyoto Prize at Oxford, Laureates Sir John Pendry, Paul F Hoffman and William Forsythe engage in a conversation with Professor Ngaire Woods, Dean of the Blavatnik School, discussing insights from their careers, future challenges and which skill each Laureates wished they had outside of their professional field. The Kyoto Prize is an international award founded by the Inamori Foundation to honour those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of humankind. The Blavatnik School of Government is honoured to bring the Kyoto Prize Laureates to Oxford each May. In 2024, the Kyoto Prize was awarded to Sir John Pendry, the 2024 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Advanced Technology, a theoretical physicist who contributed the theoretical construction of metamaterials to the field of materials science; to William Forsythe, the 2024 Kyoto Prize Laureate for Arts and Philosophy, a choreographer who opened a new horizon of performing arts by radically renewing methodologies and aesthetics of ballet and dance; and to Paul F Hoffman, the 2024 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Basic Sciences, a geologist who worked on proving Snowball Earth accelerating life evolution and plate tectonics dating back to the first half of Earth’s history. Please note this event is online only.
Systems thinking has the power to reshape how we approach strategy, leadership and decision-making. In this final Clarendon lecture, Tima Bansal showcases the role of systems thinking in addressing global challenges such as sustainability, innovation and equity. She calls on leaders to adopt a systems lens in their work and equips them with the tools to do so.
Join the Health Economics and Policy Evaluation ONLINE Course 2025, delivered by the University of Oxford. This intensive 2-day online course offers a comprehensive overview of health economics and policy assessment. Key topics: Health economics and policy evaluation, Advanced evaluation techniques (interrupted time series, panel data, instrumental variables, DIFF-DIFF), Agency problems and incentive structures in healthcare, Hospital competition and payment scheme impacts, Economic evaluation methods
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will understand more about: What experience and characteristics you need to have to gain a fellowship. The application process. How to work with University’s systems and procedures to optimise your application and its chance of success. You will have an opportunity to practice interviewing/being interviewed for fellowship applications.
Sir John Pendry (2024 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Advanced Technology), a theoretical physicist who contributed the theoretical construction of metamaterials to the field of materials science, delivers a lecture as part of the Kyoto Prize at Oxford 2025. Sir John theoretically demonstrated that materials with electromagnetic properties not found in nature, such as negative-refractive-index materials (metamaterials) can be realised by designing microstructures smaller than the wavelength of the target electromagnetic waves, thereby laying the groundwork for creating innovative materials such as ‘superlenses’ with subwavelength resolution and ‘invisibility cloaks’. Sir John’s lecture will be followed by a Q&A. Metamaterials, invisibility, & perfect lenses: a new world for electromagnetism: In the last few years, a new area of research has emerged as a result of our ability to produce materials with entirely novel electromagnetic properties. Known as metamaterials because they take us beyond the properties of conventional materials, they display remarkable effects not found in nature, such as negative refraction. Spurred on by these new opportunities, theorists have produced exotic concepts that exploit the new materials: we can now specify how to make a lens whose resolution is limited not by the laws of nature but only by our ability to build to the stated specifications; we can guide radiation along a trajectory, avoiding objects and causing them to appear invisible; we can design and manufacture materials that are active magnetically in the optical range. I shall conclude my lecture discussing the latest developments which aim to structure materials in time as well as space - space/time crystals. These materials violate time reversal symmetry and offer possibilities for new devices. Theorists find them intriguing as they offer possibilities for creating Hawking radiation in the laboratory. There has been a truly amazing amount of innovation but more is yet to come. The field of metamaterials is developing into a highly disruptive technology for a plethora of applications where control over light (or more generally electromagnetic radiation) is crucial, amongst them 5G/6G technology, satellite communications, solar energy harvesting, stealth, biological imaging and sensing, and enhanced MRI scanners.
For online access, Microsoft Teams links will be sent to the mailing list in advance or email "$":mailto:christina.debellaigue@exeter.ox.ac.uk for a link.
In the reform period of China’s 1980s, more women directors emerged and created images at odds with the stereotypical representation of ‘Chinese women’. As Lidan Hu contends, these women directors provide alternative visions of the modernisation of Chinese cinema and call attention to the fundamental issues concerning modern female subjectivity. Lu Xiaoya (陆小雅1941-), a former actress, transitioned into directing with her debut film In and Out of Court (法庭内外 Fating neiwai, 1980), a social drama that explores the profound societal challenges faced during the early years of China’s reform and opening-up. Throughout her career, her focus on social issues has remained steadfast, with women often taking centre stage in her work. By analysing Lu’s films The Girl in Red (红衣少女 Hongyi shaonü, 1985) and Unrequited Love (热恋Relian, 1989), Lidan Hu’s research examines the experiences of female protagonists as they seek both spiritual and material independence, highlighting shifting conceptions of womanhood amidst the rise of individual consciousness, the persistence of traditional cultural influences, and the expanding marketisation of China’s reform era. Unrequited Love, specifically, shows the predicament of women who were once the ardent participators in socialism but now find no space to practice their agency in the time of massive marketisation. Lidan Hu is an Associate Professor in the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures at Sichuan University, China. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford. Her research explores the intersections of film, literature, and gender studies. Her work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals, including Feminist Media Studies, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, and Asian Journal of Women’s Studies.
TBA Teams link: https://www.win.ox.ac.uk/events/win-seminar-7may
Do you get nervous before interviews? If so, don't worry, most people do and we're here to help! In this session, we will be covering a range of topics, including; various interview formats, how to prepare, different types of interview questions and practical tips on video / virtual interviews. This is a great opportunity to hear more about this topic from careers advisers and also learn and share experiences with other people in the audience.
TORCH Talks: a new series debating some of the most urgent and topical issues of our time from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Practitioners from radically different disciplines and fields share their views and insights on major global challenges. Everyone is welcome and lunch will be provided. Climate Hope/Climate Despair: A cross-disciplinary perspective
The Lunchtime Lab Talks aim to introduce and highlight the broad spectrum of research that is carried out at the Centre and encourage multidisciplinary interactions. Throughout the year, groups are invited to speak and present their work to our community. Lunch is available from 12:15 in Room A&B and talks run from 12:30–13:30. Carroll Group Speaker: Jakub Hantabal Title: 'Characterising the host-pathogen interactions of henipaviruses.' Abstract: Nipah virus (NiV) is a highly virulent emerging pathogen that causes severe respiratory disease and encephalitis, with no effective vaccines or treatments. Although the clinical progression is known, a limited understanding of host-virus interactions hampers therapeutic development. This project addresses that gap by studying henipaviral infections using in vitro and in vivo models. Specifically, we investigate NiV's neurological tropism using iPSC-derived brain organoids to explore its impact on various nervous system cells, and we examine immune responses in infected brain and lung tissues using the CellDIVE multiplex immunofluorescence platform on Syrian hamster models. Our studies provide novel insights into NiV's neurological targeting and immune cell infiltration during infection.
This paper examines the link between financial security and social cohesion, in a low-income setting where cohesion and prosociality play a crucial role in the integration of refugees into ultra-poor host communities. We first generate an exogenous shock to the financial security of both hosts and refugees, by implementing a field experiment of a large cash transfer and employment support program. Increasing the financial security of both refugees and hosts leads to higher levels of trust, new friendships with out-groups, a greater willingness to share resources with out-groups and a stronger sense of belonging for refugees. This increased our overall social cohesion index by 0.73 standard deviations relative to the control group. We then exploit a climate shock that negatively affected the financial security of some of the participants in our study. Consistent with a causal interpretation of the relationship between financial security and social cohesion, participants who experienced even a moderate reduction in financial security reported a disproportionately large weakening of prosociality of 0.53 standard deviations. Taken together, these findings suggest that individuals can shift between cooperative and competitive mindsets in response to changes in their economic circumstances. On the one hand, providing income and employment support to both refugees and low-income host community members led to more cooperative attitudes and behaviours, thus promoting gains in social cohesion. However, these gains were fragile and easily undone when individuals were exposed to a negative climate shock that made scarcity top of mind again. Written with Theresa Beltramo (UN High Commissioner for Refugees), Florence Nimoh ((UN High Commissioner for Refugees), and Matthew O'Brien (Harvard University)
In this online workshop you will be shown the functionality of Zotero, which is a free-to-use software programme used to manage references and create bibliographies. Zotero will be demonstrated on a Windows PC but users of MacOS or Linux computers will be able to follow the demonstration. The workshop will cover: understanding the main features and benefits of Zotero; setting up a Zotero account; importing references from different sources into Zotero; organising your references in Zotero; inserting citations into documents; and creating a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Are you an early career researcher, fixed-term lecturer, or doctoral student trying to get some writing done? Do you research on a topic related to health, medicine, the body, or mind using Humanities or Social Sciences approaches? The Medical Humanities Writing Group is an inclusive, interdisciplinary and casual gathering, encouraging writing as well as meeting others: all are welcome. We have timed writing blocks and coffee/tea/light refreshments, and are focused on setting writing goals and getting work done in a positive and supportive environment. Attendance is free and you are welcome to join us for anything from a single session, to a few, or even the whole term.
For our next talk, in the Digital Phenotyping seminar series, we will hear from Peter H. Charlton, Senior Research Scientist at Nokia Bell Labs, on Wednesday 7 May, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm, at the Big Data Institute (BDI). Title: Using wearables to screen for atrial fibrillation Date: Wednesday 7 May Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Venue: BDI/OxPop, Seminar Room 0; followed by refreshments in the atrium Abstract: Atrial fibrillation (AF) the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia, and confers a five-fold increase in stroke risk. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people in the UK are unaware that they have AF, and so are not offered treatment to reduce their risk of stroke. Wearables may have a role to play in identifying AF, as they can monitor the heart rhythm over prolonged periods, enabling detection of even infrequent episodes of AF. In this talk, Peter will present recent research investigating the potential role of wearables in population-level screening for AF. He will present early results from the SAFER Wearables Study on the acceptability of wearables in older adults, who are most likely to have AF. He will also present work on increasing the accuracy of manual and automated diagnoses derived from wearable data. Finally, he will discuss future directions for integrating wearables into clinical practice. Short bio: Peter Charlton is a Senior Research Scientist at Nokia Bell Labs. He specialises in signal processing for wearables, with applications in healthcare. Peter gained the degree of M.Eng. in Engineering Science in 2010 from the University of Oxford. From 2010 to 2020, Peter conducted his research at King’s College London, developing techniques to use wearables to monitor cardiovascular and respiratory health. His Ph.D. focused on using signal processing and machine learning techniques to identify acute deteriorations in hospital patients. From 2020 to 2025, Peter developed techniques to use clinical and consumer devices in screening for atrial fibrillation. He led a clinical study to assess the acceptability and performance of wearables in older adults. Hybrid Option: Please note that these meetings are closed meetings and only open to members of the University of Oxford. Please respect our speakers and do not share the link with anyone outside of the University. The purpose of these seminars is to foster more communication among employees throughout the University, so we strongly advise in-person attendance whenever feasible. Microsoft Teams meeting Join the meeting now Meeting ID: 397 044 477 761 Passcode: Vw73Zh79 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you wish to know more or receive information related to trainings and events at BDI, please subscribe by emailing bdi-announce-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. You'll then receive an email from SYMPA and once you reply you'll be on the list!
Music production has always been a social and interactive experience, but how can people practice music in a group when physically alone? The Augmented Reality Music Ensemble (ARME) is an EPSRC-funded project that employs emerging immersive technologies to expand the ways musicians practice music in a music group. ARME integrates video capture, computational modelling and augmented reality so that a musician can practice with avatars having the appearance and interactivity of real musicians. Originally designed for string quartets, ARME is evolving to allow several kinds of real-time interactions. This seminar will introduce the scientific principles and technological innovations behind ARME, from the perceptual and cognitive challenges of synchronizing humans (in real and virtual spaces) to the software and hardware that make interaction in a virtual ensemble possible. We will showcase the latest developments and discuss potential impacts on music pedagogy and beyond. Attendees will also be able to test live demonstrations of ARME, where participants could interact with virtual musicians and adaptive metronomes in real-time. Speaker Details: Dr Massimiliano Di Luca leads the ARME project; he is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology and in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham (UK). He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Brown University (USA) and has held research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Oculus, and Facebook Reality Labs. He has collaborated with industry leaders such as Facebook, Google, and Procter & Gamble, applying academic research to real-world problems. His work spans psychophysics, immersive technologies, haptics, and computational neuroscience, with 70 scientific publications, over 100 conference presentations, and four patents. He has received funding from the European Commission, the Royal Society, BBSRC, and EPSRC, and has been recognized as a Turing Fellow and a Fellow of the InterContinental Academia. Professor Alan Wing was educated at King Edward VII Grammar School, Sheffield, from 1958 to 1963, and at Edinburgh University (BSc Psychology and Physics) from 1964 to 1969. He obtained his PhD from McMaster University Ontario (PhD supervisor AB Kristofferson) in 1973 and worked at Bell Labs NJ (Human Information Processing Section) as a postdoctoral research fellow in 1974-1975. He joined the MRC Applied Psychology Unit Cambridge in 1975, leaving in 1997 to take up a Chair in Psychology at the University of Birmingham (Professor of Human Movement), where he currently leads the Active Touch Lab. His research spans sensory motor control (posture and balance, grip, timing) and touch for perception and action, including the effects of aging. Dr Diar Abdlkarim is a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Birmingham, specialising in immersive augmented and virtual reality technologies. His contribution to ARME is both entrepreneurial and scientific, focusing on user research and software infrastructure, where he combines video capture, psychophysics, and software development. He holds a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from the University of Birmingham, where he studied sensory-motor control and neuroplasticity through immersive virtual reality training. He has previously worked as a research intern at Meta Reality Labs, where he designed experiments on wrist-based haptic feedback and hand tracking in virtual environments. His expertise spans computer vision, physics-based simulation, and real-time avatar interaction, making him a key developer in ARME’s technological advancement. Evguenni Penksik is the main software developer of the ARME project. He has developed the real-time graphics and sound-video integration for the system and contributed to the scientific understanding of avatar synchronisation. With a background in computational neuroscience and cognitive robotics (MSc, University of Birmingham, 2019) and mechanical engineering (MEng, University of Warwick, 2007), his expertise is in virtual and augmented reality, machine learning, 3D graphics, modelling, and game development. His interests also extend to music performance and production, contributing to ARME’s unique intersection of technology and artistic expression. Further Details and Contacts: This hybrid event is free and open to all; however, registration is recommended. This event will be recorded and made available soon after on the OCLW website. Registration will close at 10:30 am on 7 May 2025. Queries regarding this event should be addressed to admin.oclw@wolfson.ox.ac.uk.
Productivity growth enables economic expansion in the face of constraints. Reflecting its importance, there has been no dearth of theoretical explanations of productivity growth. However, the dominant approaches today, such as neoclassical endogenous growth theories or Acemoglu's theory of directed technological change, remain unsatisfactory. Less well-known is the classical-evolutionary theory of technological change. Following pioneering work by Duménil and Lévy, the presenter has been developing this line of research for several years. The theory offers a microeconomic explanation for cost share-induced technological change, which cleanly explains why technological change is biased towards labour productivity growth. The presenter has expanded the range of applicability of the theory and shown that the microeconomic dynamics constrain valid aggregate functional forms for the link between cost shares and productivity growth. In this presentation, the speaker will summarise key insights from his earlier work. Among those insights is that total factor productivity growth (TFP growth) depends on cost shares through an explicit relationship. He will then share his recent work, including an approach to 'statistical aggregation'. Using a generalised evolutionary NK model, the author will present explicit analytical results. About the speaker: Eric Kemp-Benedict is Associate Professor of Ecological Economics at the University of Leeds’ Sustainability Research Institute in the School of Earth and Environment. With a PhD in theoretical physics from Boston University, Eric’s research focuses on the macroeconomics of a sustainability transition. Working within post-Keynesian, structuralist and classical traditions, but viewing the economy through an ecological economics lens, he addresses questions around long-run growth, decoupling, structural change, and economic development. In addition to his work in ecological economics, he has contributed to studies on diverse topics of relevance to sustainability at national, regional, and global levels and has actively developed and applied tools and methods for participatory and study-specific sustainability analyses. He was a key contributor to the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), part of the global climate scenario framework that underpins a wide range of climate studies. Until the end of 2023, he worked at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), where he directed SEI’s Asia Centre from 2013 until 2016, and the SEI US Centre’s Equitable Transitions Program from 2018 to 2023.
Dr Paul F Hoffman (2024 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Basic Sciences), a geologist who worked on proving Snowball Earth accelerating life evolution and plate tectonics dating back to the first half of Earth’s history, delivers a lecture as part of the Kyoto Prize at Oxford 2025. Based on geological evidence obtained over 50 years of extensive and precise field research in Arctic Canada and Africa, Dr Paul F Hoffman has accomplished landmark achievements regarding snowball Earth and plate tectonics in Earth’s early history that led to the present surface environment teeming with diverse life. Paul F Hoffman’s lecture will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Professor Ros Rickaby, Chair of Geology, Oxford Earth Sciences, University of Oxford. A drinks reception will be held after the event. Dancing continents and frozen oceans: reading Earth’s diary in natural stone tablets: The plate tectonics revolution in Earth Sciences took place while I was in school. It explained how the Atlantic, Indian and Southern oceans have grown at the expense of the Pacific, resulting in the fragmentation of an ancestral supercontinent (Pangea) into the six continents we see today. Eurasia, the largest, is itself an aggregate of six formerly independent continents, their mutual boundaries being the sites where lost oceans closed. Over the past two billion years, a succession of three supercontinents have come and gone, empires dispersed by self-induced uprisings from below. Since the Pacific is now closing while the other oceans are opening, the next supercontinent will be centred on East Asia. We have 200 million years with which to prepare. A Conservative majority government ended my mapping of Precambrian continental margins in northern Canada. At 52, I moved my tent to subtropical Africa and shifted my focus from dancing continents to ancient climates. For decades geologists had puzzled over evidence of glacial action, not long before the Cambrian, at the coastlines of tropical oceans. Climate scientists inadvertently came up with an explanation—oceans capped by kilometre-thick ice shelves for millions of years. Could such an idea be reconciled with fossil and sedimentary records? Having convinced myself in Africa that the paradox is real, I was drawn to the climatic explanation—a self-reversing ‘Snowball Earth’—because it made testable predictions regarding ice-age longevity, synchroneity and postglacial conditions. Two decades on, those predictions have been shown to be true—the world ocean was ice-covered for 60 million years. My lecture will conclude by explaining how diverse life forms endured, with testable predictions regarding the particular ancestry of their living descendants.
About the talk: Gender and Justice is a new feminist international and transdisciplinary journal dedicated to advancing critical scholarship on justice in the social sciences, and from different methodological perspectives. The journal has its origins in the Law, Gender and Sexuality Research Network (LEX), a hub for sharing research, fostering collaboration and nurturing dialogue on a range of issues that relate to and shape feminist research on the intersection of gender, sexuality and justice globally. Combined these fora are focused on generating critical debates for achieving social transformation through a feminist politics of ‘good trouble’. As the Co-Editors-in-Chief of Gender and Justice, the question is: what does ‘good trouble’ mean for us? First, it reflects our feminist commitment to addressing the forms of inequality, injustice and violence that impact upon people’s lives at a variety of times and scales. Secondly and because of this, it means that we will strive to create new conceptual and methodological approaches to our research and practice that can advance knowledge in the field and inform activism through social justice. In this session, we accept the Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Groups’ invitation to share our experiences of developing and realising a new feminist journal. Specifically, we will discuss the challenges that feminists face in creating, nurturing and sustaining vital publishing platforms for championing and advancing international and transdisciplinary feminist research on justice in the social sciences, and from different methodological perspectives. In sharing these experiences, the Gender and Justice editorial team looks towards a more hopeful future. About the speakers: Professor Anna Carline is based in the School of Law and Social Justice at the University of Liverpool. Her main areas of expertise are criminal law and criminal justice (in particular gender based violence), family law and feminist/gender theory. Prof Carline’s research is socio-legal, comparative and interdisciplinary in nature, examining legal developments by drawing upon a range of social science and legal methodologies and different theoretical approaches. She has published extensively on the issues of rape and sexual assault, prostitution and trafficking and domestic homicide. Her work includes the development and adoption of new materialist theoretical perspectives to explore the space of criminal justice. This has included reconceptualising the court room as an affective assemblage and examining the affects which flow amongst the differentially situated bodies of the criminal court space. Prof Carline is one of the co-editors in chief of Gender and Justice, along with Dr FitzGerald and Prof McMillan. Dr Sharron FitzGerald is senior research academic based at universities in Munich and Paris. Her main areas of research expertise lie at the intersection of gender, sexuality, migration, human trafficking and violence against women. Dr FitzGerald’s draws on a range of feminist, political and social theories to conduct her research. Her work develops innovative ethnographic approaches to researching ‘difficult to reach’ populations such as trafficked women. She has published her research findings in a wide range of international academic journals and books. She is currently writing a co-authored book with Professor Anna Carline titled: Gendered Anxieties: Exploring State and Legal Responses to Violence Against Women and Girls in the UK and the EU. Dr FitzGerald is the founder and Executive Director of the International Law, Gender and Sexuality Research Network (LEX). She is the founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the feminist social scientific journal Gender and Justice, with Professor Carline and Professor McMillan. You can join online using the below: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OTM2ODAwMzUtOWZkZi00MDVlLWIxZWUtYWNhMTg0NDFlNmE4%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22c419284a-d20b-4f3c-9f1a-728236c74974%22%7d Meeting ID: 393 781 958 897 8 Passcode: Nf6gt3oX
The ultra-fast release of neurotransmitters sets the pace of cognition. Synchronous release has now been reconstituted from pure proteins. The results are surprising mechanistic insights into the extraordinary speed of the process and the structures underpinning it.
B cells and T cells are important components of the adaptive immune system and mediate anti-cancer immunity. In this talk, I will present two recent studies that harness multi-omics technologies to unveil groundbreaking insights into immune cell immunosurveillance across metastatic sites and patient-specific responses to tumours. Our research reveals a dynamic co-evolution between B and T cell immune responses and metastatic cancer genomes, with B cell clones demonstrating remarkable predictability in immunosurveillance—a finding with broad relevance across immune-mediated diseases. Using single-cell multi-omics in pancreatic cancer, we identify two distinct immune microenvironments and their driving mechanisms: myeloid-enriched (linked to poor prognosis) and adaptive-enriched (associated with robust B/T cell clonal expansion and better outcomes). This work offers a novel blueprint for prioritising antibody sequences for therapeutic development and guiding rational combination immunotherapies, paving the way for more effective, personalised cancer treatments.
In this seminar, University of Cambridge environmental justice researcher, Joycelyn Longdon will share her lyrical book Natural Connection. Natural Connection celebrates the histories and extraordinary acts of Indigenous and marginalised communities – from the US to the UK, Brazil to Iran, Ghana to Ethiopia – who have paved the way for today’s environmental movement and presents 6 key pillars, RAGE, IMAGINATION, INNOVATION, THEORY, HEALING, CARE to root us in our intrinsic connection with the natural world, celebrating the power of community. Joycelyn Longdon is an award-winning environmental justice researcher and educator. Her PhD research at the University of Cambridge centres on the design of justice-led conservation technologies for monitoring biodiversity with local forest communities in Ghana. Her work makes more accessible topics of climate justice, climate colonialism, activism, creativity and systems change across a variety of forums on and offline and for platforms including Meta, The United Nations Geneva Dialogues, Channel 4, Cheltenham Science Festival, Oxford University, The National Lottery, The Design Council and The Wellcome Collection. Joycelyn was 2022’s winner of the Emerging Designer London Design Medal, was featured in British Vogue’s December 2023 ‘Forces for Change’ Issue and is a and is a TEDx Alumni. Most recently, she has been listed as one of Pique Action and Harvard Chan C-CHANGE's 2024 Climate Creators to Watch and as one of Country and Town House’s Future Icons Power People 2024. The Nature-based Solutions Initiative, Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Nature-based Solutions Initiative, Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.
The humanitarian localization agenda calls for power and resources to be transferred from international actors to local and national responders in the places affected by crisis. Despite a consensus that humanitarian responses should become more localized, debates persist on how best to achieve this practically. Moreover, there is little evidence to show how such a shift in power affects humanitarian outcomes. This paper asks how localization is understood and implemented in the Rohingya refugee response in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, and with what consequences for the Rohingya population there. It argues that the response scores high on many of the criteria against which localization is measured. For example, Bangladeshi NGOs and Bangladeshi staff of international agencies have significant power and resources. However, the response also exemplifies many of the critiques of the localization agenda, notably in terms of who constitutes a “local” actor and how well local actors can withstand governmental pressures and maintain their independence and neutrality. Moreover, localization in the Rohingya refugee response fails to achieve some of the most important underlying goals of the localization agenda and may even be counterproductive for the achievement of some of those goals. Indeed, many Rohingya individuals and community groups believe that the layers of Bangladeshi bureaucracy and NGOs between international actors and themselves have restricted their own access to power and resources, and reduced the quality and effectiveness of the humanitarian response. Finally, the paper draws out some more general conclusions about the shortcomings of the localization agenda and dominant conceptualizations of localization when applied in refugee crises.
Join via Microsoft Teams here: https://tinyurl.com/5d5s7x5k
As conflicts grow more complex, can AI become a game-changer in peacemaking? This panel explores how AI-powered tools can assist in de-escalation, track early warning signs and enhance mediation efforts. From predictive analytics to digital diplomacy, the Panellists will discuss AI’s role in shaping more effective, data-driven peace processes. What are the ethical, practical and strategic implications of integrating AI into conflict resolution, and how can we ensure it serves as a force for stability rather than division? The Panellists are: Professor Corneliu Bjola (Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford) - CHAIR Ms Leena Badri (Chatham House) Professor David Leslie (Alan Turing Institute) Mr Richard Makepeace CMG, formerly Consul General in Jerusalem (St Cross College, Oxford) Dr Roxana Radu (Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford) There will be a drinks reception in the Sybil Dodd Room following the Discussion Panel to which everyone is welcome. If you'd like to attend, please register at: https://www.stx.ox.ac.uk/event/ai-and-peacemaking
Life expectancy, which is no more than the aggregation of mortality rates reflecting past biographical conditions, has been since the seventeenth century the most usual way of apprehending the inequality of lives by demographers, epidemiologists and economists. But can the inequality of lives be reduced to a statistical fact and paradoxically to a probability of dying? Based on two research projects, one on the fate of migrants trying to reach Europe, the other on the situation of Palestinians during the present war on Gaza, I want to propose a distinct analysis of the value of life using various criteria of evaluation integrating quantitative and qualitative information about the living and the dead. Didier Fassin is Professor at the Collège de France, where he holds the Chair Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, in the School of Social Science. At the the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales where he is Director of Studies, he founded Iris, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute on Society. Anthropologist, sociologist and physician, he has conducted research in Senegal, Congo, South Africa, Ecuador, and France, focusing on moral and political issues. Recipient of the Gold Medal in anthropology at the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and of the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, he is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Academia Europea. Former Vice-President of Doctors Without Borders, he is currently the President of the French Medical Committee for Exiles. He edited or coedited thirty collective volumes and authored twenty-three books, translated in eleven languages, including Life. A Critical User’s Manual (Polity), Exile. Chronicle of the border, with Anne-Claire Defossez (Polity, 2024) and Moral Abdication. How the World Failed to Stop the destruction of Gaza (2025).
We face a grim reality: the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere continues to rise, and fossil fuels still underpin 80% of our energy system. There are solutions – but are we focused on the right ones? Join renowned Oxford Professor of Economic Policy, Dieter Helm for a dose of ‘climate realism’ on the UK’s most pressing issues, including how to achieve sustainable growth, how to reduce the costs of net zero, and what the UK should do in a world without US leadership. Professor Helm will be joined by Cameron Hepburn, Professor of Environmental Economics, for discussion and Q&A. About the 2025 Battcock Lecture Smith School Director, Professor Mette Morsing, welcomes Professor Helm as this year’s guest speaker. Dieter Helm is Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Oxford and Fellow in Economics at New College, Oxford. From 2012 to 2020, he was Independent Chair of the Natural Capital Committee, providing advice to the government on the sustainable use of natural capital. In the New Year 2021 Honours List, Dieter was awarded a knighthood for services to the environment, energy and utilities policy. He provides extensive expert advice to UK and European governments, regulators and companies across three key areas: Energy & Climate; Regulation, Utilities & Infrastructure; and Natural Capital & the Environment. The Humphrey Battcock Lecture is a joint collaboration of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford and host, New College, Oxford.
*_Every Monument Will Fall_* offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope in the fragments of the past. Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, _Every Monument Will Fall_ joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums — including the one in which he is a curator. Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford — revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions. _Every Monument Will Fall_ offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times. *Dan Hicks* is Curator and Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford. His new book _Every Monument Will Fall_ has been called by Professor Paul Gilroy as "an extraordinary intervention — this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource" *Panellists:* *Nandini Chatterjee* (Professor of Indian History at Oxford University) *Simukai Chigudu* (Associate Professor of African Politics at Oxford University) *Christopher Morton* (Deputy Director and Head of Curatorial, Research and Teaching at the Pitt Rivers Museum) *Corinne Fowler* (Professor of Colonialism and Heritage in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester) The event will be chaired by: *John Schofield* (Professor of Archaeology and Director Of Studies in Cultural Heritage Management at the University of York). He was formerly an Inspector and Head of Military Programmes at English Heritage. His most recent book is _Wicked Problems for Archaeologists: Heritage as Transformative Practice_.
A discussion between Brasenose alumnae Narmada Thiranagama and Diana Holland, Former Assistant General Secretary of Unite the Union
Unique among mammals, great apes have evolved to be rational agents: (i) they metacognitively monitor their decision making and correct themselves or gather new information as needed; (ii) they understand why things happen in terms of the causal structure of the physical world and the intentional structure of the social world. Building on this foundation, humans have evolved in addition species-unique skills and motivations for collaboration and cultural life – shared agency and intentionality - which have made possible almost all of their most distinctive cognitive and cultural achievements. Bio: Michael Tomasello is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and emeritus director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. His research interests focus on processes of cooperation, communication, and cultural learning in human children and great apes. His recent books include Origins of Human Communication (MIT Press, 2008); Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009); A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard U. Press, 2014); A Natural History of Human Morality (Harvard U. Press, 2016); Becoming Human (Harvard U. Press, 2019); The Evolution of Agency (MIT Press, 2022); Primate Cognition, 2nd Ed. (Oxford U. Press, 2024); and Agency and Cognitive Development (Oxford U. Press, 2024).
‘When you’re in a hole, stop digging.’ Sadly, this ‘first law of holes’, often attributed to former politician and once Balliol scholar, Denis Healey, seems to have bypassed many universities. Despite warnings in recent years about the perils of over-expansion, marketisation and anti-intellectualism, reports point to courses closing, redundancies rising, bureaucracy increasing, students becoming dissatisfied, staff demoralised and standards falling. Notably, fewer 18-year-olds now elect to go to university and 40 per cent of universities and other higher-education institutions expect to run a loss in this financial year. What are the underlying problems? And what should universities be? What will it take to get out of the hole? Some blame the culture wars and the wider politicisation of education. In the US, a Trump-driven ‘vibe shift’ has caused a reassessment of social-justice priorities and funding for DEI, but UK universities seem to be doubling down. For example, newly proposed guidelines aim to make adherence to diversity guidelines a condition of research funding, raising questions as to how academics assert independence to determine research priorities. ‘Decolonising’ reading lists or eliminating gendered language – even from graduation ceremonies – are said by some to be prioritised over defending knowledge and excellence, which are now said to be elitist. Do such shifts help explain, for example, the devaluation of the arts and humanities, which are under siege and facing drastic cuts? Elsewhere, paternalism can often dominate student life. Some worry that the very notion of the risk-taking, intellectually autonomous student is drowning under directives on wellbeing and mental health. The chancellor of Oxford University, Lord Hague, said universities must not be ‘comfort blankets of cancellation’. But the University of Sussex may be more representative of the new norm with its recent decision to challenge a fine for failing to uphold free speech and insisting on setting guidelines on lawful speech. However, some students do seem keen to fight back against a censorious culture on campus – and in some instances, even sex and gender debates now go ahead largely free of a ‘heckler’s veto’. Are these signs of hope, or more false promises? How do students and academics who wish to change campus culture navigate questions about critical inquiry, intellectual independence and academic freedom? Has managerialism destroyed the university for good, or can it be reformed – and if so, how? How can – and should – we best harness the spirit of true intellectual endeavour, inside and outside of universities?
This special symposium for Oxford Postgraduate and Early Career researchers is an opportunity to share "where you are at" in your research with our vibrant community of women’s, gender and queer historians. It is, more broadly, a day to think about the state of play in these sub-disciplines and their relationship with each other. The day will consist of various panels, poster presentations, and pre-circulated papers, which will allow attendees to consider these sub-fields of history - and their connections to other fields in the social sciences and humanities - in diverse formats. The exact schedule and structure of the day will be announced shortly. The day will end with a concluding plenary titled 'Where are we at?: Multigenerational reflections on the day'. *If you are joining as an audience member, please register in advance on Eventbrite, here: https://tinyurl.com/e8vejwyn*
In this session we will cover how to locate and interpret journal level metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). We will examine the tools you can use to locate journal level metrics, such as Journal Citation Reports and Scopus Sources. We will also consider the uses, limitations and pitfalls inherent in these metrics and how they can be used responsibly. By the end of the session, you will be familiar with: the major journal metrics and how these are calculated; accessing journal citation data using Journal Citation Reports and Scopus Sources; using JIF, CiteScore and SJR journal metrics to rank journals; and the limitations of different metrics, including how journal metrics may be skewed or distorted. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
The human body accumulates somatic mutations throughout life, shaped by diverse mutational processes, environmental exposures, and tissue-specific dynamics. Using highly accurate single-molecule sequencing (NanoSeq), we have mapped the mutational landscape across over 50 human tissue types, revealing striking variability in mutation burden, mutational signatures, and clonal structure. While most somatic tissues accumulate mutations through both endogenous and exogenous processes, the male germline emerges as an evolutionary outlier. Spermatogonial stem cells exhibit the lowest mutation rates observed in any dividing human cell, accumulating just 2-4 single base substitutions per year, despite their lifelong proliferation. In this talk, Dr Rahbari will present insights from their pan tissue analysis, with a focus on the unique features of the germline. She will discuss how its mutational restraint, signature spectrum, and evidence of positive selection distinguish it from somatic tissues, and explore the evolutionary pressures likely acting on the germline to preserve reproductive fidelity. Finally, she will discuss how rare exceptions, such as germline hypermutation, reveal vulnerabilities in this otherwise tightly constrained system, with important implications for heritable disease risk.
Uncover the art of facilitating interactive science demonstrations that captivate and educate. Learn the pivotal elements of event design and planning specifically tailored for public engagement activities. By the end of this course, you'll not only have a repertoire of engaging activities at your disposal, but you'll also possess the skills to thoughtfully design, execute, and adapt events that leave lasting impressions.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
A general online introduction to the vast range of electronic resources which are available for all historical periods of British and Western European history. Learning outcomes are to: gain an overview of some of the key online resources for medieval, early modern and modern British and Western European history; know how to access subscription resources; and gain awareness of key examples of useful resources: bibliographic databases; reference sources; primary sources; maps; audio-visual resources; and data sources. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
This workshop will cover the basics of copyright as they apply to lecturers and tutors at the University of Oxford. It will explain the different types of copyright work that are used or generated in teaching and the rights and responsibilities for teaching staff and students. By attending this session you will have the opportunity to: identify copyright works and usages in teaching contexts; compare different types of licence available for teaching – proprietary and open; follow the requirements of the CLA licence; and apply risk management principles to the use of copyright exceptions for teaching. Intended audience: Oxford students, academics and other staff.
ABSTRACT High Commissioner of Singapore to the UK Mr Ng Teck Hean will share his views on the rapidly evolving geopolitical landscape and its global implications, especially on Singapore and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Mr Ng’s brief remarks will set the context for an interactive Q&A with students. The session, moderated by Professor Joerg Friedrichs, will be followed by an informal reception. BIO Mr Ng has been Singapore’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom since November 2023. He is concurrently accredited to Iceland and Ireland. Prior to his current appointment, Mr Ng served as Deputy Secretary (Asia-Pacific) at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from April 2016 to September 2023. He was concurrently Deputy Secretary (Southeast Asia) from September 2019 to August 2022. During this period, Mr Ng also served as Singapore’s Senior Official to the Arctic Council and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM). From August 2012 to April 2016, Mr Ng was appointed Singapore’s Ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In recognition of his contributions to the strengthening of relations between Singapore and Vietnam, he was awarded the Vietnam Order of Friendship by President Truong Tan Sang in 2016. Mr Ng’s career in the Singapore Foreign Service has spanned multiple key appointments. These include postings as First Secretary in Washington DC (1995-1998), Special Assistant to Minister for Foreign Affairs Professor S Jayakumar (2001-2002), and Deputy High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur (2003-2006). He was Director of the Americas Directorate (2007-2010), and the Southeast Asia Directorate (2010-2012) at the Ministry’s headquarters. Mr Ng was awarded the Public Administration Medal (Bronze) in 2003, the Public Administration Medal (Silver) in 2013, and the Long Service Medal in 2015 by the Government of Singapore.
Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Elisabeth Siegel at elisabeth.siegel@politics.ox.ac.uk or Brian Kot at brian.kot@politics.ox.ac.uk in advance to participate or with any questions. Remote attendance is possible, but in-person attendance is prioritized (and provided refreshment). About the speaker: Kayla Blomquist is a co-founder and director of the Oxford China Policy Lab and a DPhil researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, with an affiliation to the Oxford Martin School AI Governance Initiative. Her research focuses on US-PRC relations and international AI governance, examining how status and legitimacy shape PRC AI governance and development. Prior to Oxford, she served as a diplomat in the U.S. Mission to China for four years, specializing in governance of emerging and dual-use technologies. She is professionally fluent in Mandarin Chinese. She holds an MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute and a bachelor’s degree with Honors in International Relations, Public Policy, and Mandarin Chinese from the University of Denver's Korbel School of International Studies, with additional studies at Peking University.
This amazing feat of translation presents an accessible, clear and fluid English Qur’an that all readers, no matter their faith or familiarity with the text, can read with pleasure and with a deeper appreciation for the book and the religious tradition founded upon it. Those familiar with the Arabic—and especially the faithful who hear the text recited aloud—know that the Qur’an is a perfect blend of sound and sense. While no translation can perfectly capture these complementary virtues of the original, this volume has come closest to an accessible, clear, and fluid English Qur’an that all readers, no matter their faith or familiarity with the text, can read with pleasure and with a deeper appreciation for the book and the religious tradition founded upon it. Extensive notes and explanatory apparatus will help all readers―whether they are familiar with the original or coming to the text for the first time―to read (and hear) the Qur’an with fresh understanding and insight.
Classical philosophy and social theory have long considered the ways in which the city is hospitable; open to the arrival of strangers, newcomers and migrants. In the Open City Project, working at multiple scales of the city as a whole, a single borough, a neighbourhood and a single housing estate, this sense of arrival, belonging and making a home was explored in collaborations across London with three artists. Drawing on different art forms, a scenographer (with a background in forensic architecture), a film-maker, and a socially engaged artist generated work that was central to our research. In this talk, we discuss these collaborations and consider how arts-based methods, often alongside co-produced or collaborative work, have become increasingly common across the social sciences. We discuss critically some of what have become conventional wisdoms of such work, surprising symmetries and asymmetries of knowledge production, especially within the affective register, the relationalities of churning urban life on the ground (and far below it!) and the always surprising insights of empirical research in migration studies, cutting across pasts, presents, and claims over the future. Open City: https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/project/open-city | https://opencitywarwick.co.uk/
More information will be available shortly. Booking is required for people outside of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI). A booking link will be available shortly. DSPI Members do not need to register.
This talk tries to get around our understandable cynicism about the permanent crisis of the humanities by arguing that this is a good time to revive the disciplines with a systemic, collaborative focus on literary knowledge. After limiting myself to one rude comment about the critical debates of the 2010s, and to one (or two) slides about the humanities’ political economy, I will argue that we masters of nuance and ambiguity will have a much healthier discipline if some of us shift to explicit articulations of the full range of the impacts of literary study—personal, affective, cognitive, discursive, cultural, and social, with a special emphasis on non-pecuniary effects. I will try to model sustainable abductive speech acts that aren’t speculative propaganda but interdisciplinary syntheses of existing research findings about the outcomes of literary reading. I will also suggest some possibilities for further scholarship.
Please contact "$":mailto:sarah.apetrei@campion.ox.ac.uk for the Teams link to join remotely.
Over the past 50 years, the Cyril Foster Lecture series has delivered engaging lectures from some of the world's most influential policymakers and academics. This year's lecture will be given by Christine Ahn and Lt Gen (Ret) Dan Leaf, US Air Force, bringing together two leading, internationally renowned speakers on peace activism and peacekeeping. The lecture will be introduced by Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Professor Lord Tarassenko, and chaired by Cyril Foster Lecture Chair, Professor Neta Crawford. The Cyril Foster Lecture 2025: Many fear that the next big interstate war will begin in Asia, whether as an escalation of pre-existing but unresolved conflicts or by accident and miscalculation. Christine Ahn and and Lt Gen (Ret) Dan Leaf, US Air Force have decades of experience working in conflict zones. They have found working together to bring peace and reconciliation in the Asia Pacific region valuable. They will share insights from their individual work in Korea and Vietnam, their collaborations and will talk about the politics and process of ending wars. More about Christine Ahn and Lt Gen (Ret) Dan Leaf, US Air Force: Christine Ahn is an Fellow from the Institute for Policy Studies and Founder, Women Cross DMZ. Christine is a Korean-American peace activist who served as the Executive Director of Women Cross DMZ, an organization of women advocating for an end to the Korean War. In 2015, she led 30 international women peacemakers across the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) from North Korea to South Korea. She is also the 2020 winner of The US Peace Prize for her work for peace on the Korean peninsula and her advocacy for women's leadership in peace-building efforts. Lt Gen (Ret) Dan Leaf, US Air Force, is the Managing Director of Phase Minus 1, LLC (PM1), a company he formed in 2017. His focus areas include peace on the Korean Peninsula, the US-Viet Nam relationship, conflict resolution, effective governance, and strategic leadership. He provides independent consulting services on cyber security solutions, adaptive learning systems, and AI-enabled planning tools. A decorated combat fighter pilot, Dan Leaf has more than 3,600 flight hours, including F-15 and F-16 combat missions during a 33-year USAF career that culminated in duties as the Deputy Commander of U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) 2005-2008. Event Schedule: 4.30pm - 4.55pm: Registration 5pm prompt: The Cyril Foster Lecture 2025 will start; - Opening remarks from Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Professor Lord Tarassenko CBE FREng FMedSci, President of Reuben College - Introduction to Christine Ahn and Lt Gen (Ret) Dan Leaf, US Air Force by Professor Neta Crawford - Cyril Foster Lecture 2025: ‘How to End Wars: Pragmatic Approaches to Peacebuilding' by Christine Ahn and Dan Leaf - Q&A chaired by Professor Neta Crawford - Closing remarks by Head of Department of Politics and International Relations, Professor David Doyle 6.30pm - 7.30pm: Drinks Reception About the Cyril Foster Lecture Series: This lecture series is the legacy of Cyril A Foster. We know very little about him. Mr Foster owned several small sweet shops in and around London and lived alone in Essex. On his death, he left a bequest to the University, asking us to create an annual lecture series on the ‘elimination of war and the better understanding of the nations of the world’. This wish is particularly unusual, as he had no previous connection to the University. His kind and generous gift continues to promote international cooperation. Previous speakers include prominent figures from the world of politics and policy, from prime ministers and foreign ministers, to secretary-generals of the United Nations and heads of major international organisations, as well as prominent academics. See the full list of past lectures at https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/cyril-foster-lecture-series
As part of the Castalian String Quartet's residency, this session will consist of brief presentations by Eric Clarke, Jacob Downs, Laura Tunbridge, and Jennifer Walshe. Our point of departure for discussion is Hans Keller's 'Group functioning of a string quartet', which we will consider in relation to distributed cognition/creativity and improvisation, intimacy, models for unity and disintegration, and how a quartet might be infiltrated by external creative forces. Keller's text takes the form of a letter, responding to a questionnaire circulated by sociologist Margaret Phillips about small-group psychology in 1942. It is reproduced in Music and Psychology: From Vienna to London, 1939-52, ed. Christopher Wintle and Alison Garnham (London: Plumbago, 2003), pp. 41-47. We encourage you to read this short text before the session.
The aim of the seminar is to foster a dynamic and interdisciplinary postcolonial research culture supportive of individual scholarship. Finalists, M.St. and D.Phil. students, lecturers, fellows, scholars from across the university community – all are welcome. If you’d like to appear on the seminar mailing list, please email zana.mody@kellogg.ox.ac.uk, riley.faulds@worc.ox.ac.uk OR hannah.fagan@mansfield.ox.ac.uk
Join Worcester College Provost, David Isaac CBE, as he interviews leading role models about their lives and careers. Award-winning journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed presents the BBC’s flagship arts show, Front Row, on Radio 4, where she regularly interviews leading writers, actors and directors. Meanwhile on BBC One, her Newswatch programme scrutinises the corporation’s journalism and editorial decision making on behalf of viewers and listeners. Samira’s documentaries include Art of Persia (BBC Four) – the first major Western documentary series shot in Iran for 40 years – as well as films exploring the intersection of popular culture, science, politics, and social change. In 2020, Samira was named British Broadcasting Press Guild audio presenter of the year, the same year in which she won a landmark sex discrimination employment tribunal against the BBC for equal pay on Newswatch. Before joining the BBC, Samira was a news anchor and correspondent for Channel 4 News, where she won the Stonewall Broadcast of the Year award for her film about the so-called ‘corrective’ rape of lesbian women in South Africa. Samira is a trustee of the Centre for Women’s Justice and on the advisory board of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. She is an honorary fellow of Oxford’s St Edmund Hall and holds honorary doctorates in law and arts from the University of East Anglia, City – University of London, Kingston University and the University of Winchester. Join us in the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre at Worcester College. All are welcome to join for drinks after the event. Please note that entry to the venue is via the Worcester College Porters’ Lodge on Walton Street and that the auditorium is approximately five minutes’ walk from this entrance.
The Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that attendance at the Surgical Grand Rounds can count toward internal CPD, with 1 point awarded per hour. Please note that in-person attendance is required, and you will need to sign the attendance register. Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend online.
The COVID-19 pandemic represented a major challenge to many sectors of society. It also provided the opportunity for epidemiological modellers to prove their worth. Much of the modelling was performed to extremely tight deadlines and was underpinned by noisy and often biased data. 5 years on, and with the benefit of hindsight, I’ll present a personal perspective of what went well, what went badly and lessons for next time. I’ll cover many aspects, but pay particular attention to vaccination, roadmaps, Omicron and building collaborative networks.
Several icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, including Europa and Enceladus, host liquid oceans buried beneath their icy crusts. Geological features of the ice crusts as well as large-scale variations of the ice thickness are often attributed to endogenic processes within the ice. However, the ice crust is also coupled to the rocky interior via the convective ocean which controls heat and material exchanges. Using direct numerical simulations in rotating spherical shells, we investigate how tidal heating within the silicate mantle could affect rotating thermal convection in Europa's ocean. In particular, tidal heating in the rocky mantle is spatially heterogeneous (larger at the poles, with longitudinal variations of order 2 in the equatorial region). These horizontal variations can drive "thermal winds" which would significantly change the general circulation in the ocean compared with homogeneous heating, which is more representative of radiogenic heating. These results suggest that if tidal heating is dominant in the silicate mantle, its pattern could be partially transposed up to the ice despite the dynamic ocean lying between the ice crust and the rocky mantle.
About the book: This book explores the profound and multifaceted impact of stigma on individuals with Tourette’s syndrome. It critically examines how stigma, rooted in historical misconceptions continues to shape societal perceptions and attitudes, and marginalises those with the condition across education, employment, media, and interpersonal relationships. Drawing on personal narratives, Tourette’s Syndrome, Stigma, and Society’s Jests investigates how humour and media representations both reinforce and challenge societal stigma. It evaluates systemic barriers that maintain inequality and exclusion and confronts traditional medicalised views of Tourette’s syndrome. Significantly, it advocates for an intersectional approach that emphasises inclusivity, empowerment, and society’s accountability in addressing stigma and fostering change. By weaving together lived experiences with scholarly insights, the book challenges readers to rethink preconceived notions about Tourette’s syndrome and to consider the societal structures that impact the lives of those with the condition. Accessible yet grounded in academic research, this volume offers valuable insights for readers interested in disability studies or social justice. It aims to inspire dialogue, challenge stigma, and advocate for a future that prioritises the voices and experiences of individuals with Tourette’s syndrome. Part of the TORCH Neurodiversity Network events
Dr. James Olzmann completed his undergraduate studies in Biology at the University of Michigan and earned his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Emory University. He then performed his postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Ron Kopito at Stanford University, where he studied the cellular mechanisms of ER protein quality control. In 2013, he established his independent research group at the University of California, Berkeley where he is the Doris H. Calloway Chair and Professor of Molecular Therapeutics. He holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Molecular & Cell Biology and Nutritional Sciences & Toxicology. Dr. Olzmann’s research group investigates the principles that regulate cellular lipid homeostasis, including the mechanisms that influence neutral lipid storage in lipid droplets and oxidative lipid damage during ferroptosis. His group further aims to develop small molecule tools and therapeutics to target these pathways in disease. Dr. Olzmann’s contributions to the field have been recognized with several honors, such as the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, American Society for Cell Biology Günter Blobel Early Career Award, Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator appointment, UC Berkeley Beatriz Manz Award, and Miller Institute Professorship Award.
Join us as we continue our discussion around the intellectual histories of Black women, with an ‘in conversation’ session with Professor Mia Bay and Dr. Meleisa Ono-George. Prof. Bay and Dr. Ono-George will lead with a conversation about their methodologies, praxis, and engagement with these histories, after which we will facilitate a Q&A session, where we welcome your questions, thoughts, and provocations. Biography: Mia Bay is the newly appointed Paul A. Mellon Professor of American History in the University of Cambridge. Previously she taught at University of Pennsylvania, where she was Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History, and in the Department of History at Rutgers University, where she also led the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity. She is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history whose interests include black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. Bay’s most recent book is the Bancroft prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Harvard University Press, 2021. Her previous books include To Tell the Truth Freely: the Life of Ida B. Wells. Hill & Wang, February 2009; The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925, Oxford University Press, 2000, and the edited works Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015, which she co-edited with Martha Jones, Farah Griffin and Barbara Savage, and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line, Rutgers University Press, 2015, which she co-edited with Ann Fabian. Bay's current scholarly projects include a book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson, and a study of streetcars and segregation in the nineteenth century United States. Biography: Dr. Meleisa Ono-George is a social-cultural historian of race and gender, with a focus on Black women’s histories in Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean. She is interested in the everyday ways people oppressed within society negotiate and navigate structures of power and inequality, as well as the legacies and politics of writing such histories within contemporary society. Dr Ono-George’s current research focuses on the life of an Afro-Jamaican woman in late eighteenth-century Jamaica and Britain and the archival remnants of her life. She is also currently developing a community-engaged project which looks at the history of Black mothering in Britain and the use of creative storytelling. Both projects draw upon her interest in community-engaged and Caribbean research methodologies. Dr. Ono-George’s first book, My Name is Amelia Newsham: Science, Art and the Making of Race, is forthcoming from Viking Books. ----- Bluesky: raceresistance.bsky.social Subscribe to our mailing list by sending a blank email to: race-and-resistance-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Oncogenes are not able to initiate tumors in all cellular contexts, a phenomenon referred to as oncogenic competence. Such competence depends on both cell-intrinsic programs (i.e. developmental and epigenetic state) as well as cell-extrinsic influences from the TME. To study this, we have developed zebrafish and human pluripotent stem cell models of melanoma. In the talk, I will discuss how convergence of intrinsic and extrinsic programs determines the likelihood of oncogenic transformation. SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY The White lab is interested in the basic biology of melanoma, with a specific focus on the intersection between developmental biology and cancer biology. There are many parallels in these processes, including both cell-intrinsic fate decisions as well as cell-cell interactions in the microenvironment. Using both zebrafish and human pluripotent stem cell models of melanoma, his lab has described a mechanism called “oncogenic competence” that explains why DNA mutations are only sometimes able to initiate tumors. His lab has found that the ability to initiate melanoma is strongly influence by the anatomic position of the cell along the body axis. Whereas cutaneous melanomas are enriched for BRAF mutations, acral melanomas more commonly harbor amplifications of genes such as CRKL. These specific oncogenes depend upon the positional gene program in the melanocytes, suggesting that an anatomic code could be a targetable vulnerability in melanoma. Finally, his work has more recently investigated how cells in the TME such as keratinocytes and adipocytes promote melanoma progression and metastasis, acting through signaling and epigenetic mechanisms. He has been awarded the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, as well as awards from the Melanoma Research Alliance, the Pershing Square Foundation Award, the American Cancer Society, and the Mark Foundation ASPIRE award.
Zotero is a reference management tool that helps you build libraries of references and add citations and bibliographies to word processed documents using your chosen citation style. This classroom-based session covers the main features of Zotero and comprises a 45-minute presentation followed by practical exercises at the computers. You can leave at any point once you have tried out the software, and do not have to stay until the end. The learning outcomes for this classroom-based session are to: create a Zotero library and add references to it; edit and organise references in your Zotero library; add in-text citations and/or footnotes to your word-processed document; create bibliographies; understand how to sync your Zotero library across multiple computers; and understand how to share your Zotero library of references. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Puzzled by PICO? Daunted by databases? Baffled by Boolean? This one-hour online introductory class will offer top tips and advice on how to find literature to answer a research question. No prior experience necessary! Together, we will break down a question into the PICO format, put together a structured search, and try it out in PubMed. By the end of this session, you will be able to: explain what structured searching is, and when to use it; break your research question down into searchable concepts; and make use of Boolean operators (ANDs/ORs) in your structured searches. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
TBC
As climate change drives more frequent and more severe weather events and as governments across the world implement policies to transition their economies to net zero, the macroeconomic impacts are increasingly materialising over time horizons relevant for monetary policymakers. James Talbot, Executive Director at the Bank of England and Chair of the Network for Greening the Financial System’s (NGFS) workstream on monetary policy, explains why monetary policymakers must understand the macroeconomic impacts of climate change. Drawing on the latest work in this area, he discusses the channels through which climate shocks affect the economy, the trade-offs they can present for policymakers and why central banks need to better understand these risks.
Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 4-7 Supplementary: Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854): Chapters 1-2; Lorna Finlayson ‘I was a Child Liberationist’ (2021)
Join us for the second annual Social Sciences Division Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Lecture, featuring award-winning journalist, bestselling author, filmmaker and Oxford alumna Afua Hirsch. Afua Hirsch studied PPE at Oxford. Her bestselling books, including Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (2018) and Decolonising My Body: A Radical Exploration of Rituals and Beauty (2023), have shaped conversations on race, identity, and decolonisation. In this lecture, she will share insights from her career and research, offering reflections on some of today’s most urgent questions around race and belonging. Afua Hirsch is the founder of Born In Me, a production company creating premium scripted and unscripted TV and film, including Africa Rising, an ongoing BBC series exploring the art and culture of African countries. She is also the host of Legacy, a top-3 global podcast hit for Wondery and Amazon Music, now in its twentieth season. A journalist for more than twenty years, she is a former Guardian correspondent, associate editor of British Vogue, and a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California. We do hope you'll join us for this opportunity to hear from one of today’s leading voices in journalism, storytelling, and social commentary.
We are pleased to welcome you to our latest in the series of ‘In Conversation…’ events with renowned journalist and broadcaster, Mishal Husain. Mishal Husain is a journalist, broadcaster and author who was a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme for 11 years and will launch a new global interview show for Bloomberg in 2025. She will be joined by historian, writer and Kellogg vice-president, Prof Yasmin Khan. Yasmin and Mishal will discuss Mishal's latest book, her family history, and wider links to Asian history. You can read more about the book here. Refreshments will be served from 5pm; the event will begin at 5.30pm. Post-event drinks will be served in the Hub immediately after the event, at approximately 6.45pm. Please register to attend in person by clicking the red button on the right. If you cannot attend in person and would like to attend the livestream of the event, please register via https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1262826591329?aff=oddtdtcreator This event will be photographed and filmed. If you do not wish to appear in the photographs/footage, please let the photographer/videographer know. Should you have any further queries, or be unable to attend after booking, please contact events@kellogg.ox.ac.uk
The liberal international order has shaped global politics since the end of the Second World War. But in an age of rising authoritarian powers, renewed great-power rivalry, and domestic political backlash, its future appears increasingly uncertain. Is liberal internationalism in terminal decline—or is it evolving to meet the challenges of a changing world? Join the Oxford University International Relations Society for a conversation with Professor G. John Ikenberry, one of the world’s leading theorists of liberal internationalism, as he reflects on the past, present, and future of the liberal order. The discussion will explore how liberal values, institutions, and multilateral frameworks are being tested—and whether a more resilient form of liberal internationalism can still anchor global cooperation. This event is open to all members of the University of Oxford. G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He is also Co-Director of Princeton’s Center for International Security Studies. Ikenberry is also a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. In 2018-19, Ikenberry was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. In 2013-2014 Ikenberry was the 72nd Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College, Oxford. Ikenberry is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In a recent survey of international relations scholars, Ikenberry was ranked in the top 10 in scholars who have produced the best work in the field of IR in the past 20 years, and ranked in the top 8 in scholars who have produced the most interesting work in the past 5 years.
The integration of artificial intelligence into patient care, high rates of burnout occurring in the healthcare workforce, and work settings defined by bureaucracy all shape how health professionals see themselves and do their jobs. These realities present opportunities as well as challenges. This seminar will identify the professional mindsets needed, and the specific personal tactics required, for thriving in today’s healthcare work settings.
Curious about using AI to find research papers? Not sure how to properly reference GenAI and avoid plagiarism? This beginner-friendly workshop introduces three GenAI tools (ChatGPT, Elicit, and Perplexity), showing how they can support information discovery and analysis. Designed for those new to AI, this practical session will allow you to independently experiment with these tools and participate in group discussions to explore their strengths, limitations, and suitability for different tasks. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers, and other staff who are new to AI.
The 5-module core course designed and delivered by experts in leadership provides a blend of online materials, presentations and small group discussion sessions, and aims to develop enhanced skills and confidence in innovation leadership, managing stakeholders and teams, influencing skills and more. Module 1: Leadership and innovation Module 2: The Entrepreneurial Mindset Module 3: Visualising Success: setting goals and identifying success factors Module 4: Managing stakeholders and teams; Coaching and mentoring for success Module 5: Communicating and influencing externally
CPRD collects anonymised patient data from a network of GP practices across the UK. Primary care data are linked to a range of other health related data to provide a longitudinal, representative UK population health dataset. For more than 35 years, research using CPRD data and services has informed clinical guidance and best practice, resulting in over 3,500 peer-reviewed publications investigating drug safety, use of medicines, effectiveness of health policy, health care delivery and disease risk factors. The session will provide a brief overview of the wealth of data available for researchers, discuss the strengths and limitations of the data, describe the process of submitting a research protocol and obtaining data access, and explain how the NDPH CPRD Team can work with researchers on potential studies. Topics to be covered: 1. Primary care data 2. Linked data 3. Research protocol submission and data access Intended Audience Staff and students who are interested in learning how to use electronic health records from GP practices for research in disease epidemiology, methodological and/or health services delivery research, drug safety, economics, drug utilisation, pharmacoeconomics, drug effectiveness, and pharmacoepidemiology. Objectives 1. Understand the coverage, strengths and limitations of the two primary care databases 2. Aware of the linked datasets available 3. Aware of CPRD's Research Data Governance process 4. Aware of the services provided by the NDPH CPRD Team Monday, 12 May, 10:00 - 11:00 am Aden Kwok - An introduction to Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) data Mode: Hybrid To attend, please register - https://forms.office.com/e/JdBY77pCNF?origin=lprLink MS Teams - Join the meeting now Meeting ID: 391 230 848 220 Passcode: Cm6up2Pd
Acquisition of a ptychographic dataset typically requires the collection of a series of far field diffraction patterns as a function of probe position at the specimen plane. This can then be used to recover the complex specimen object function using either iterative or non-iterative algorithms. Importantly, ptychography is an inherently dose efficient technique, enabling effective the reconstruction of the exit wavefunction of radiation sensitive objects. For applications in the life sciences cryo-electron ptychography holds much promise particularly when used with a defocused probe to scan across a specimen with highly overlapped probe positions. This can be applied in a variant of conventional single particle analysis to provide 3D structures taking advantage of the known resolution variation of the effective ptychographic transfer function with convergence angle to provide wide spatial frequency bandwidth transfer. This geometry also allows datasets from wide fields of view to be collected that are suitable for studies of biologically relevant structures in a low concentration cellular context.Ultimately the resolution of reconstructions of radiation sensitive samples is limited by radiation damage which inherently scales with electron fluence and in general most Ptychographic datasets have extremely low signal to noise. Methods to overcome this will be discussed including sparse scan geometries optimised based on diffusion equations and the use of neural networks for processing of the raw input data. For the latter accurate centring of the bright field disk, data denoising and deconvolution of the detector MTF provides a typical 3-4 X enhancement of the SNR. Finally, regularised and Fourier Ptychography as alternative data acquisition and processing strategies will be discussed.
TBC
The immediate risk of AI is not a sensational conflict with malevolent superintelligence and killer robots. It is the risk of AI destabilizing the current political-economic equilibrium, radically altering the balance of power in society, and tearing up the social fabric. This talk describes how such a process might unfold and proposes policies and institutions for managing the political and economic risks of AI. Competition policy emerges as a critical tool for risk management, as does strengthening democratic and egalitarian institutions. Without appropriate policies, there will be no AI-driven growth take-off and the scale of inequality that would emerge would dwarf anything experienced in the twentieth century.
Considerable criticism of the narrowness of teacher efficacy operationalisations argues they fail to tap the complexity of the teacher’s role. At the same time, we need more knowledge about how self-efficacies change for different kinds of teachers, dependent on their individual qualities and early career experiences, and consequences for their professional engagement. In this seminar, I will review the development and validation of our multidimensional SET (self-efficacy for teaching) scale1 , explore different patterns of change from teacher education through early career, identify associated demographics and early career experiences, and examine impacts on professional engagement. The SET extends the widely-used Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001), to build a comprehensive and ecologically-valid measure beyond their classroom work by developing new items to tap 5 additional competences: ‘Critical reflection on practice’, ‘Value cultural diversity’, ‘Professional interactions with the community’, ‘Respect confidentiality’ and ‘Meet legislated ethical requirements’. Beginning teachers (N = 339) from four Australian universities completed the SET at 2 timepoints: near the end of teacher education, and again after on average 3 years teaching. Early career self-report measures included experiences of excessive demands, mentoring, collective-efficacy and belonging. Professional engagement was measured at both timepoints (effort, planned professional development, persistence). CFAs established psychometric validity and scalar invariance across timepoints. Five different change patterns were distinguished using hierarchical cluster analysis (Ward’s method) of change scores: “High competence”, “Moderate growth”, “High growth—longest timeframe”, “Declining competence” and “Declining competence—shortest timeframe”. Repeated-measures MANOVA compared clusters on trajectories which associated with distinct demographic/school contextual characteristics. High competence started out and retained high self-efficacies; highest-rated collective-efficacy/belonging T2 may have supported this continuity. By contrast, ‘declining’ clusters reported least supports. Moderate growth/High growth—longest timeframe reported similar contextual supports as others. Declining self-efficacies mattered for teachers’ level of professional engagement. Although tempting to infer self-efficacy increases with length of experience it was unrelated for one ‘declining’ cluster, pointing to quality rather than quantity of experience as key. It is crucial for policymakers, educators and administrators to set in place contextual structures and practices to nurture beginning teachers’ professional engagement and development by supporting the range of expected competences outlined by national frameworks. Acknowledgments: This work is conducted jointly with Professor Paul Richardson, Monash University, funded by Australian Research Council: DP0666253, DP0987614, DP140100402 1 Watt & Richardson, 2008 – presented at Oxford in 2009. Join on Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OTNiZGM1MzItOTcwOS00YThjLWJmYTAtZGFjZGM1YzkyNjQw%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2275f39f15-fefd-45cf-b904-2e2174db4aa1%22%7d
Infectious diseases exert huge selective pressure on their hosts, resulting in all sorts of host population genetic signatures of pathogens past and present. I am particularly interested in studying the genes of humans and other primates in order to learn about malaria. I will discuss malaria infection blocking mutations, such as the Dantu blood group and the Duffy negative mutation, and what their global distribution may indicate about malaria parasites. Bio-Sketch of speaker: Bridget Penman studies the genetics of infection. She uses mathematical and computational models to simulate interactions between pathogens and genetically diverse host species. Bridget is especially interested in malaria parasites and in how humans and other primates have adapted to malaria. Bridget studied her undergraduate degree and DPhil at Oxford and was also a postdoctoral fellow in the Zoology department and at Merton College. She then moved to the University of Warwick, where she worked in the School of Life Sciences and the Zeeman Institute. Bridget is now an Associate Professor Tutorial Fellow in the Biology Department and St Peter's College here in Oxford.
Patents and standards are a valuable source of technical information relevant to the fields of engineering, materials sciences, and more. Together, they provide approved rules and guidelines whilst helping to protect inventions and innovative ideas. They can, however, be tricky to find. Join this session to find out more about what patents and standards are, why they might be useful for your research and how to find them in specific databases. By the end of this session, you will: know what a patent is and where to find it; know what a standard is and where to find it; and be able to reference patents and standards. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Are you considering an academic career? In this session we will hear from a small panel of early- to mid-career academics about their day-to-day roles, how they manage a work-life balance, and opportunities for progression. This is a chance to ask questions and generate discussion on many aspects of being an academic. *Lorena Sanchez* Dr. Lorena Sanchez Tyson is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Hertfordshire's School of Law and Education. Her research focuses on education and international development. This is Lornas first academic appointment after leaving her postdoctoral position at the Dept of Education here in Oxford last year. *Laurence Roope* Dr Laurence Roope, Larry, is a senior researcher at the Health Economics Research Centre, research interests lie broadly within development economics, with particular interests in poverty, inequality, health, and human capital. He has also worked as a consultant for the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research and as an econometrician in the private sector. *Liz Stokes* Dr Liz Stokes is a senior researcher at the Health Economics Research Centre in 2009 having worked at Keele University (2001-2007) and Liverpool John Moores University (2008-2009) and in this time completed an MSc in Medical Statistics at the University of Leicester. Liz’s research interests lie in economic evaluation and particularly in costing within economic evaluations. She has worked on many cost-effectiveness analyses alongside randomised controlled trials in areas such as blood transfusion, and cardiac and thoracic surgery, and has used decision modelling to assess the cost-effectiveness of additional tests to guide treatment decisions for several cardiac populations. Liz completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford in 2016 on the costs and cost-effectiveness of transfusion management strategies in cardiac surgery. Liz is a Research Advisor for the Research Design Service - South Central *Vojtech Prazak* Dr Vojtech Prazak is currently a visiting researcher based in the Dept of Biochemistry and a Postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute of Virology in Hamburg having completed his DPhil in Oxford at the Dept of Structural Biology. His research interests are focused on the use of Cryo-ET to investigate host-pathogen interactions of a diverse array that includes viruses, bacteria, plasmodium and most recently oomycetes. *Emma Silvester* Dr Emma Silvester completed a DPhil in the Dept Physics, followed by Postdocs in the Depts of Structural Biology and then Biochemistry. In 2023 Emma won a Wellcome Early-Career Award investigating DNA nanostructures as tags for cryo-electron tomography. These nanostructures are highly visible and address one of the significant challenges of studying complex biological systems in 3D by cryo-electron tomography: identifying specific molecules in crowded environments. Emma has validated this approach on vesicles, viruses and cell surfaces, and her research now focuses on intracellular applications.
In a big place like Oxford, it’s not always easy to find out about what’s available and how to make the most of your time here. This event is for new research staff to welcome you to our wonderful university and introduce you to the many opportunities and resources. People who attend are typically postdocs, research fellows and research assistants at Grades 6 to 8. Event objectives: Identify resources and support for your professional and career development. Know how to widen your social network through the Oxford Research Staff Society, Oxford University Newcomers Club. Start to effectively plan your coming months at Oxford. Pre-Requisites: No pre-requisites required.
Although two-photon calcium imaging has provided groundbreaking discoveries since its first application more than 30 years ago, the emerging field of two-photon voltage imaging offers significant advantages by directly capturing millisecond-scale membrane potential dynamics. Unlike calcium imaging, which relies on slower, indirect calcium signals that lag behind electrical activity and fail to resolve subthreshold potentials or hyperpolarizations, which are crucial for understanding synaptic integration and network computation. Voltage imaging with genetically encoded indicators (GEVIs) achieves sub-millisecond temporal resolution, allowing for the detection of individual action potentials and dendritic voltage fluctuations in vivo. Additionally, GEVIs enable cell-type-specific targeting and chronic recordings, which are nearly impossible to achieve with patch-clamp-based electrophysiological methods. To fully exploit the advantages of voltage indicators, only fast imaging methods capable of matching this temporal resolution are essential. Cutting-edge 3D acousto-optical (AO) system combines acousto-optical scanning and 3D online real-time motion correction (RTMC) to achieve even 100 kHz/ROI sampling rates in freely behaving animals, resolving fast neuronal and dendritic signals as well as their integration. Voltage imaging with 3D acousto-optical system also facilitates unique closed-loop experiments, enabling simultaneous 3D photostimulation and 3D recording to evoke and track artificial percepts with 0.5 ms precision. Furthermore, novel GEVI sensors that can be excited at shorter wavelengths with positive fluorescent signals incorporate all the optical advantages of two-photon imaging, including deep imaging depths of up to 700 μm through the entire mouse cortex and low phototoxicity. These advancements position two-photon voltage imaging as a transformative tool for studying neural circuits and advancing neuroprosthetic applications.
EndNote is a desktop-based reference management tool for Windows and Mac users. It helps you to build libraries of references and insert them into Word documents as in-text citations or footnotes and to automatically generate bibliographies. This classroom-based introduction to EndNote is open to all University of Oxford students, researchers and staff and teaches you how to use the software so that you can effectively manage your references. The workshop will cover: what EndNote can do for you; adding references to EndNote from a range of sources; managing your references in an EndNote library; adding in-text citations and/or footnotes to your essays and papers; and creating bibliographies. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
ABSTRACT Successful mathematical learning requires the integration of conceptual understanding, procedural skill, and number fact knowledge. But many children struggle with learning number facts and particularly the multiplication tables. One reason for this may be the need to resolve interference between facts. Models of number fact learning propose that this requires inhibitory control, but we lack empirical evidence for this and particularly how interference emerges when learning new facts. I will present studies with adults and children that evidence the need for inhibitory control, examine interference during the learning of new facts, and consider the impact of different types of classroom practice. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Camilla Gilmore is Professor of Mathematical Cognition at Loughborough University. She is interested in understanding how we acquire and process mathematical ideas and what this means for mathematics education. She completed her doctorate in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford before working as a postdoc at Harvard University. She then spent five years as a Research Fellow in the Learning Sciences Research Institute at The University of Nottingham before joining Loughborough in 2011. She is now Co-director of the Centre for Mathematical Cognition – funded by Research England – and leads the ESRC-funded Centre for Early Mathematics Learning. To join the talk remotely: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84218701589?pwd=0ztWPlw7tqf80Wpg6zmFNJULKifiX1.1 Meeting ID: 842 1870 1589 ID: 536931
We introduce the concept of the moral cost of carbon (MCC): the internal carbon price individuals implicitly apply to their consumption decisions. We argue that the MCC is a key metric for policy design as it reveals how much consumers are willing to sacrifice to address the carbon externality. We propose an artefactual experimental design to measure the distribution of the MCC among a target population. We empirically find that the MCC is highly heterogeneous. It follows a bi-modal distribution where it is effectively zero for almost half of the sample. It is also malleable with respect to extrinsic incentives; carbon pricing crowds out the MCC, but only for consumers that are the least morally motivated.
Stuart Hall’s recasting of “race as a floating signifier” has paved the way for a return to the problematisation of apartheid in South Africa and those racial formations that follow in its wake. Taking my cue from Hall, I argue that shifts in the co-evolution of the human and technology beginning with the abolition of slavery and passing through the rise of experimental psychology (later psychotechnics), and cybernetics may better explain the rise of biopolitical projects such as apartheid. These shifts significantly altered and constituted the meaning of race as a site of stasis, or permanent civil war. In this lecture I revisit three theatrical works by William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company – Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld, and Ubu and the Truth Commission – to explore the fate of the subject caught in the double binds of race and technology. Rather than seeking reprieve in a politics of transcendence, a perspective of the technical becoming of the human locates apartheid in a global conjuncture where the work of its undoing may proceed.
Is part of the purpose of our roles as academics to change society by feeding our knowledge into policy decision making? Increasingly the spotlight might fall on how we are making a measurable difference in society. So how can we engage with stakeholders, and use our knowledge, to inform, shape and/or change policy? Reflecting on his role as Aotearoa New Zealand Ministry of Transport’s Chief Science Advisor, this presentation will consider how we can engage in decision making and the risks of doing it. It will consider the pros and cons of being ‘inside government’ vs the greater freedom, but less direct access to policy makers, of being outside. It was also consider the professional and personal risks of trying to get your voice heard in policy debates.
Instructions to burn, destroy, or keep documents hidden abounded in correspondences of the long eighteenth century. A common cultural practice, the destruction of personal papers denotes a process of selectivity and self-curation, as well as speaking to the negotiations of trust that underpinned epistolary relationships. This paper explores the widespread practice of destruction in the context of the correspondences of scientific figures from 1650-1850. Drawing on several case studies, it will be argued that the destruction of papers in this period provided a means through which their writers could curate their image, navigate societal and intellectual expectations, and test their relationships with their correspondents. From discussions of the destruction of 'juvenile' scientific tracts that were deemed unsuitable for publication, through pleas to destroy long and rambling letters that somewhat incoherently jump from one theory to another, to the enclosing of the papers of others marked for destruction after reading to preserve integrity, this paper will explore a range of manuscript sources that reveal the central place that destruction played in shaping the correspondences of early modern scientists. *Dr Zoe Screti* is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her project, ‘Burn This: The Destruction of Personal Papers During the European Enlightenment’, explores the intentional destruction of manuscripts during the long eighteenth century and combines digital humanities techniques with more traditional archival research to model and understand archival loss in this period. She was formerly the Astra Foundation Research Fellow in Manuscript Studies at the Voltaire Foundation where she worked on the Catalogue of Manuscripts Relating to Voltaire (CMV). For CMV, Zoe established the data model for the catalogue, identified fields for inclusion, created catalogue entries, and considered ways in which CMV could link to the wider Digital Voltaire project. She continues to contribute to the catalogue alongside her Leverhulme ECF project. Zoe has a BA in History, an MA in Early Modern History, and a PhD in History, all from the University of Birmingham. Her doctoral thesis explored the relationship between religious reform and alchemy in early modern England, questioning what the collation, circulation, and use of alchemical manuscripts can reveal about the ways in which alchemy was shaped by the Reformation.
Many explanations for the rise of populism date its modern incarnation back to the Great Financial Crisis, when arguably a period of deregulation triggered risk taking that brought the global financial system crashing down. But equally it will be hard to foster faster growth unless the UK’s financial services grow faster and more effectively serve their purpose. So how does the regulator in the middle, the Financial Conduct Authority, get the balance right between consumer rights and enabling innovation? Find out more and register: https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/research/visiting-parliamentary-fellowship/register-to-attend-7/ This seminar will take place in the Nissan Institute Lecture Theatre at St Antony’s College: 62 Woodstock Rd, Oxford, OX2 6JF
Academics, teachers, and activists have long been engaged in efforts to dismantle deficit thinking about language and race in England’s schools, but linguistic injustices persist. In this talk, which draws on my individual and collaborative projects with Professor Julia Snell, I show how Ofsted are a central force in the maintenance of linguistic injustice and the reproduction of dominant language ideologies which frame racialised and working-class communities as linguistically deficient. I draw on multiple data to do so, including a large corpus of historical and contemporary inspection reports, Ofsted policy documents, training materials for inspectors, and interviews with racially marginalised teachers. I turn critical attention to the white ears of Ofsted – institutional and powerful modes of listening which hear nondominant language varieties as symptomatic of empirically detached but ideologically connected traits, such as misbehaviour, poor quality teaching, intellectual inferiority, and a disinterest in school. I show how Ofsted rely on a flawed theory of social justice which frames the acquisition of dominant language varieties as a key means to achieving equality, but at its core, is a means to preserve the raciolinguistic status quo. Through this analysis, I argue that Ofsted’s policing of language in schools is a form of what Rob Nixon calls slow violence: an intergenerational form of harm which builds up quietly yet steadily over time. I end by calling for linguistic justice in schools and consider what role – if any – Ofsted might play in that. -- Dr Ian Cushing is Senior Lecturer in Critical Applied Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research focuses on documenting and dismantling deficit thinking about language in schools, especially concerning its intersections with race and class. This work takes place in close collaboration with teachers, where he is currently involved in projects which imagine futures of linguistic justice in schools. His work is funded by the Spencer Foundation, the British Academy/Leverhulme, and the UK Literacy Association. His 2022 monograph, Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and England’s Schools won the British Association of Applied Linguistics book prize, and he was the recipient of the 2023 Outstanding Contribution to Research award from the National Association for the Teaching of English. He is an Editor of Critical Studies in Education.
Join us to hear Dr Joel Ng, Centre for Multilateralism Studies (CMS), S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, discuss 'Prospects for Multilateralism at the End of the Liberal Order'. The US retreat from commitments to uphold the liberal order and the lack of viable alternatives to this system may represent a grave threat to small states’ continued autonomy and even survival. Even before the Trump administration’s rejection of the liberal order, work was under way in Asia to develop alternative multilateral formats, including BRICS, Sino-centric multilaterals, and the longstanding ASEAN-led mechanisms. Asymmetric power relations underlie all formats, which creates difficult choices for small states, yet that asymmetry may be a necessary condition for success. This talk examines the prospects of new multilateral alternatives and their implications from a small state perspective.
For more than two and a half millennia the verses of the Psalms have welled up in the hearts and minds of Jews and Christians in countless situations, from reveries about the beauty and order of the world, celebration of the power of the divine, desperate prayer for rescue from danger, to confidence that God will always be at our side. Indeed, our immediate emotional and spiritual needs, the public or private settings of our song, even our fleeting moods, shade our conversations with the divine as we read and sing the Psalms in different moments in our lives. Hebrew manuscript artist and scholar, Debra Band, has approached the Psalms in several of her illuminated books, with indeed another presently in progress. In this slide discussion Band will present the very different interpretations of three psalms, numbers 29, 92 and 96, as each is interpreted in two of her books, I Will Wake the Dawn: Illuminated Psalms (with Arnold J. Band, JPS 2007), and Kabbalat Shabbat: the Grand Unification (with Raymond P. Scheindlin, Honeybee in the Garden, 2012). In the many vibrant illuminated paintings accomplished for each book, Band employed the full panoply of Hebrew manuscript arts to express the intricate visual symbolism she developed to express the subtleties and beauty of these beloved poems.
In this free Hacking History workshop you will learn and practice new digital scholarship methodologies. Participants will work in groups, using Gale's Digital Scholar Lab to answer a research question, all the way through to presenting their findings. We will be asking you to let us know how confident you already are with digital humanities research methods - we will be running some parallel workshop strands to accommodate all levels. Breakfast and lunch will be provided. *For more information, and to book, visit: https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/event/hacking-history*
Are you looking to learn about the ways in which to transmit scientific ideas and make your research accessible to a non-specialist audience through a variety of mediums? This session will serve as an introduction to science communication and how it can be successfully incorporated into our roles. By the end of this session you will be able to: define science communication and provide a list of examples; explain why science communication is important for both our CPD and the public; and list ways in which we can all get involved in science communication. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Unlock the secrets to conquering self-doubt and embrace your achievements with our transformative workshop led by Dr. Tracy Bussoli. Course Highlights: • Understand Impostor Phenomenon (IP): Delve into the roots of IP and discover why high achievers often grapple with this phenomenon. • Explore Your Unique Experience: Create a safe and confidential space to reflect on your personal journey with IP. Share and connect with like-minded individuals. • Impact on Life & Career: Uncover the ways in which IP can affect your life and career. Gain insights into its subtle manifestations and tackle its consequences head-on. • Strategies for Empowerment: Identify powerful strategies to manage self-doubt effectively. Dr. Tracy Bussoli will equip you with practical tools to navigate and overcome Impostor Phenomenon.
Psychiatry largely deals with the same questions it did 100 years ago. The recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution provides hope for innovation and advancement that can translate into transformative change in patient care. In this talk, Paris will present a comprehensive journey into clinical and biological heterogeneity within depression and psychosis at various biological and phenotypic levels using AI-based approaches. This work challenges traditional diagnostic boundaries, showcasing the promise for a new era of precise and transdiagnostic approaches to mental health care. Paris is a Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence in Mental Health at King's College London, focusing on psychosis studies. He has a background in psychology and brain imaging, with experience in both research and clinical roles in Greece and the UK. He completed a joint PhD through the University of Birmingham and the University of Melbourne, and later worked on an NIH-funded project developing machine learning tools for psychosis. Now, he leads the AIM lab, where he uses advanced AI techniques to combine data from multiple sources to improve our understanding and treatment of conditions like psychosis, depression, and dementia. This seminar is hosted in person at the Department of Psychiatry, Seminar Room and online. To join online, please see Zoom details below. https://zoom.us/j/92620728590?pwd=s1JefrGff6bN0nZZcHSTBkCw8Z1RlT.1 Meeting ID: 926 2072 8590 Passcode: 196542
For our next talk, in the BDI/CHG (gen)omics Seminar series, we will be hearing from Adam Cribbs, Associate Professor in Computational Biology at the University of Oxford and Section Head for Computational Biology at the Botnar Research Centre, NDORMS. We’re delighted to host Adam in what promises to be a great talk! Talk title: Leveraging long-read sequencing to resolve regulatory and transcriptional complexity Date: Tuesday 13 May Time: 9:30 – 10:30 am Location: BDI/OxPop Seminar room 0 Abstract: Short read single cell RNA sequencing has revolutionised our understanding of cellular diversity, yet it remains inherently limited by its inability to capture full length transcripts, thereby obscuring the complexities of transcriptional regulation and isoform diversity. Biological systems are regulated not solely at the level of gene expression, but through intricate layers of alternative splicing, promoter usage and transcript isoform switching, features that remain largely unresolved by conventional short read approaches. To address these limitations, we have developed cCOLORseq, a robust long read single cell sequencing protocol optimised for enhanced accuracy and transcript resolution. This method enables direct quantification of full length transcript isoforms, facilitating a more mechanistic understanding of gene regulation. We have applied cCOLORseq across diverse biological contexts, including tumour heterogeneity in Multiple Myeloma and tissue specific regulatory complexity in musculoskeletal systems, as part of the Human Cell Atlas initiative. This talk will highlight how long read single cell approaches can redefine the way we interrogate regulatory landscapes, moving beyond expression to uncover how genes are regulated at the isoform level in health and disease. Bio Adam Cribbs is an Associate Professor in Computational Biology at the University of Oxford and Section Head for Computational Biology at the Botnar Research Centre, NDORMS. He leads a multidisciplinary research group focused on systems biology, immunology, and the application of advanced machine learning approaches—including graph neural networks and causal inference—to decode disease mechanisms and identify novel therapeutic targets. Prof Cribbs completed his PhD in T cell immunology at Imperial College London, followed by postdoctoral training in epigenetics and a fellowship in computational genomics at Oxford. He currently holds an MRC Career Development Fellowship and is a co-founder of Caeruleus Genomics, a University of Oxford spinout. He also serves as the biological coordinator for the Human Cell Atlas Musculoskeletal Programme and co-leads the international scTrends Consortium. ———————————————————————————————————————— All members of the University are welcome to join, please let reception at BDI know you’re here for the seminar and sign-in. We hope you can join us! We also now have a mailing list – To be added, ping genomics_bdi_whg-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk (with any message), you should get a bounce-back with three options to confirm your subscription. Follow any of those options, and with a bit of luck you should be signed up! As a reminder, the (gen)omics seminar series runs every other Tuesday morning and is intended to increase interaction between individuals working in genomics across Oxford. We encourage in-person attendance where possible. There is time for discussion over, tea, coffee and pastries after the talks. Hybrid Option: Please note that these meetings are closed meetings and only open to members of the University of Oxford to encourage sharing of new and unpublished data. Please respect our speakers and do not share the link with anyone outside of the university. Join the meeting now Meeting ID: 343 047 571 091 Passcode: nz3DS98d ——————————————————————————————————— If you wish to know more or receive information related to trainings and events at BDI, please subscribe by emailing bdi-announce-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. You’ll then receive an email from SYMPA and once you reply you’ll be on the list!
The second in a duo of courses (attendees should attend the Fundamentals course prior to Logistics) that will cover the logistics of researching, publishing, and locating open scholarship resources and tools at the University of Oxford. Subjects include: what is the Oxford University Research Archive?; depositing work into ORA via Symplectic Elements; depositing data into ORA-data; applying for one of Oxford’s APC block grants; registering or connecting your ORCID; how to be included in the rights retention pilot; and locating and checking funder policies. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Get ready to understand the stages of your literature review search process by using your own research questions to build a successful search and apply it to a range of library resources. By the end of the session you will be able to: build a successful search strategy; use a range of bibliographic databases and search tools in the social sciences; source highly cited papers relevant to your research; and set up alerts for newly-published papers on your topic. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Interested in AI? This Is Your Chance to Build With Qualcomm. Meet the Team. Learn the Tools. Build What Matters. Whether you are a student eager to create your first breakthrough, a researcher ready to take your work beyond the lab or a founder looking to scale your startup—Qualcomm is coming to Oxford to connect, collaborate and build what is next. This spring, Qualcomm engineers, researchers and product leads will visit select UK universities to meet with AI builders and share how you can get involved in one of the most exciting opportunities this year: * The Qualcomm European Edge AI Hackathon! A 2-day challenge bringing together 100 of the UK’s brightest minds—from students to researchers to founders—to build real-world AI applications using Qualcomm’s cutting-edge platforms. But before the hackathon, we are hitting the road to meet you! What to Expect at the Campus Session? * Meet the Experts Speak directly with Qualcomm engineers and researchers working on AI hardware, tooling, and applications. * Discover the Qualcomm AI Hub Explore this free platform for deploying, optimising and scaling AI models at the edge—perfect for developers, academics and entrepreneurs. * Tech Talks & Live Demos See what is possible with Qualcomm’s latest on-device AI tools and Snapdragon platforms. * Learn How to Join the Hackathon Get early access, inside tips and hear from the team running this year's flagship event. Why Should You Attend? For Students: * Work hands-on with cutting-edge tools. * Meet a world-leading tech company. * Collaborate in a fast-paced, fun environment. For Researchers & Academics: * Explore real-world impact for your research. * Connect with Qualcomm’s R&D teams. * Learn how your AI work can go from lab to product via the AI Hub. For Founders & Startups: * Get early access to Qualcomm developer tools. * Discover success stories from other AI startups. * Explore routes to co-marketing, support and industry partnerships. Who Should Attend? * AI/ML Developers. Computer Scientists. Engineers. Physicists. Mathematicians. Hardware Hackers. * Ambitious undergrads. Focused postgrads. Curious researchers. Visionary founders. * If you are building with AI—or want to start—this is for you. The Bigger Picture This is your chance to plug into the Snapdragon Edge AI ecosystem, get inspired and join a growing community of builders pushing the boundaries of what is possible!
It has long been appreciated that learning about the probabilistic structure of events alters our perceptual awareness. However, recent work has demonstrated that this relationship between learning and perception is more complex than previously believed and can theoretically serve a multitude of functions. For example, we must balance demands of representing the perceptual world accurately while effectively updating our models when the world changes. The first part of my talk will present some work that asks how we optimize this balance via predictive mechanisms. The second part will consider how explanations of oscillatory windows of perceptual awareness could link with these ideas. I hope to convince the audience that our models of learning-perception interdependences should move on from some currently popular monolithic accounts (e.g., cancellation; intrinsic fixed sampling rhythms), and stimulate discussion concerning how best to conceptualise these synergistic relationships.
Seminars followed by a sandwich lunch. All welcome!
We’re delighted to welcome Professor Jessica Metcalf, a professor of Ecology, Evolution and Public Affairs at Princeton University, who will be presenting at our upcoming PSI seminar. Professor Metcalf is known for her work at the intersection of infectious disease dynamics, vaccination policy, and climate drivers. Her research draws on statistical and mathematical modelling to explore how population immunity, climate variability, and disruptions to healthcare systems shape the transmission of diseases such as measles, rubella and malaria. The seminar will be chaired by James Hay and it will take place from 12:30 to 13:30 in the seminar room 0&1, Big Data Institute. This will be followed by a networking session, during which lunch will be provided. Abstract The process of transmission is at the heart of infectious disease dynamics, yet it is rarely observed. Fluxes of cases of infectious diseases across time and space at the scale of populations provides the main lens currently available to probe drivers for the unobserved process of infectious disease transmission. Approaches to susceptible construction provide tools for inference of climate drivers of transmission; recent disruptions via the Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions implemented for COVID-19 provide a useful set of perturbations for deepening these insights and understanding both the role of climate drivers and interference between different pathogens. These approaches can be augmented by explicit data on human mobility. Yet, climate effects on infectious disease may be greatest not via effects on infection transmission, but rather via disruption of health care provisioning; a process we evaluate using detailed surveillance for malaria, with results indicating the potential power of recently developed malaria vaccines in the face of disruption of health care delivery by cyclones. This raises again the importance of population immunity (or susceptibility) in both driving the dynamics of infections and providing paths for interventions and control, and we discuss relevance for surveillance, returning to the case of measles in the current landscape of healthcare. Biography Jessica Metcalf is a Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She is a demographer with broad interests in evolutionary ecology, infectious disease dynamics and public policy. Much of her work centers around the use of statistical and mathematical models to explore vaccination policy, especially on measles and rubella, and the intersection between climate drivers and infectious disease dynamics.
In ‘The Concept of the Political’, Schmitt presents the friend-enemy distinction, arguably his most well known political concept. This seminar seeks to unpack Schmitt’s full defence of his agonistic account of politics as an existential fact of life. We will also connect the friend-enemy distinction to Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty discussed last week. After unpacking Schmitt’s argument, we will shift focus to Schmitt’s somewhat unexpected quasi-Marxian condemnation of economic warfare and his critique of liberalism as an ideology which seeks to dispense with politics.
We characterize optimal policy in a multidimensional nonlinear taxation model with bunching. We develop an empirically relevant model with cognitive and manual skills, firm heterogeneity, and labor market sorting. We first derive two conditions for the optimality of taxes that take into account bunching. The stochastic dominance optimal tax condition shows that at the optimum the entire schedule of benefits dominates the entire schedule of distortions in terms of second-order stochastic dominance. The lobal optimal tax formula provides a representation that balances the local costs and benefits of optimal taxation while explicitly accounting for global incentive constraints. Second, we use Legendre transforms to represent our problem as a linear program. This linearization allows us to solve the model quantitatively and to precisely characterize bunching. At an optimum, 10 percent of workers is bunched. We introduce two notions of bunching -- blunt bunching and targeted bunching. Blunt bunching constitutes 30 percent of all bunching, occurs at the lowest regions of cognitive and manual skills, and lumps the allocations of these workers resulting in a significant distortion. Targeted bunching constitutes 70 percent of all bunching and recognizes the workers' comparative advantage. The planner separates workers on their dominant skill and bunches them on their weaker skill, thus mitigating distortions along the dominant skill dimension.
This talk draws on the approach of conceptual historians to explore how Asia emerged as a conceptual space with Afghanistan at its center in the minds and writings of Afghan and Muslim intellectuals in the early twentieth century. Reacting to European civilizational divides, transnationally-connected Muslim reformers of the early-twentieth century like the Afghan writer and statesman Mahmud Tarzi (1865-1933) conceived of a broader Asia in which Afghanistan figured prominently. Through Tarzi and the transregional press, Asia became a galvanizing political framework that shaped material solidarities on the ground in Afghanistan, not without tensions and contradictions. Beyond shedding light on important intellectual developments, this talk also puts forward conceptual history as a method for writing regional histories. It illustrates the potentials of situating and tracking the development of the geographic terms we use across time and languages, noting how they changed over time, through space and interrogating how they were understood by our historical interlocutors. Marya Hannun is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, where she serves as the Managing Editor with the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). Her current research is a transregional history of the Afghan women's movement and gendered reform in the early 20th Century.
U.S. selective colleges are notoriously secretive about how they evaluate applications, especially with regard to how diversity informs admissions decisions. Even prior to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to ban race-based affirmative action, the contours of diversity have been contested and murky, especially for applicants whose identities are variably classified and interpreted, such as mixed-race applicants. Through qualitative case studies, collected during one of the final admissions cycles where race-based affirmative action was legal, I show how multiracial-identifying applicants and their families discern the boundaries of diversity. Do they contribute to diversity, and to what extent? Are they viewed as distinct or similar to other racial minorities? And what do their identities mean?: Do they represent a novel form of diversity, or a diluted one? The conclusions these families draw to questions like these I deem identity appraisals. Identity appraisals help explain applicant behavior, including how they identify, which schools they apply to, and for which opportunities they deem themselves eligible. Through these family portraits, I show the variable meanings ascribed to racial identities and diversity in selective US selective college admissions, and comment on how these meanings might have contributed to affirmative action’s recent downfall. I also consider alternative pathways to achieving diversity in the current political landscape.
Faculty Presentations
Anthroposophy, the alternative spiritual movement founded in 1913 by Austrian Esotericist Rudolf Steiner, has become a significant presence in contemporary Israeli society. Two branches of the Anthroposophical society operate in Israel, along with an Anthroposophical Kibbutz in the upper Galilee. Waldorf education, based on Steiner’s pedagogical principles, is highly popular, with hundreds of Waldorf kindergartens, schools and training centers across the country. Additionally, several Anthroposophical remedial homes and villages support people with special needs. The widespread success of Anthroposophy in Israel raises intriguing questions. How did the spiritual teachings of Rudolf Steiner, which are rooted in western esoteric traditions and incorporate numerous Christological themes, resonate withing Israeli Jewish society? How do Israeli Anthroposophists engage with Steiner’s negative views on Judaism and Zionism? The lecture will explore the reception history of Anthroposophy in Israel, focusing on the efforts of Israeli anthroposophist to reconcile their Jewish and Israeli identities with their Anthroposophical beliefs and practices. Boaz Huss is the Aron Bernstein Chair in Jewish History in the Department of Jewish Thought and serves as the chair of the Goldstein-Goren International Center for Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. His research focuses on the history of Kabbalah, Western esotericism, New Age culture, and new religious movements in Israel. Huss's recent publications include The Cosmic Movement: Sources, Contexts, Impact (Bialik Press, 2021, co-authored with Julie Chajes) and Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality (Oxford University Press, 2020). His forthcoming book, The Secret Doctrine of the Jew: Jewish Theosophists and the Kabbalah, is scheduled for publication in 2025 by the State University of New York Press.
We conduct a field experiment to study how unemployed job seekers' subjective wage expectations shape their job search behavior and labor market outcomes. Using matched survey-administrative data from more than 9,000 unemployed workers in Denmark, we first document that job seekers anchor their wage expectations to their pre-unemployment wages by more than is objectively justified. A random half of the sample is provided with information about the objective wage potential of comparable workers, leading them to update their own wage expectations accordingly and to adjust their job search strategies. Ultimately, the treatment increases re-employment probabilities among both previous over- and previous under-estimators, but through different mechanisms. Initial over-estimators lower their reservation wages and increase their search effort. Initial under-estimators increase their reservation wages and redirect their job search to vacancies closer to their residence. Consistent with a reduction in search frictions in local labor markets---which is unanticipated by workers---they find re-employment sooner and at higher wages.
Description: The seminar will explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, AI, and technological innovation, co-taught by a philosopher and a technologist. The seminar will welcome a variety of visiting discussants from philosophy, computer science, and the technology industry throughout term. The focus will be on how a concern for human flourishing can be embedded in the global technology development pipeline, and on exploring how broader bridges can be built between philosophy and technology. The seminar is primarily aimed at philosophy graduate students and computer science graduate students but participants from other levels and areas are welcome. Topics include: truth-seeking AI, privacy, collective intelligence, decentralization in science and AI, and approaches to human autonomy. The seminar culminates in a clinic to facilitate grant applications for independent summer projects on the themes of the seminar. Fast grants: New for this year, Cosmos Ventures has established a dedicated funding pool that seminar participants can apply to for independent summer building projects on related themes. Prerequisites: please email HAI Lab philipp.koralus@philosophy.ox.ac.uk no later than April 27th with a (very) brief explanation of your interest in the seminar to reserve a spot, and the subject line “TT Seminar”. Space limited to maintain quality of discussion. Readings: ● Constant, “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with That of Moderns” (excerpts) ● Nissenbaum, reading on privacy, TBD
An interesting feature of the recent scholarship on preindustrial wages is that its heated debates do not fall neatly along disciplinary lines. Economists disagree on what information about compensation of manual labor should be included in indexes of living standards. Historians, for their part, can be more or less skeptical about all wage series. My paper sidesteps these debates and argues for the need to focus on wage differentials rather than modal or median wages. It analyses a series of hiring contracts signed in Murano (Venice) between 1638 and 1696 in order to interpret the role of individual productivity and collective bargaining in producing the remarkable wage differentials observed among highly skilled workers employed in the glass industry of the period.
The College has recently established the Margaret MacMillan North American Distinguished Visiting Lectureship. It has been set up on a permanent basis to honour Professor Margaret MacMillan for all that she did for the College as Warden, around a subject that she is passionate about: North American Studies. The Visiting Lectureship allows us to invite distinguished academics, historians, and authors to spend a week at St Antony’s in Trinity Term each year. The Visiting Lecturer is asked to deliver one well-publicised lecture, attend a seminar with students and, if time allows, to join an alumni event in London. The inaugural North American Distinguished Visiting Lecturer is Dr Richard Haass (Politics, 1973). A veteran diplomat and respected scholar of international relations, Dr Haass is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations after having served as its president for twenty years. He is also senior counselor with Centerview Partners, an international investment banking advisory firm. In 2013, he chaired the multiparty negotiations in Northern Ireland that provided the foundation for the 2014 Stormont House Agreement. For his efforts to promote peace and conflict resolution, he received the 2013 Tipperary International Peace Award.
An interesting feature of the recent scholarship on preindustrial wages is that its heated debates do not fall neatly along disciplinary lines. Economists disagree on what information about compensation of manual labor should be included in indexes of living standards. Historians, for their part, can be more or less skeptical about all wage series. My paper sidesteps these debates and argues for the need to focus on wage differentials rather than modal or median wages. It analyses a series of hiring contracts signed in Murano (Venice) between 1638 and 1696 in order to interpret the role of individual productivity and collective bargaining in producing the remarkable wage differentials observed among highly skilled workers employed in the glass industry of the period. *If you would like to meet the speaker before the seminar, please sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/23druvdp*
Miguel Robles a Research Fellow and Finance and Economics Professor at Universidad del Pacífico. Previously, he served as an Advisor to the Executive Director at the World Bank from 2017 to 2019; he also provided technical advice on a earthquake catastrophe bond for the Peruvian government. His earlier role was at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in the Markets, Trade, and Institutions Divisions, focusing on innovative financial solutions such as weather index-based insurance in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. His work has garnered international recognition, including an award at the Marketplace on Innovative Financial Solutions for Development. Additionally, he developed a commercially viable index-based insurance product for Uruguay’s horticultural sector. His academic credentials include a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Los Angeles, specializing in Macroeconomics and Asset Pricing, and a Master’s in Economics from Universidad Catolicade Chile. His diverse research also covers agricultural commodities, food security, and insurance innovations like Picture Based Insurance in India.
How does spatial marginalisation impact equitable energy access, and how can spatial justice guide inclusive and sustainable energy transitions? This seminar addresses these questions through three distinct yet interrelated case-studies from Pakistan: off-grid solar electrification for a remote village in the Thar desert in Sindh; decentralised community-driven micro-hydro power projects in rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and energy infrastructure heterogeneity in Lahore’s urban peripheries. Using a socio-technical and intersectional lens, the talk explores how different forms of spatial marginality, including geographic isolation, socio-economic exclusion, and gendered infrastructural disparities impact energy access and shape sustainable development outcomes. It highlights spatial justice as a powerful and critical lens for achieving equity and inclusion in energy transitions, offering lessons and insights for energy policymakers, planners, and sustainability practitioners.
Biography: Dr. Emrah Karakuş is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research examines affective politics, migration, and the lived experiences of queer and trans communities in conflict zones across the Middle East, with a particular focus on Kurdish and Turkish contexts. He is currently an LSE Fellow in Gender and Human Rights at the London School of Economics and previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. His book project, Rebel Affections: The Making of a Queer Sacrifice in Kurdish Intimate Frontiers, explores how queer and trans Kurds navigate their lives through notions of debt (bedel), rights, and repayment. Karakuş’s work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including American Ethnologist, Anthropology Today, Kurdish Studies, and Transgender Studies Quarterly.
Black Sea regional security is an integral part of European security. At a time when the US is leaning towards withdrawing from Ukraine and the Black Sea, Europe, the UK, and Turkey need to do more and cooperate closely to ensure Ukraine’s statehood and thwart Russian domination of the Black Sea, thereby directly challenging European security. The discussion will focus on how key Western actors' policies towards the Black Sea are changing and whether their policies are likely to further converge or diverge from one another.
Join us for the screening of the documentary films Daughters of Chibok and Mothers of Chibok followed by a post-film discussion on 13 May at Rhodes House! As part of the Global Programmes portfolio, the Film Fora series showcases impactful films and brings together a global community to spark ideas for meaningful change in response to global challenges. We will be screening two different films on the day so please refer to our 'About the Films' section to learn more about the two films. If you are interested in watching the VR movie Daughters of Chibok, it will be screened at 5:40 PM, before the screening of Mothers of Chibok at 6:00 PM. Learn more about the two films here:https://events.rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk/rhodes-film-fora-2025/pages/about-the-films
In this public talk, Jean Strouse discusses her acclaimed new book, Family Romance, John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers with Professor Dame Hermione Lee. About Family Romance: In Family Romance, Bancroft Prize winning author, Jean Strouse captures the dramas, mysteries, intrigues, and tragedies surrounding John Singer Sargent's portraits of the Wertheimer family Stouse looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career – and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age. In commissioning this grand series of paintings, Asher Wertheimer, an eminent London art dealer of German-Jewish descent, became Sargent’s greatest private patron and close friend. The Wertheimers worked with Rothschilds and royals, plutocrats and dukes – as did Sargent. Asher left most of his Sargent portraits to London’s National Gallery, a gift that elicited censure as well as praise: it was a new thing for a family of Jews to appear alongside the Anglo-Saxon aristocrats and dignitaries painted by earlier masters. Strouse’s account, set primarily in England around the turn of the twentieth century, takes in the declining fortunes of the British aristocracy and the dramatic rise of new power and wealth on both sides of the Atlantic. It travels back through hundreds of years to the Habsburg court in Vienna and forward to fascist Italy in the 1930s. Its depictions of Sargent, his sitters, their friendships and circles, and the portraits themselves, light up a period that saw tumultuous social change and the birth of the modern art market. Sargent brilliantly portrayed these transformations, in which the Wertheimers were key players. Family Romance brings their interwoven stories fully to life for the first time. Speaker Details: Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan: American Financier and Alice James: A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Newsweek, and other publications. Strouse has been a Fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and served as the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library from 2003 to 2017. She lives in New York City. Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013), and Tom Stoppard (2020). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, and Willa Cather, an OUP Very Short Introduction to Biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. She was awarded the Biographers’ Club Prize for Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. From 1998 to 2008, she was the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023 she was made GBE for services to English Literature. She founded OCLW at Wolfson College in 2011. She is currently working on a biography of Anita Brookner. Further Details and Contacts: After the event, join us for a complimentary wine reception and book sale by Caper (@caperoxford). This event is free and open to all; however, registration is recommended. This is an in-person event, but will be recorded and made available soon after on the OCLW website. Registration will close at 10:30 on 13 May 2025. Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
Elspeth Askew (St Johns), "'These primeval mountains': Shelley, Buffon, and Deep Time" Toby Stinson (Oriel), "'Nor be the parsonage by the muse forgot': The Poetic Legacy of Gilbert White"
The Trusted Research Team welcome you to join our May informational Surgery! University research is facing increasing scrutiny from the UK Government and research funders in relation to security, ethical, financial, and reputational risk. A range of measures have been rolled out to address risk in international research collaborations, such as legislation, advice services, and support to universities in their due diligence processes. Actions include the export control regulatory framework and the National Security and Investments Act, as well as the tightening of funder terms and conditions. To help departments navigate the changing landscape of Trusted Research, Research Services regularly host a series of Trusted Research & Assurance Surgeries. These surgeries are open to researchers, departmental support staff, divisional representatives, and RS colleagues to discuss all aspects of Trusted Research and Assurance including export control, NSIA, and due diligence on international collaborations. To ensure your session meets your and your department’s needs, we ask that you clarify your particular area of interest upon booking: * Export Control as it relates to your department * Due Diligence for third parties * Managing risk * Information on National Security Investment Act and other legislation involving international collaborative research * Questions regarding a specific case The next surgery will be held Wednesday, May 14th 2025. From 10:00 to 14:00 At Boundary Brook House, Churchill Drive Oxford OX3 7LQ To book your 30 min timeslot, please contact trusted.research@admin.ox.ac.uk A kind reminder, the deadline for booking a timeslot is Tuesday, May 13th 2025
Significant progress has been made in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying spatial attention and working memory. However, in natural settings, the rapid flow of information during saccades and speech perception poses challenges to the mechanisms supporting these cognitive functions. To address this, we are developing a research program using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in humans to investigate these mechanisms during natural tasks such as visual exploration, reading, and language comprehension. During visual exploration, we find that both feature and category information about upcoming saccade targets can be accessed as early as 100 ms after fixation on the pre-saccadic object. Similarly, in natural reading, both orthographic and semantic information can be extracted from upcoming saccade targets within 100 ms of fixating on the preceding word. Importantly, during both visual exploration and reading, saccades are locked to the phase of ongoing alpha oscillations, suggesting that these oscillations are important for visuo-motor coordination. During language comprehension, working memory is crucial for storing information across embedded sentences. We have identified the neural network and temporal dynamics associated with the maintenance and reactivation of this information during sentence processing. In conclusion, our approach demonstrates how concepts and mechanisms identified in cognitive neuroscience can be applied to understand the key neuronal operations required for naturalistic tasks. References • Wang, L., Frisson, S., Pan, Y., and Jensen, O. (2024) Fast hierarchical processing of orthographic and semantic parafoveal information during natural reading. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.27.615440v1 • Fakche, C., Hickey, C., and Jensen, O. (2024) Fast feature- and category-related parafoveal previewing support free visual exploration. J Neurosci 44: e0841242024 • Pan, Y., Popov, T., Frisson, S., and Jensen, O. (2023) Saccades are locked to the phase of alpha activity during natural reading. PLoS Biol 21(1):e3001968 • Pan, Y., Frisson, S., and Jensen, O. (2021) Neural evidence for lexical parafoveal processing. Nature Communications 12:5234 • Jensen, O., Frisson, S., Pan, Y., and Wang, L. (2021) A pipelining mechanism supporting previewing during visual exploration and reading. Trends in Cogn Sci 25:103301044
In this session we will examine article level metrics. We will discuss how citation counting can help identify influential papers in particular fields and how altmetrics provide a different perspective on research output. Using tools such as Web of Science, Google Scholar and Scopus you will learn how to locate different article metrics. The session will also allow you to appreciate the limitations of different metrics and the importance of their cautious interpretation. By the end of the session, you will be familiar with: using Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar to track and count citations to papers and individual researchers; measuring impact using altmetrics; understanding how to contextualise metrics against other, similar papers in a field; and the limitations of different metrics. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
In developing economies, artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to have transformative—and potentially disruptive—effects on labour markets. Unlike previous waves of automation, which primarily affected routine or low-skilled jobs, AI now increasingly impacts high-skilled, educated workers, younger adults and women in certain roles. Drawing on new research, this talk by Dr Pablo Egaña-delSol, Visiting Fellow on the Oxford Martin Future of Work Programme, explores how AI exposure in developing countries correlates not only with education and skills, but also with deeper structural inequalities. Employment growth is concentrated at the top and bottom of the wage distribution, while the middle class shrinks. At the same time, wages for high-exposure jobs do not necessarily rise, challenging traditional assumptions about education as a protective factor. The talk will also examine broader patterns across low and middle-income countries. From large informal economies to gaps in digital infrastructure, many developing regions face distinctive vulnerabilities in the face of AI-driven change. As AI adoption expands unevenly, the potential for deepening inequality grows - unless met with proactive skill-building, inclusive policy, and regional cooperation.
Donald Trump’s second term is just three months old, yet it is already clear it may be an era-defining presidency. From his trade tariffs, to his unconventional attempts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine, Trump’s policies are a break with much of the post-war era. In this event, the former Special Assistant to US President Bill Clinton for Economic Policy, Robert Westcott, will discuss the Trump Administration's first 100-day report card, economically and geopolitically, and assess what comes next for the United States and wider world. Dr Robert Wescott served for four years as Special Assistant to US President Bill Clinton for Economic Policy and as Chief Economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. As the President’s top international economic adviser, he helped develop the Administration’s policies toward the EU, China, Japan, Russia, and key emerging market countries, while at the Council of Economic Advisers, he conducted economic analysis, prepared the Administration’s forecasts, and helped write the annual Economic Report of the President. Dr Wescott is the founder of Washington DC-based Keybridge Research, and he regularly testifies before US Congressional committees. From 1994-98, Dr Wescott was Deputy Division Chief in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund, where he undertook research on the global economy and edited the Fund’s semi-annual World Economic Outlook. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
TORCH Book at Lunchtime is delighted to welcome Dr Sally Bayley (English) for a series of performed readings and conversations around her groundbreaking series of coming of age stories, GIRL WITH DOVE, NO BOYS PLAY HERE and THE GREEN LADY. Find out more about Sally here. https://sallybayley.com/
There is a positive psychology revolution sweeping educational psychology, emphasizing how healthy, normal, and exceptional students can get the most from education. Positive self-beliefs are at the heart of this revolution. My self-concept research program represents a substantive-quantitative synergy, applying and developing new quantitative approaches to better address substantive issues with significant policy implications. Particularly in educational psychology, self-concept enhancement is a major goal. Self-concept is also an essential mediating factor that facilitates attaining other desirable outcomes. In education, for example, a positive academic self-concept is both a highly desirable goal and a means of facilitating subsequent academic accomplishments. However, the benefits of feeling positive about oneself concerning the choice, planning, persistence, and subsequent accomplishments, transcend traditional disciplinary and cultural barriers. Perhaps more than any other area within educational psychology, there are extensive international cross-cultural tests and support for the generalizability of the major theoretical models in the discipline. Self-concept research has also been a testing ground for developing new and evolving quantitative methodologies. My purpose here is to provide an overview of my self-concept research in which I address diverse theoretical and methodological issues with practical implications for research, policy, and practice. Highlights include: · Extensions of the BFLPE (adverse effects of school-average achievement on self-concept) to include negative effects on student, teacher, and parent educational aspirations and expectations, the role of school-average SES, and phantom effects of school-average achievement on subsequent student achievement. · Extensions of the REM (reciprocal relations between academic self-concept and achievement) juxtaposing cross-lag panel models with and without random intercepts and lag2 effects, and models of simultaneous (lag0) effects. · Extensional of the I/E (internal/external frame-of-reference model) showing that high verbal achievement detracts leads to high verbal self-concept but lowers math self-concept (and vice-versa for math achievement) and how this explains in part so-called Gender Paradox in STEM coursework selection. · An integrative model incorporating all three of these effects. Join on Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NWY0MWFiYTgtYjUwNy00OTVjLTk4NWItMmFkZWIwYmRiMTBh%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2275f39f15-fefd-45cf-b904-2e2174db4aa1%22%7d
Are you an early career researcher, fixed-term lecturer, or doctoral student trying to get some writing done? Do you research on a topic related to health, medicine, the body, or mind using Humanities or Social Sciences approaches? The Medical Humanities Writing Group is an inclusive, interdisciplinary and casual gathering, encouraging writing as well as meeting others: all are welcome. We have timed writing blocks and coffee/tea/light refreshments, and are focused on setting writing goals and getting work done in a positive and supportive environment. Attendance is free and you are welcome to join us for anything from a single session, to a few, or even the whole term.
An introduction to key archival, printed and electronic resources, such as finding aids, bibliographic resources and primary sources for post-1800 global history. The focus will be on non-European history but will draw predominantly on English and European language resources. This session is classroom-based. After the session you will have an understanding of: the different types of material relevant to researching modern global history; how to search databases, bibliographies and other online resources; how to search the Bodleian Libraries resource discovery tool for manuscripts and archives; and how to locate relevant archive material elsewhere. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
This years Lubbock Lecture and supporting lectures will look at the different approaches engineers are taking to tackle the ongoing challenges of climate change. We are pleased to welcome Warren East, CBE, as our keynote speaker. Warren will look at the climate challenges being addressed by engineers whilst addressing the reality of the slow progress being made and the possibilities to improve. Supporting lectures will be provided by Professor Sarah Sparrow looking at climate change effects on extreme weather and its impacts on infrastructure and Dr Jesus Lizana with contribution from Professor Barbara Rossi on the future of net zero buildings and the sustainable use of materials in construction.
In this work, we ask whether tradable emissions permits, based on the cap-and-trade principle, provide better climate change and economic projections than alternative regulations for GHG emissions, such as operational permits, which are commonly used to mitigate non-GHG emissions (prevention first principle). Towards this goal, we simulate climate and the economy through a new version of the Dystopian Schumpeter meeting Keynes (DSK) model, extended to include an emission trading system (ETS) and operational permit systems. We show that climatic and economic projections in an ETS scenario need not be superior to those in an operational permit scenario. Which system delivers more encouraging projections on temperature anomalies, the green transition, and economic dynamics depends on institutional details, such as the set of firms for which permits are mandatory; the regulatory requirement of corrective measures; the magnitude of penalties; the stringency of the ETS. An ETS with a declining number of permits emerges as the best-performing system in terms of macroeconomic, microeconomic, and climate outcomes. A system of operational permits mandatory only for large firms (centralised permits) ranks as the second-best system, provided that the regulator imposes corrective measures regarding R&D expenses and machinery replacement. About the speaker: Lilit Popoyan is a Lecturer in Business Analytics & Innovation at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on policy-relevant quantitative analysis at the intersection of macroeconomic policy, financial regulation, financial stability, sustainable finance and climate change, production networks, and macroeconomic dynamics. She is also an Associate Researcher at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies and a Lecturer in Money and Banking at NYU’s Study Abroad Programme in Florence. Lilit holds a PhD in Economics from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. Before joining Queen Mary University of London, she was an Assistant Professor in Economic Policy at the University of Naples "Parthenope." She serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination and leads the "ABM and Networks" research stream at the Centre for Quantitative Methods(CQM) at QMUL. Additionally, she is a founding member of the ABM4Policy research group.
This 90-minute session will cover some more advanced techniques for finding medical literature to answer a research question. We will recap some basics, then demonstrate searching in several medical databases, including using subject headings (MeSH) and the differences between different platforms. By the end of this session, you will be able to: explain what subject headings are, and how to use them; search for words that appear near to other words; take a search from one database into another; and save a search and document it. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
At the time of her death in 1981, pianist/composer Mary Lou Williams was celebrated as one of the only jazz musicians to have played through each of the eras of jazz (1920s-late 1970s). This distinction was not simply based on Williams’ proximity to specific jazz communities that have been essentialized as part of the general understanding of genre’s progression but symbolized her direct contributions to the evolution of jazz’s sound. During the last decade of her life, Williams began promoting through live performances, lectures, and recordings her version of the "history of jazz." Although she did not claim overtly any allegiances to the faction of intellectuals and creatives that promoted cultural nationalism as part of the Black Power ideology, there are correlations that permeate Williams’ framing of jazz and its history. This lecture discusses how Mary Lou Williams’ shift away from the common mythologies/themes and canonical repertory that are often advanced in telling jazz’s history reflected how female jazz musicians challenged the exclusionary and narratives of jazz’s history.
To provide care is to enact control. Securitization practices are exceedingly difficult to disentangle from humanitarian intervention. Modes of governing the migration and mobility of people on the move, who are at once ‘at-risk’ and ‘risky’, reveal operations beyond the biopolitical and necropolitical binary. This book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the logics and practices of this governance: debilitating mobilities. Emerging from the relationship between militarism and humanitarianism, this approach captures the ways in which mobilities are restricted and controlled under the guise of care. Set across the humanitarian landscape of northern Brazil, this results in the (re)production of exclusion and precarity for people from Venezuela seeking refuge. While the 1984 Cartagena Declaration enables their protection, this materialises within a context imbued with histories and continuities of militarized violence. Journeying across interlocking scales and the spaces and times of mobility governance, this book reveals that from the border to the city, and within spaces of institutional care, the body and everyday life are always implicated in military-humanitarian intervention.
If you are interested in attending any of these events, please send an email to plp@law.ox.ac.uk to indicate i) which events you plan to attend, ii) whether you would like to join the speaker for dinner that evening, iii) whether you plan to attend the student seminar accompanying the Colloquium. For more information, visit the PLP Colloquium website: www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-and-subject-groups/jurisprudence-oxford/PLP-colloquium where up-to-date information is listed.
This edited collection explores the problem of space under socialist regimes in the twentieth century. Bringing together contributions from international scholars with expertise in the architectural, urban, social, and cultural history of twentieth-century socialism, the book includes examples from China, Africa, Mongolia, Eastern Europe and the USSR. The volume reflects on how developments in the field over the past two decades have altered our understanding of how such spaces were constructed (both literally and discursively), how they could become sites of contested meanings, and how they were perceived outside the socialist world. Moreover, the volume is concerned with how scholarly approaches associated with post-colonialism, global history, gender history, and the ‘temporal’ and ‘sensory’ turns have reconfigured our knowledge of, and approach to, the history of socialist space.
Join via Microsoft Teams here: https://tinyurl.com/5d5s7x5k
In this edition of the OICSD Research Showcase, we will feature presentations from a wider OICSD network of students working on issues of sustainable development with a focus on India. Full set of presentations will be announced a week before the event. Watch this space for updates.
This edited collection explores the problem of space under socialist regimes in the twentieth century. Bringing together contributions from international scholars with expertise in the architectural, urban, social, and cultural history of twentieth-century socialism, the book includes examples from China, Africa, Mongolia, Eastern Europe and the USSR. The volume reflects on how developments in the field over the past two decades have altered our understanding of how such spaces were constructed (both literally and discursively), how they could become sites of contested meanings, and how they were perceived outside the socialist world. Moreover, the volume is concerned with how scholarly approaches associated with post-colonialism, global history, gender history, and the ‘temporal’ and ‘sensory’ turns have reconfigured our knowledge of, and approach to, the history of socialist space.
Ingrid Persaud is a Trinidadian writer, artist and former legal academic who lives in London. Her prize-winning debut novel Love After Love, (Faber & Faber 2020) won the Costa First Novel Award (2020), Author’s Club First Novel Award (2020) and the Indie Book Award for Fiction (2021). Her short story The Sweet Sop also won the BBC National Short Story Award (2018) and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2017). Her second novel, The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh (Faber & Faber 2024) was published in April 2024. Persaud is Writer in Residence at University of the West Indies, Trinidad campus, during Spring 2025. Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan Registration not required.
Even before the demands of the recent pandemic, the NHS was operating severe pressure. Against a backdrop of greater life expectancy and the critical need for effective social care, coupled with the development of revolutionary new treatments, can the 75-year-old NHS model adapt to provide fit-for-purpose prevention, early detection and treatment, and social, primary, secondary and tertiary care? What is the future of the NHS? Join our distinguished panel including Jonathan Van-Tam, former Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Kamila Hawthorne, Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, and leading figures from the sector in conversation with Trinity Fellow and Clinical Director of the University of Oxford Primary Care Clinical Trials Unit, Christopher Butler as they consider and discuss the future of the NHS.
An online introduction to using alerts to keep up to date with new research and save you time. A combination of presenter-led instruction and the opportunity for participants to set up email alerts to receive notifications for publications in their field of research. We invite you to send any questions you have in advance to usered@bodleian.ox.ac.uk for the instructors to cover in the session. There will also be opportunities to ask questions in the class. The workshop will cover: how email alerts can help you; setting up alerts on your favourite databases and other platforms for new content in your field; and managing your alerts. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Discover what elements of storytelling and narrative can be used to enhance a profession in the sciences. Craft compelling and moving stories from your experiences as a scientist using these key story elements: character, conflict, structure, metaphor and description. Apply these storytelling and narrative skills to working in the sciences: communicating research to a range of audiences (including publics, media and funding bodies); enhancing presentation skills; telling scientific stories across a range of media.
The Data Engineers meeting seeks to connect data wranglers and professionals in related data engineering roles across the University. This group aims to provide a platform for individuals to share their expertise and interests, fostering a sense of community and encouraging knowledge exchange across research teams. While primarily designed for those working at the intersection of data generation and analysis - covering areas such as data collection, wrangling, modeling, visualization, and communication - the group is inclusive and open to all members of the University. Please join us for the next Data Engineers meeting: Date - Thursday 15 May 2025 Time: 11:00 - 12:00 Venue: BDI/OxPop Seminar room 0 Agenda: 11:00 - Introduction - Daniel Avery, Data Analyst, China Kadoorie Biobank, Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU), University of Oxford 11:10 - Adam Huffman, Research Computing Manager, University of Oxford 11:30 - Isaac Wade, Bioinformatician, NDPH, University of Oxford Introduction to the All of Us Researcher Workbench: Trials, tribulations and successes of leveraging a "one-of-a-kind dataset" of "expansive health data shared by a diverse participant cohort" 11:45 - Discussion (Q&A, feedback) Followed by lunch in the atrium To attend, please register - https://forms.office.com/e/xysygZrh4r?origin=lprLink
A roundtable with Ling Zhang (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge); John Sabapathy (History, University College London); and Amanda Power (History, University of Oxford) Further details will follow soon.
Surprisingly many long-standing questions in (stem) cell research remain disputed. One major reason is the fact that we usually analyze only populations of cells - rather than individual cells – and at very few time points of an experiment – rather than continuously. We therefore develop imaging approaches and software to image, segment, and track cells, and to quantify e.g. divisional history, position, interaction, and protein expression or activity of all individual cells over many days and generations. Live-cell imaging is complemented by novel large-volume multi-color 3D imaging with up to single-molecule sensitivity. Dedicated software, machine learning and computational modeling enable data acquisition, curation, and analysis. Custom-made microfluidics, optogenetics and other hardware devices improve single-cell observation, dynamic manipulation, molecular analysis, and the high-dimensional snapshot ‘omics’ quantification of individual cells with known history, kinship and dynamics. The resulting continuous single-cell data is used for analysing the dynamics, interplay, and functions of signalling pathway and transcription factor networks in controlling the fate decisions of self-renewing and differentiating hematopoietic, pluripotent, neural stem and intestinal stem and progenitor cells and normal and synthetic embryos.
We will have a plenary session with a talk by Professor Richard Cornall, Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine and Head of Department, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford
This research investigates the role which environmental and labor activism played in shaping dissent during the coal miners’ strikes in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Originating from wage cuts and difficult working conditions and developing into political concerns, the miners’ strikes highlight the relationship between environmental protection, labor rights, and self-determination. This paper expands the definition of “dissent” in the Soviet context by exploring how non-intelligentsia members participated in activism. While issues of industrial pollution, radiation, and irrigation were approached by dissident intelligentsia circles, different and less studied sites of labor, environmental, and political activism also emerged. The coal miners’ strikes of 1989, 1993, and 1996 offer a rich opportunity to expand our knowledge of labor and environmental activism in Ukraine in the 1980s and 1990s, thereby deepening our contextual understanding of factors which shaped the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first years of independent Ukraine.
There is huge interest across Oxford in careers across the public sector, from the Civil Service Fast Streams (FS) through dedicated graduate entry programmes within Local Government, NHS, social services, policing and direct entry routes into individual government departments, regulators and agencies. The recruitment processes share many common elements and all can be highly competitive, so it pays to learn as much as you can about the options and recruitment processes in order to be competitive. This event will be most valuable for anyone planning to apply for a public sector role in the year ahead, including finalists and recent graduates looking for immediate direct entry and jobs this summer, as well as anyone planning to apply in the autumn for next years diversity (summer) internship programmes and a multitude of graduate entry programmes. Join us to learn from the experiences and stories of our panel, including the support they received from The Careers Service, and which embraces a variety of successful applications to the following programmes: * Summer Internship Programme: a Civil Service Fast Stream internship at the Home Office * Fast Stream, e.g. Policy; Project Delivery; Diplomatic and Development stream * Police Now! National Graduate Leadership Programme
The prevalence of Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy is 29–49% in people with Diabetes Mellitus, up to 50% of them develop Neuropathic Pain. The reasons for this are not completely understood and this heterogeneity cannot be always captured by a single molecular assay. Studying the molecular changes at the level of genetic variation; the gene and protein expression; the quantity of metabolites and serum biomarkers can reveal composite signatures explaining the heterogeneity of the disease. I will discuss how we can utilise multi-omics data integration and analysis to discover composite biomarkers associated with the presence and intensity of Neuropathic Pain
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
This talk will reflect on key themes from the recently published edited volume Lahore in Motion: Infrastructure, History and Belonging in Urban Pakistan (UCL Press, 2025). This collaborative portrait of a major South Asian metropolis is organised around the path of Pakistan’s first, mass transit metro rail corridor: the 27-km long Orange Line, opened in 2020. The editors will discuss the frictions generated by the construction of this major piece of transport infrastructure. But they will also trace the new geographies opened by the metro as well as its integration into the wider flows of everyday life in Lahore. Reflecting on the different modes of transportation - walking, rail and road travel as well private and public conveyances - the talk will focus on gender and class hierarchies in how Lahore is accessed and experienced. It will highlight the politics and challenges surrounding equitable transport provision.
Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Elisabeth Siegel at elisabeth.siegel@politics.ox.ac.uk or Brian Kot at brian.kot@politics.ox.ac.uk in advance to participate or with any questions. Remote attendance is possible, but in-person attendance is prioritized (and provided refreshment). Topic — AI Safety in Practice: Safeguarding Against Real-World Misuse and Near-Term Harms AI safety has reached an inflection point, with near-term risks becoming real-world harms amidst a new political and regulatory landscape that has begun to reflect these shifts. Despite recent shifts in AI governance, preventing high-severity harms, including terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC), chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) risks, foreign influence operations, ransomware, targeted phishing campaigns, and scams remain top priorities for governments and industry alike. To examine the threat landscape, real-world use cases from malicious actors—including terrorists & extremists, criminal networks, and hostile foreign states—will be examined alongside adversarial shifts and anticipated misues. While these high-severity risks represent an urgent threat, the presentation focuses on practical solutions and present a new socio-technical approach to close the capabilities gap. About the speaker: Broderick McDonald is an Associate Fellow at Kings College London’s International Center for the Study of Radicalisation working at the intersection of conflict, extremism, and technology. Prior to this, he served as an Advisor to the Government of Canada and was a Fellow with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC). He has provided expert analysis for a range of international news broadcasters including ABC News, BBC News, CBC News, Good Morning America, France24, and Al Jazeera News. His research and commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera, CS Monitor, and The Globe & Mail amongst others. He previously lived in the Middle East and has conducted extensive quantitative and qualitative fieldwork with armed combatants and foreign terrorist fighters from ISIS, HTS, and other armed non-state actors. He currently serves on the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)‘s Independent Advisory Committee, the Aspen Institute UK’s RLF Advisory Board, and the GLOCA Board of Advisors. Alongside his research, Broderick has advised policymakers, parliamentarians, intelligence agencies, international prosecutors, NGOs, AI Safety Institutes, AI labs, and social media platforms on emerging technologies and security threats from terrorist & extremist entities, organized crime, and hostile foreign states.
Documentary Film Screening, followed by Q&A with the filmmaker. Refugees are often seen as distant figures—people whose struggles we hear about but rarely witness first-hand. "Our Refugee, Your Refugee" brings their reality to the forefront, offering a raw and unfiltered glimpse into life inside Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon and Myanmar refugee settlements in northern Thailand. Filmed by a Korean journalist from KBS, South Korea’s only public broadcaster, this documentary challenges the prevailing perception of refugees in a country with one of the world’s lowest refugee acceptance rates. It explores why many in Korean society dismiss refugees as “fake” and what happens when that narrative is questioned. This internationally recognised film sparked intense debate in Korea, winning the ABU International Award (Peace Category) 2024. More than just a story about displacement, this documentary invites us to reflect on our role in shaping the refugee discourse. How should British society understand immigration? How can we coexist with those seeking refuge? Through an in-depth discussion following the screening, we will explore migration narratives, public perceptions, and the broader implications for policy and society.
Please note that this seminar has changed date and will now be held on May 15. More information will be available shortly. Booking is required for people outside of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI). DSPI Members do not need to register.
Join via: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/tosca
From Henry James to Virginia Woolf, a major preoccupation of the novel in the first quarter of the twentieth century was the depiction of consciousness. One hundred years later, the preoccupation has shifted to the problem the processing and management of information, as new technologies like smart phones, search engines, social media, wearables, online encyclopedias and marketplaces, and now generative AI have become unavoidable features of contemporary life and thus of fictional and semi-fictional representations of contemporary life. Literary criticism has already begun to theorize this issue, primarily through the lens of genre, coining such terms as “uncreative writing,” “the internet novel,” “the information epic,” and “Wikipedia realism” to capture the way the new epistemic and discursive modes made possible by these technologies has infiltrated the work of twenty-first century writers from Alexander Kluge to Rachel Kushner. In my talk, “The Novel And/As/Of Information,” I will revisit Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” and “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” alongside Gertrude Stein’s article on “Normal Motor Automatisms” and her late “Reflections on the Atom Bomb,” to historicize these generic classifications, recounting the constitutive and conflictual relationship between “storytelling” and “information” in the history of the novel.
Please contact "$":mailto:sarah.apetrei@campion.ox.ac.uk for the Teams link to join remotely.
This talk presents findings from Dr Lawson's book-in-progress on the history of teachers in the Nationalist and Communist party-states. The aim of the book project is to combine quantitative analysis of datasets constructed from archival and survey data with qualitative analysis of published narratives to examine historical memory in relation to other types of evidence. The talk will focus on two sets of questions from different chapters. Firstly, what did Nationalist Party membership mean for teachers in the 1940s, and how has this been remembered? Secondly, what are we to make of narratives produced in the 1980s and 90s that suggest that women teachers had a closer relationship to the Maoist party-state of the 1960s and 1970s than men did, even though this is not borne out by any quantitative data? Dr Joseph Lawson is an historian of nineteenth and twentieth century China. His first book examined inter-group conflict in Southwest China within the context of long-term political and social transformation. This led to an interest in the working of state power at the grassroots, from which his present project on the history teachers and the Nationalist and Communist party-states developed. He is the current Head of History at Newcastle University.
In this talk anthropologist Munira Khayyat revisits the South Lebanon borderland, where she has conducted longterm fieldwork in the wake of its almost total destruction after the latest season of war there. This talk reflects on ecologies of resistance and survival through storms of war and the steadfastness of life after the end of the world.
2025 Lorna Casselton Memorial Lecture given by Dr Andrea Hinwood, Chief Scientist, United Nations Environment Programme.
Medical experimentation on humans was criminalized under international law following the Nuremberg Trials, where Nazi physicians were prosecuted. However, similar practices continued thereafter in several Western countries, including the United States, Australia, Britain, Sweden and Canada. This talk will present the first criminological investigation into this phenomenon, aiming to identify criminal clusters of varying degrees of harm and involving differing medical procedures: (1) experiments based on racial ideology, (2) military-related experiments, and (3) general medical experiments. The talk will conclude by offering preliminary proposals for legislative amendments and future research. The presentation will be followed by discussion and drinks. The event is free. Advance registration below is required from all attendees. This event will take place in accordance with the framework developed by a number of Oxford colleges, including Worcester College, to promote free speech at Oxford. Details of this framework and ‘tips’ for productive discussion of difficult topics are to be found at: www.worc.ox.ac.uk/fos. By attending this event, attendees agree to adhere to these guidelines and the terms and conditions of the event which uphold Worcester College’s commitment to freedom of speech: www.worc.ox.ac.uk/fos/massada-2025
Join Green Templeton alum Stephen Robert Morse (MBA 2015) for a highly strategic, slightly chaotic, and refreshingly honest talk about how to stay afloat when the systems around you are going sideways fast. Stephen is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and entrepreneur whose work includes Amanda Knox, How to Rob a Bank, and In the Cold Dark Night. From uncovering political corruption in Pennsylvania to navigating the wilds of Netflix negotiations, he’s built a career by asking tough questions and refusing to wait for permission. This isn’t a lecture about hope and dreams. It’s about tools and tactics. How to think clearly when everyone else is losing the plot. How to build leverage when all you've got is a soggy backpack and a stubborn belief in yourself. How to use narrative to make people care, act, or wire you the money. Rooted in the Green Templeton ethos—blending science, medicine, and business—this talk offers an interdisciplinary framework for navigating the chaos ahead. Whether you’re reimagining healthcare systems, launching a startup, or just trying to stay sane, Stephen brings a mix of Oxford brainpower and real-world scar tissue to the table. You’ll laugh. You’ll think. You might even take notes. Come for the truth bombs. Leave with a blueprint.
The last two centuries have seen a radical transformation in our understanding of Genesis 1-11. As a result, it is no longer possible to read these chapters as giving an accurate historical account of the creation of the universe and humanity and a reliable description of the earliest years of human history, contrary to what most Christians and Jews had previously believed over hundreds of years. Firstly, and best known are the results of scientific discovery. Thus, it has been shown that the universe is not merely about 6,000 years old (or 7,000 years, if we follow the Greek Septuagint), as a literal reading of Genesis implies, but is actually billions of years old. Again, human beings were not uniquely created a mere few thousand years ago but are the result of many millennia of evolution from lower forms of life. Moreover, there is no geological evidence of a universal flood within historical time, such as Genesis 6-8 describes. Secondly, Biblical criticism has shown that Genesis 1-11 is not the work of one man, Moses, as traditionally thought, but was written centuries later and consists of a composite narrative made up of two basic sources, commonly known as the Priestly source (P) and the non-Priestly source or Yahwist (J), which an editor has subsequently combined together, somewhat like a jigsaw. These sources do not always agree with each other, disagreeing, for example, over the order of creation and the details of the flood story. Thirdly, archaeological discoveries of ancient texts in the Near East over the last two centuries have shed a flood of light on the background of Genesis 1-11. For example, it is now clear that the flood story in Genesis 6-8 is ultimately based on the Mesopotamian flood story, which is attested in three main versions: the Sumerian flood story, the Atrahasis epic, and the Gilgamesh epic (tablet 11). The biblical writers of Genesis have ‘monotheised’ and ‘ethicised’ this underlying Mesopotamian myth so as to make it compatible with Israel’s faith. Again, although the story of the multiplication of languages at the tower of Babel (Babylon) is clearly a myth, archaeology has shown that there actually was a massive tower or ziggurat at Babylon, made of brick and bitumen, just as Genesis 11 describes. Furthermore, the Garden of Eden story, in which humans gained wisdom but not immortality (in this world) and a serpent was involved in depriving humanity of this immortality, has precedents in Mesopotamian myths, whether or not Genesis is directly dependent on them. However, I shall argue that Genesis 1-11 can still be seen as conveying profound theological truth as well as psychological truth about human nature, if we read its narratives not as history but as stories akin to parables.
The Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that attendance at the Surgical Grand Rounds can count toward internal CPD, with 1 point awarded per hour. Please note that in-person attendance is required, and you will need to sign the attendance register. Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend online.
In this 60-minute online workshop you will be introduced to the methodologies and principles underpinning the conduct of literature searches for systematic reviews, scoping reviews and other evidence reviews. The session will cover: formulating a focused research question; preparing a protocol; developing a search strategy to address that research question; choosing appropriate databases and search engines; searching for grey literature and ongoing studies; storing and managing references; and documenting and reporting your search. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Josephine McDonagh is Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Chair of the Development of the Novel in English and Distinguished Service Professor, Department of English and the College, University of Chicago. In Hilary and Trinity 2025, she is Visiting Fellow at All Souls College Oxford. She is a scholar of nineteenth-century British literature whose work has increasingly focused on the global circulation of literature and the impacts of European colonialism in the rest of the world. Her most recent book, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876 (2021), reevaluates the significance of demographic mobility and settlerism in the British literary imaginary. She is now co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Literature and Migration. Her current work thinks about children and migration, in particular, the persistence of figures of displaced children within print cultures of the nineteenth century. Further Details and Contacts: This is an in-person event and will not be recorded. Registration is required and will close one week before the event (5:30 pm on 9 May). Confirmations of successful registration will be sent out one week before the event. Please note that this event is exclusively open to current members of the University of Oxford. Workshop places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to members of the English Faculty. Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
Circadian clocks generate autonomous daily rhythms of gene expression in anticipation of daily sunlight and temperature cycles in a variety of organisms. The simples and best characterised of all circadian clocks in nature is the cyanobacterial clock, the core of which consists of just 3 proteins - KaiA, KaiB and KaiC - locked in a 24-h phosphorylation-dephosphorylation loop. Substantial progress has been made in understanding how cells generate and sustain this rhythm, but important questions remain: how does the clock maintain resilience in the face of internal and external fluctuations, how is the clock coupled to other cellular processes and what dynamics arise from this coupling? We address these questions using an interdisciplinary approach combining time-lapse microscopy and modelling. In this talk, I will first characterise the clock's free-running robustness and explore how the clock buffers environmental noise and genetic mutations. Our stochastic model predicts how the clock filters out such noise, including fast light fluctuations, to keep time while remaining responsive to environmental shifts, revealing also that the wild-type operates at a noise optimum. Next, I will focus on how the clock interacts with the other major cellular cycle, the cell division cycle. Our single-cell data shows that the clock couples to the division rate and expression of cell cycle-dependent factors using both frequency modulation and amplitude modulation strategies, with implications for cell growth and cell size control. Our findings illustrate how simple systems can exhibit complex dynamics, advancing our understanding of the interdependency between gene circuits and cellular physiology.
Self-organisation in plutonic igneous rocks has been suggested to form by a variety of mechanisms including oscillatory nucleation and growth, competitive particle growth (CPG), recrystallisation during compaction, and by a reduction in the total grain boundary energy budget based on the assumption that the energy of boundaries between two grains of the same mineral is less than that between two grains of different minerals. These various mechanisms can be distinguished on the basis of their microstructural signatures. An investigation of the Stillwater inch-scale layering and similar layers in the Bushveld intrusion shows that the CPG patterning mechanism leaves a characteristic microstructural record preserving evidence for slow super- and sub-solidus cooling with a highly interconnected texturally equilibrated melt phase that enhanced Ostwald ripening. The Skaergaard intrusion locally preserves cm-scale micro-rhythmic layering, superimposed on single modally-graded layers. The microstructures in the Skaergaard example do not show evidence of CPG. Furthermore, the energy of all relevant hetero-phase interfaces is less than that of the associated grain boundaries in igneous and metamorphic rocks, compaction was not a significant process in the Skaergaard intrusion, and the supposition of micro-rhythmic layering on modally graded layers formed by sedimentation precludes patterning by oscillatory nucleation and growth. A new patterning mechanism is proposed, whereby immiscible conjugate silicate liquids in the crystal mush self-organise, due to differences in their wetting properties in the compositionally-graded mush and the positive feedback due to the fact that the two immiscible conjugates predominantly crystallise the minerals which they preferentially wet.
Mariam Jamal-Hanjani is a Clinician Scientist and Group Leader at the UCL Cancer Institute in London. She studied theoretical physics and medicine at UCL and is a Thoracic Medical Oncologist. Her research is focused on the biological processes driving metastatic disease, including genomic drivers of tumour dissemination, tumour- and host-initiated mediators of catabolic states suggestive of cachexia, and failure of the adaptive immune system.
Join us in welcoming Dr. Francesca Sobande to Race & Resistance, who will be sharing her work related to Black people's cultural memories and archived representation in "alternative (alt)" rock music spaces (particularly in the UK). In doing this, this session addresses dynamics between blackness, gender, (un)popular music, social media, "artificial intelligence" (AI), and archives. It also considers how forms of "internet humour" and online influence impact the landscape of music (sub-)genre categories (e.g., "yacht rock"). Focusing on examples related to Black people in/and emo, nu-metal, post-hardcore, punk music, and adjacent (sub-)genres (e.g., "baddiecore"), this session highlights how Black cool, creativity, and culture is at the centre and margins of elements of these genres and their subcultural histories. Alongside this, the process of doing such research and co-creating with others as part of it will be reflected on. Bio: Francesca Sobande is a writer and researcher, who lives in Cymru (Wales). Her books include Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture (University of California Press, 2024), Consuming Crisis: Commodifying Care and COVID-19 (SAGE, 2022), and The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Francesca is co-author/co-dreamer with layla-roxanne hill of Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland (Bloomsbury, 2022) and the free graphic novel and animation Black Oot Here: Dreams O Us (2023). Her bylines include Disegno, Paste Magazine, and The Vinyl Factory. Francesca enjoys midnight skies and all things emo. --- Bluesky: raceresistance.bsky.social Subscribe to our mailing list by sending a blank email to: race-and-resistance-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
In the absence of conventional lymphatics, drainage of interstitial fluid and solutes from the brain parenchyma to cervical lymph nodes is along basement membranes in the walls of cerebral capillaries and tunica media of arteries. Perivascular pathways are also involved in the entry of CSF into the brain by the convective influx/ glymphatic system. Cerebral arterial basement membranes form the pathways by which fluid passes into and out of the brain with different basement membrane layers involved. The significance of these findings for neuroimmunology, Alzheimer’s disease, drug delivery to the brain and the concept of the Virchow–Robin space will be discussed. SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY Roxana Carare qualified in Medicine in Bucharest in 1994. During her basic clinical training, she became fascinated by anatomy and completed her PhD in neuropathology in 2006, in the University of Southampton, UK. The main international recognition for Roxana Carare has come from the interdisciplinary research she leads, relevant to the causes and new treatments for Alzheimer's disease, with over 165 peer reviewed publications in the field. She led the discovery of the intramural periarterial drainage system for proteins and fluid from the brain that fails in ageing leading to Alzheimer’s disease and her group now focusses on harnessing this system for efficient therapies and early biomarkers for age related neurodegenerative diseases. Roxana is a member of the UK Medical Research Council Dementia Platform UK Vascular Experimental Medicine committee and the UK government advisory committee for the effects of pollution on the brain, has served as the only European member of the American NIH strategy committee for funding in dementia. Roxana has won prestigious awards, including a Dementia Research Leader award from Alzheimer’s Society UK. Roxana has served as Co-Chair for The International Alliance of Women Alzheimer's Researchers in Alzheimer’s Association, she is Chair of the Vascular Professional Interest Area of Alzheimer’s Association, co-led the Scientific Committee for Vas-Cog, Secretary of the British Neuropathological Society, member of the scientific committee of the Rainwater Foundation, serves as an expert for several international research funding boards. Roxana is a Visiting Professor in the University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology Targu Mures- Romania where she has co-founded the British-Romanian Academic Institute of Neuroscience.
We consider a principal-agent model with moral hazard, bilateral risk-neutrality, and limited liability. The principal knows only some of the actions the agent can take and evaluates contracts by their guaranteed payoff over possible unknown actions. We show that linear contracts are a robustly optimal way to incentivize the agent: any randomization over contracts can be improved by making each contract in its support linear. We then identify an optimal random linear contract characterized by a single parameter that bounds its continuous support. Several corollaries arise: the gain from randomization can be arbitrarily large; optimal randomization does not require commitment; and screening cannot improve the principal’s guarantee.
In this lecture, historian Jamey Jesperson considers the utility of “trans woman” or “trans womanhood” as categories of historical analysis by identifying patterns and parallels of gender transformation from antiquity to the modern age. Just as she examines the risks of tracing such a global phenomenon, she challenges the insistent historiographical refusal to name it. To flip colonialist charges on their head, she pulls from her dissertation on Indigenous North America, de-romanticizing it as an exotic place “before the gender binary,” but rather just one corner of the world where certain binaries could sometimes be crossed. And almost always, this was towards woman. *To join this hybrid event online, please email "$":mailto:hflgbtq@history.ox.ac.uk before the event to receive the meeting link.*
Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 8-11 Supplementary: Angela Davis, ‘Abolitionist Alternatives’ in Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003): Chapter 6
Seminar followed by Q&A and drinks - all welcome Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly hailed as a means of tackling climate and biodiversity crises while benefiting society. Yet they’re often reduced to carbon-offset schemes or narrowly focused projects, overlooking their power for deeper systemic change. In this talk, I will explore how Western ecological science and Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK)—grounded in core values of relationality, reciprocity, responsibility, and redistribution—can unlock NbS’ transformative potential. Drawing on these worldviews, I will discuss how holistic measures, genuine community empowerment, and the reorientation of economic priorities toward stewardship can help NbS catalyse lasting social and ecological transformation rather than merely delivering incremental gains. Nathalie Seddon is Professor of Biodiversity and Founding Director of the Nature-based Solutions Initiative in the Departments of Biology and Geography (Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment) at the University of Oxford. She is also Director of the Agile Initiative, member of the leadership team of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, and is a Senior Research Fellow at Wadham College. In 2021, she co-founded the Oxford University Social Venture, Nature-based Insights Ltd, of which she is non-executive Director. Nathalie trained as an evolutionary ecologist at Cambridge University and has over 25 years of research experience in a range of ecosystems across the globe. As a University Research Fellow of the Royal Society, she developed broad research interests in understanding the origins and maintenance of biodiversity and its relationship with global change. Her work now focuses on the role of nature-based solutions in social and ecological flourishing, and how to increase the influence of robust biodiversity science as well as traditional knowledge on the design and implementation of climate and development policy.
A Conversation with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Kenneth Lonergan Join us for a fascinating discussion between two acclaimed writers, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Kenneth Lonergan. In a conversation hosted by Brasenose Principal, John Bowers KC, they will discuss the art of playwriting and their experiences in the world of theatre. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a celebrated playwright and a significant voice in contemporary American theatre. Some of his most renowned plays include "Appropriate," which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and "An Octoroon," which reimagines a 19th-century melodrama to explore issues of race and cultural appropriation. Kenneth Lonergan Kenneth Lonergan is a distinguished playwright, screenwriter, and director. His plays such as "This Is Our Youth" and "The Waverly Gallery" explore the complexities of human relationships. Lonergan is also well-known for his work in film, having written and directed "Manchester by the Sea," which earned him Academy Award nominations and a win for Best Original Screenplay.
All materials are provided in the fee of £10. In association with Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Faculty of History.
This is the 17th Human Welfare Conference, which has been organised annually by graduate students at Green Templeton College since 2008. This year, we explore food sustainability across multiple levels—personal, local, and global—while fostering interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary interactions among students, grassroots organisations, and senior researchers. Our keynote speakers will each deliver lectures on food systems and sustainability, focusing on global and national approaches. Graduate students will deliver talks about their research and there will be a Friendly Food Fair with the college kitchen, community-based organisations, and local social enterprises.
For online access, Microsoft Teams links will be sent to the mailing list in advance or email "$":mailto:sian.pooley@magd.ox.ac.uk for a link.
Join Dr Eisler in a discussion of *_Energy, Environment and Society_*, chaired by Dr Catherine M Jackson, Director of the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. The conversation will be followed by a sandwich lunch. This event has limited capacity and is open to registered participants only. *Dr Matthew N Eisler* is Chancellor’s Fellow in History, University of Strathclyde, and author of _Overpotential: Fuel Cells, Futurism, and the Making of a Power Panacea_ (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and _Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car_ (MIT Press, 2022). Dr Eisler’s research reveals how ideology and policy shape social relations and the biosphere. His current project _Greenwork and Environmental Knowledge_ (funded by RWTH Aachen University) interrogates how environmental regulation co-produces labour, science, engineering, and business practices, developing his interdisciplinary approach to central themes of contemporary concern.
Technical and vocational education and training (VET) is a crucial part of any economy and education system. In particular, upper secondary VET systems are responsible for educating a large proportion of the population, significantly impacting productivity, economic growth and skills shortages. In this paper, we analyse the short-run impacts of a new set of hybrid upper secondary VET qualifications in the UK: T levels. T levels are large (3 A levels in size) VET qualifications that are more academically oriented than other VET qualifications and combine classroom learning with work-based experience and placements. T levels are part of a broader global trend towards combining academic and vocational tracks into one programme in upper secondary education. Using a combination of methods (instrumental variables, regression adjustment and matching), we find overall, early indications of initial T levels having negative short-run impacts. T level students are significantly less likely to achieve a full level 3 by the age of 18. However, T level students are more likely to progress to advanced apprenticeships and higher technical study. We show that these impacts are more negative for the marginal student and when considering other level 3 vocational pathways as an alternate form of study. We also find heterogeneity by T level pathway (subject), indicating that some pathways are performing significantly better than others. Join on Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OTNiZGM1MzItOTcwOS00YThjLWJmYTAtZGFjZGM1YzkyNjQw%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2275f39f15-fefd-45cf-b904-2e2174db4aa1%22%7d
Are you considering roles in academia? The range of research and teaching roles in higher education is large, and you'll come across a variety of terminology. In this session we will try to de-mystify the options, let you know more about the most commonly found early career academic roles. We'll also look at how to put together a tailored and compelling CV and cover letter or supporting statement for such opportunities and touch on other application materials that you might need. There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions.
A key database for those researching the social sciences, medical sciences and physical and life sciences, Scopus encompasses more than 94 million records from 5000 publishers. This interactive session will cover basic and advanced searching, highlighting features unique to Scopus and recent updates to the database. Attendees will be encouraged to practice the tips explained during the session. This will be useful for those new to databases and a good refresher for experienced users. By the end of the session you will be able to: construct simple and complex searches; navigate filters; understand effective search query techniques; save and export results; and extract further information from your results. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Free lecture with Prof Minna Ruckenstein Prof Minna Ruckenstein will address the disparity between the promises of AI and its actual implementations, questioning who shapes the future of AI and advocating for a more inclusive dialogue. She will present three persistent visions for the future of AI to stimulate conversation before outlining areas that require greater attention. She will highlight these areas with examples from her ongoing research in healthcare and data labor. The topics will include the materiality of AI, the human-powered nature of AI automation, and the shifting nature of expertise. Additionally, she will address the role of algorithmic techniques in positioning professionals. It makes a difference whether the algorithmic setup positions the expert as an AI quality controller or works to facilitate the care process. Her talk will demonstrate that there are many ways to implement AI technologies, and we need to be more imaginative about how they can benefit the health of humanity. To achieve this, we must develop a better understanding of what is truly needed and carefully consider when AI should be part of our potential futures. Minna Ruckenstein is a Professor of Emerging Technologies in Society at the Consumer Society Research Centre, University of Helsinki. She leads the Datafied Life Collaboratory and currently directs projects involving senior researchers, post-docs, and PhD students in seven countries: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, UK, Slovenia, and China. These collaborative projects combine cutting-edge research themes addressing algorithmic systems with classical social scientific concerns regarding the formation of values, individual and social ties and the organization of society. A recently published article discusses our approach to collaborative research https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768640241308332
Tissue regeneration in organs built from repeating functional units—like the lung’s millions of alveoli—has long been thought to occur exclusively within each unit. In this seminar, I will show how alveolar type 2 (AT2) stem cells break this paradigm by migrating across alveolar boundaries to orchestrate repair. Combining genetic mouse models, longitudinal two-photon intravital imaging, and ex vivo lung explant microscopy, we directly visualize individual AT2 cells as they transition from sessile sentinels to active repair agents. We demonstrate that, following bleomycin-induced injury, AT2 cells not only proliferate in place but also traverse the pores of Kohn to repopulate adjacent alveoli. Genetic blockade of their motility impairs both AT2 and AT1 restoration, revealing migration as a critical, previously unrecognized driver of alveolar regeneration1. These findings redefine how we think about stem-cell–mediated tissue repair and open new avenues for therapies that harness or mimic cell motility in lung disease. Beyond this project, our lab integrates advanced imaging, genetic perturbations, and single-cell genomics to dissect the molecular circuits that govern lung stem-cell behavior in health and disease. Our goal is to translate these insights into novel strategies for promoting regeneration in chronic respiratory disorders.
HDRUK Oxford Monthly Meetup, Monday 19 May 2025, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Speakers: 1) Professor Peter Visscher; Professor of Quantitative Genetics, Oxford Population Health, University of Oxford 2) Dr Siqi Wang; Oxford Population Health, University of Oxford Talk Description: The availability of large biobanks with individual-level genomic, exposure and outcome data allow researchers to address questions about the causes and consequences of human complex trait variation. In two presentations, we will highlight new discoveries on the association between genomes, traits and diseases, using multiple biobanks and data on hundreds of thousands of individuals. Short Bios: 1) Peter Visscher is a quantitative geneticist at the Nuffield Department of Population Health. His research is about a better understanding of human trait variation in populations and the development of statistical analytical tools to analyse genotype-phenotype data in large biobanks. 2) Siqi Wang is a postdoctoral researcher at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, with expertise in epidemiology and the analysis of biobank data. Mode: Hybrid In-person Venue – Richard Doll Lecture Theatre, Richard Doll Building, Old Road Campus, University of Oxford To attend online - please register (link below)
The vast majority of electricity in developing countries is produced and sold through bilaterally negotiated long-term contracts between independent power producers (IPPs) and the state-owned off-taker that are seldom disclosed, making it difficult to ascertain whether value-for-money has been achieved. In a first-of-its-kind effort, we compile a novel dataset of the universe power purchase agreements signed in Pakistan since private participation began in 1994. We find that the terms of these contracts remove the incentive for IPPs to pursue efficiency improvements because (i) IPPs can pass on all increases in fuel and input costs to the state-owned off-taker via the cost-plus tariff structure, and (ii) IPPs receive monthly fixed payments irrespective of generation alongside a guaranteed return on equity. These contracts were not competitively procured and have resulted in substantial lock-in given their 25-40 year tenures. We further find that IPPs take advantage of the cost-plus structure and low state capacity to conduct regular audits, by artificially inflating their costs. Using confidential financial disclosures on actual revenues and costs for a subset of IPPs, we find that some IPPs earn annual real returns on equity above 80%, far beyond what is contracted (which is typically 20%) and on average, actual profits are 83% higher than what is contracted. We calculate how much cheaper electricity would be if no IPP lied about costs and size the welfare loss of cheating in terms of allocative and productive efficiency. Our results empirically underscore the importance of writing incentive-compatible contracts and the risks of excess de-risking for private investors.
In this presentation, I will critically review my work in the history of the social relations of energy conversion in environmental context, using ecological thinking to include work/labor alongside science, technology, engineering, and energy in the frame of reference. I will offer some thoughts on the epistemic tension in environmental studies around human, non-human, living, and non-living agencies in engaging ideas including limits to growth, the place of technology in human progress, ecological parallax, and normative scholarship in the age of climate crisis. *Dr Matthew N Eisler* is Chancellor’s Fellow in History, University of Strathclyde, and author of _Overpotential: Fuel Cells, Futurism, and the Making of a Power Panacea_ (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and _Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car_ (MIT Press, 2022). Dr Eisler’s research reveals how ideology and policy shape social relations and the biosphere. His current project _Greenwork and Environmental Knowledge_ (funded by RWTH Aachen University) interrogates how environmental regulation co-produces labour, science, engineering, and business practices, developing his interdisciplinary approach to central themes of contemporary concern.
Every day we make decisions critical for adaptation and survival. We repeat actions with known consequences. But we can also infer associations between loosely related events to infer and imagine the outcome of entirely novel choices. In the first part of the talk I will show that during successful inference, the mammalian brain uses a hippocampal prospective code to forecast temporally structured learned associations. During periods of rest, co-activation of hippocampal cells in sharp-wave/ripples represent inferred relationships that include reward, thereby “joining-the-dots” between events that have not been observed together but lead to profitable outcomes. Computing mnemonic links in this manner may provide an important mechanism to infer new relationships. In the second part of the talk I will show how this hippocampal computation influences neocortex, by providing a generative training signal to build a deep internal model of the world that extends across the cortical hierarchy.
For those who associate Buddhism with sensory denial, the compound “Buddhist Music” may seem like a contradiction in terms. Indeed, the Buddhist ideal was, from earliest times, one intended to be fulfilled primarily by renunciates, who subjected themselves, in varying degrees, to an ascetic discipline that would seem to imply the necessity of renouncing the appeasement of musical appetites. Be this as it may, by the time of the establishment of an official code of conduct for monks, or Vinaya, the participation of the Buddhist priesthood in musical practices had given rise to enough conflict for it to require strict regulation. Nevertheless, even after the establishment of prohibitions on singing, dancing, and instrumental music in the monastic context, chanting practices were retained and developed by the monastic establishment, until the time at which, during the political, social, and religious upheavals of the medieval Indian period, intricate song and dance forms were reincorporated into formal Buddhist institutions In this talk, an account will be given for the development of Buddhist musical practices on the Indian subcontinent from their earliest, datable instances to the disappearance of Buddhist institutions from India proper, demonstrating the persistence of descendant traditions of Sanskrit Buddhist chant and song in contemporary Japanese, Tibetan, and Newari esoteric Buddhist communities. It is argued that the Buddhist musical theory and praxis of these three cultural spheres preserve features of ancient and medieval Indian Buddhist chant and song that have otherwise, along with historical Buddhist institutions themselves, disappeared from the Indian subcontinent.
Narsai’s Memra 49, concerning the creation and fall of Adam and Eve, as well as the story of Cain and Abel, is a typically sensitive Narsaian reading of Genesis 2-4. Narsai pays close attention to the narrative details of the Scriptural passages in question while weaving them together into one of his favorite theological themes, that of Divine Pedagogy. How did God use the creation of humanity to teach the rest of the created world about himself? How did he use the paradigmatic sins of the primordial human beings to teach them to grow? How does he use the Scriptural account of these events to teach us? God’s teaching is more than the promulgation of information; it is the formation of students into greater maturity and more perfect resemblance of the God in whose image we are created.
As businesses are increasingly keen to understand political and policy-making processes, how might they find ways of formally measuring some of the risks they have to respond to? You can register for this event via this link: https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/research/visiting-parliamentary-fellowship/register-to-attend-8/ This seminar will take place in the Nissan Institute Lecture Theatre at St Antony’s College: 62 Woodstock Rd, Oxford, OX2 6JF
*Please note that the opening of the exhibition will take place at the Maison Française d'Oxford at 17:30 on Monday 19 May 2025, and will be followed by a wine and cheese reception. Registration to attend is required.* From 19 May to 26 June, the MFO is delighted to host a new exhibition in collaboration with the Chaire Santé-SHS at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, featuring Breaths – Air Bladders, a captivating artwork by artist-researcher Filomena Borecká. Blending art, science, and sensorial experience, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the shared act of breathing and our deep interconnection with the living world. The exhibition is open to the public from Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, free of charge. Read more on the website here: https://mfo.web.ox.ac.uk/event/exhibition-breathing-breaths-air-bladders
The celebrated artist and writer Edmund de Waal will be in a free-flowing conversation with biographer Hermione Lee about his life and work, as well as the intersections of art and memoir-writing. As described on his website: ‘In his visual art and literary works, Edmund de Waal uses objects as vehicles for human narrative, emotion and history. His installations of handmade porcelain vessels, often contained in minimalist structures, investigate themes of diaspora, memory and materiality' This conversation will explore these themes—human narrative, emotion, and history—in depth. Speaker Details: Edmund de Waal is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place. His interventions have been made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide, including Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire; the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris; The British Museum, London; The Frick Collection, New York; Ateneo Veneto, Venice; Schindler House, Los Angeles; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and V&A Museum, London. De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), and The White Road (2015). His most recent book, Letters to Camondo, a series of haunting letters written during lockdown was published in April 2021. He was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University in 2015. In 2021 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded a CBE for his services to art. In 2024 he was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. b.1964 Nottingham. He lives and works in London. Hermione Lee, GBE, FRLS, FBA, was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 (where she founded OCLW in 2011) and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013) and Tom Stoppard (2020). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth and Willa Cather, an OUP Very Short Introduction to Biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. She is currently working on a Life of Anita Brookner. Further Details and Contacts: After the event, join us for a complimentary wine reception and book sale by Caper (@caperoxford). This event is free and open to all; however, registration is recommended. This event will be recorded and will be available via our website soon after (registration is not required to access the recording). Registration will close at 10:30am on 19 May. Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
Disputes between colleagues can have a significant impact on performance and wellbeing as well as affecting patient experience and safety. This course is designed to help healthcare professionals understand how and why conflicts arise within and between teams, as well as what they can do to try and resolve issues. This course aims to help participants: understand the causes and impact of colleague to colleague conflict in a healthcare context appreciate different types of conflict personalities identify how conflict develops learn de-escalation strategies.
We invite you to join us at Somerville College for this one-day conference dedicated to the ideas and influence of all the Mills: John Stuart Mill, James Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill and Helen Taylor. The conference builds upon the success of the John Stuart Mill annual lecture hosted by Somerville College since 2016. It presents an opportunity for researchers from a wide range of disciplines, whether new to Mill research or long-established, to come together to exchange ideas on John Stuart Mill and members of Mill’s family, and promote future research into academic themes which continue to be important in a changing world. For further information and programme, please visit: https://library.some.ox.ac.uk/multidisciplinary-mills/
The Oxford Spinoza Conference is dedicated to exploring the myriad manners in which Benedict Spinoza has contributed to the history of philosophy and continues to shape our understanding of the world. The third edition will take place at Pembroke College on Tuesday 20 May 2025. The theme of this year’s conference is Benedict Spinoza: Politics & the International. Keynote Speakers Sandra Leonie Field (Monash University) Pierre-François Moreau (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon) The conference is open to all and free to attend. Please fill in the registration form. Submissions: The theme will colour the keynotes, but papers are welcome from across Spinoza’s work and across all generations of Spinoza scholars: we will accept submissions from students, early career researchers and experienced academics. Submission deadline: 17 March 2025 Abstracts: By email to olivier.defrance@pmb.ox.ac.uk Hosted by: Olivier Yasar de France (Stipendiary Lecturer in Political Theory, Pembroke College, Oxford) & James Read (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Pembroke College, Oxford)
Enhance your critical thinking and research skills in this practical workshop designed for undergraduate students. Learn to question assumptions, analyse sources critically, and develop information discovery and search strategies that will set you apart in your academic studies. By the end of this session, you will be able to: describe what critical thinking is; understand a critical thinking method; apply the method to your academic work; and explain the fundamentals of conducting research, including how to evaluate information sources in SOLO. Intended audience: Oxford undergraduate students.
In this online workshop you will be shown the functionality of Zotero, which is a free-to-use software programme used to manage references and create bibliographies. Zotero will be demonstrated on a Windows PC but users of MacOS or Linux computers will be able to follow the demonstration. The workshop will cover: understanding the main features and benefits of Zotero; setting up a Zotero account; importing references from different sources into Zotero; organising your references in Zotero; inserting citations into documents; and creating a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) have been hailed as a major scientific breakthrough by several stakeholders. These medications display neuroprotective/anti-inflammatory and dopamine-regulating activities involved in cognitive, addictive, psychotic, and mood disorder. Industry and most major academic institutions are competing to investigate GLP-1RAs’ repurposing potential for all these conditions. In this talk, I will report on available pre-clinical and clinical studies about the putative neuropsychiatric effects of GLP-1RAs – whether positive or negative, and consider putative mechanisms of action. I will then present an epidemiological investigation completed within my laboratory about the risk of neurological and psychiatric outcomes in T2DM patients using the GLP-1RAs semaglutide, where we found that the use of this medication may be associated with a lower risk of cognitive deficit and nicotine use disorders. I will discuss how evidence from this study has been used to inform the design of an experimental medicine trial in healthy volunteers, which assesses the potential neuropsychological bases of its effect, and present our findings across several cognitive domains. Finally, I will provide perspectives about the further development of GLP-1RA-based compounds, considering both its promises and pitfalls, including our next working steps in Oxford. Riccardo De Giorgi is a Clinical Lecturer at the University of Oxford, Department of Psychiatry, and ST6 at Health Education England-Thames Valley, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. He is interested in neuropsychopharmacology and evidence-based treatment of mental illness. He works on evidence synthesis, epidemiological, and experimental medicine studies to investigate repurposing opportunities for drugs with immune-metabolic activity (e.g., statins, GLP-1RAs) in cognitive and mental disorders. This seminar is hosted in person in the Department of Psychiatry, Seminar Room and online. To join online, please use the details below: zoom.us/j/92620728590?pwd=s1JefrGff6bN0nZZcHSTBkCw8Z1RlT.1 Meeting ID: 926 2072 8590 Passcode: 196542
Leading and Managing People in Research (formerly “Essentials of People Management in Research”) is a module in The Confident Manager Series, designed to equip PIs/academic managers with knowledge of their responsibilities when managing research staff and with key people skills needed to create a healthy and productive research environment. Topics covered include recruiting effectively, leading and managing a team, having productive career conversations/annual reviews, supporting those on fixed-term contracts, and fostering positive research cultures, including excellence in research practice. This module is specifically for new PIs (Principal Investigators) / Academic Managers / Researchers who have secured a grant that will involve recruiting and managing others or experienced PIs looking to update their knowledge and skills. Objectives - Understand what is expected of PIs/academic managers at Oxford – Clarify HR essentials for recruiting and leading your team – Learn how to facilitate effective career development conversations / annual reviews (CDR/PCDR) and to manage fixed-term contracts – Explore your role in fostering a positive research culture and enabling excellence in research practice Please note: Professional services colleagues working in research or clinical trials are advised to enrol on the more appropriate module in The Confident Manager Series titled ‘Managing at Oxford’.
Join us for a digital scholarship coffee gathering - tea and coffee will be provided. If you'd like to get an email reminder of these coffee mornings please sign up for that here: https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/oxford/digital-scholarship-coffee-morning-keep-in-touch
Join us for an interactive in-person session with Roger Frosh, an expert in strategic communication and engagement. With experience working across academia, industry, and start-ups, Roger will share practical approaches to help researchers present their ideas clearly, connect with diverse audiences, and maximise the impact of their work.
Selective attention relies on intricate neural mechanisms that govern how the brain processes information. In this lecture, I will explore research on the neural underpinnings of voluntary spatial, feature, and object attention, utilizing both EEG and fMRI techniques. I will highlight key findings related to attentional control in the frontal and parietal cortices, as well as how these processes influence sensory and perceptual processing. Additionally, I will present studies examining voluntary attention in free-choice conditions, where individuals exert their free will to direct attention without external guidance. The framework for this presentation is our Specificity of Control (SpoC) Model of attention, which highlights the microstructural organization of top-down control and the specificity of sensory biasing it imparts in the visual cortex. ABOUT THE SPEAKER: George R. Mangun, Ph.D., is the founding and now Co-Director of the Center for Mind and Brain, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neurology, and the former Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, Davis. He received his doctoral degree in neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego, and has taught and conducted research at UC San Diego, Dartmouth College, and Duke University. His laboratory investigates brain mechanisms of perception and attention in health and disease. His team has identified many of the basic brain processes by which humans focus their attention and filter out distracting events, as well as how these processes break down in disorders of attention. In 1994, he chaired the founding committee of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, an international scientific society with over 3000 members; he continues to serve on the Governing Board for the society and is currently President and Treasurer of the corporate board. In 1998, he was the founding Director of the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. He is an active editor, and the author of numerous journal publications and books, including his celebrated foundational textbook, Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind. For a decade he was the Director of the Kavli Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, a training program for doctoral and postdoctoral scholars that was supported by NIMH, NIDA, and the Kavli Foundation. From 2008 to 2015, Mangun served as Dean of Social Sciences at UC Davis, where he led the academic programs of ten university departments ranging from Anthropology and Psychology to Economics, Political Science, History and Philosophy. He is also an outspoken advocate for access and inclusion in higher education, and is currently serving as the founding co-chair of the College of Letters and Science Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee. Among other honors and awards, Professor Mangun received the Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award from the Society for Psychophysiological Research, an NIMH Senior Scientist Award, and a Distinguished Scientist Lecturer Award from the American Psychological Association. He is an elected fellow of both the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2024 he received the Award for Education in Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience, and was also named a Fulbright U.S. Distinguished Scholar.
Seminars followed by a sandwich lunch. All welcome!
Discussions around electability are central in election campaigns, often targeting minority candidates. This paper examines two related questions: Why do electability concerns strongly affect minority candidates? How can we contrast such concerns? Focusing on voters’ perspective, I argue that three main factors fuel electability concerns, including perceptions of lack of electoral support for minority candidates, voters’ own prejudice, and the scarcity of successful examples of minority candidates. I also explain that providing voters with information on actual public support for minority rights and candidates reduces electability concerns. I test my expectations on minority candidates by focusing on LGBTQ+ candidates. I rely on three original datasets: the largest survey to date of LGBTQ+ candidates, which includes about 500 candidates; and two voter surveys, each conducted with about 2,000 U.S. respondents, where I embedded conjoint and priming experiments. Reducing electability concerns is important to avoid that they become self-fulfilling prophecies.
COURSE DETAILS In this session we introduce RDM and the practical skill of developing Data Management Plans to manage your own data successfully. The Research Data Management (RDM) course answers these questions and more: How often do you consider how you’re managing this vital resource? Is your data secure and backed up? How can you demonstrate its integrity if challenged? Could your research make a greater impact by sharing data? What happens to your hard-won data when your project ends? LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will: Have an appreciation of the importance of RDM and understand the research data management lifecycle. Confidently approach preparing a data management plan and apply the principles to your own research. Be able to locate sources of support and expertise around the University to help with different aspects of RDM.
‘The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy’ is less well known compared to the texts explored in the previous two weeks. However, it contains Schmitt’s most direct and sustained attack on liberal democracy as a theoretical ideal. The seminar will explore Schmitt’s criticism that liberal democracy is an oxymoron, paying close attention to Schmitt’s understanding of liberalism and democracy respectively. We will then connect Schmitt’s understanding of democracy with his concept of the political and sovereignty. Through ‘The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy’, we will endeavour to understand why Schmitt, with all of his authoritarian tendencies, considered his work to be democratic in essence.
We develop a novel measure of trust in the Federal Reserve using Generative Artificial Intelligence to analyse millions of tweets about the Fed, its leadership and its policy framework and decisions. Our measure reacts in an intuitive way to various macro-financial variables and indicators of U.S. monetary policy. To study the effects of trust shocks, we use a narrative identification approach based on ethical scandals embroiling some FOMC members, and we study the effects of these shocks using a daily VAR. We find that trust shocks have highly persistent effects on macroeconomic variables despite having short-lived effects on our trust measure: they weaken business conditions, the stock market and news sentiment, while increasing the VIX index. Inflation expectations also increase following a trust shock, worsening the inflation-output trade-off.
Dr Johann Schmid is a Project officer for the subject of Hybrid Warfare at the Bundeswehr Centre of Military History and Social Sciences (ZMSBw), Potsdam and lecturer at the University of Potsdam. Previously he was the Director COI Strategy & Defence at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) in Helsinki. He joined the Bundeswehr in 1989. His assignments within the mechanized infantry, latest as company commander, included deployment to Kosovo in 1999. He gained his PhD at the University of Cologne. His research interests include Hybrid Warfare, Clausewitz, Theory and the Changing Manifestation of War, and Security Policy.
A practical session 180-minute workshop where participants will work on searches for their review across multiple databases. Librarians from the Bodleian Health Care Libraries will be on hand to demonstrate online tools for facilitating the process and give practical advice on refining individual search strategies. By the end of this classroom-based session you will be able to: improve a search strategy that you are working on; adapt the search across multiple databases; use tools such as Yale MeSH Analyzer, Polyglot and the SR Accelerator to improve your searches; describe alternative methods for identifying references, including citation tracking; de-duplicate results from multiple database searches; start screening results for inclusion in your review; and report your search methods according to PRISMA-Search. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Description: The seminar will explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, AI, and technological innovation, co-taught by a philosopher and a technologist. The seminar will welcome a variety of visiting discussants from philosophy, computer science, and the technology industry throughout term. The focus will be on how a concern for human flourishing can be embedded in the global technology development pipeline, and on exploring how broader bridges can be built between philosophy and technology. The seminar is primarily aimed at philosophy graduate students and computer science graduate students but participants from other levels and areas are welcome. Topics include: truth-seeking AI, privacy, collective intelligence, decentralization in science and AI, and approaches to human autonomy. The seminar culminates in a clinic to facilitate grant applications for independent summer projects on the themes of the seminar. Fast grants: New for this year, Cosmos Ventures has established a dedicated funding pool that seminar participants can apply to for independent summer building projects on related themes. Prerequisites: please email HAI Lab philipp.koralus@philosophy.ox.ac.uk no later than April 27th with a (very) brief explanation of your interest in the seminar to reserve a spot, and the subject line “TT Seminar”. Space limited to maintain quality of discussion.
Student Presentations
Different strands of science studies, including scientometrics and sociology of science, have produced a large body of works focused on specific dimensions of inequality manifesting at macro-, meso- and micro-levels of academia. However, the persistent divide between these works prevents a more holistic understanding of how social inequalities in a given field are interlinked and shape the knowledge it generates. Our multi-method study on inequality and its epistemic effects in forest research addresses this gap. Drawing on Bourdieusian sociology of science as a meta-theoretical frame, our project links bibliometrics, ethnography and content analysis to examine how gender- and geography-related inequalities affect scientific practices, the distribution of capital and knowledge outcomes in the field. In the first part of our presentation, we explain how we operationalise Bourdieusian theory for empirical study, and present selected bibliometric analyses of global forest science, and selected findings from a comparative database representation study and comparative content analysis focused on Tanzanian forest science. In the second part, we move from the macro- to the micro-level, sharing qualitative insights from the ethnographic research carried out in the context of our multi-method project. We specifically zoom into African-European research projects on forests and show how and why inequalities are reproduced in international collaborations, regardless of formal project constellations and contrary to individual intentions. The analysis highlights collaboration habitus as a concept explaining discrepancies between desired forms of collaboration and actual collaboration practice.
According to traditional Jewish dietary practice (kashrut), meat and dairy products cannot be eaten together, creating quite the dilemma for anyone who appreciates a sweet treat! So, what do you do if you're the Rabbi's wife and you really like dessert—but all the main dishes on the menu contain meat, and all the delicious cakes contain butter? Daisy Abboudi began Tales of Jewish Sudan in 2015 with the aim of documenting and preserving the stories and recipes of her grandparents’ community. The community was most active between 1900 and 1970 - a melting pot of Jewish people from all over the Middle East where traditions and food cultures came together and adopted an extra Sudanese dimension. In this session, Daisy will share stories told by the women from this small, vibrant community, exposing a more nuanced picture than one might expect. And the best time to have a chat? While cooking, of course! At the end of this session, participants will taste one of these delicious dairy desserts that tempted the Rabbi's wife. Please note that the dessert that will be served contains dairy, gluten, and nuts. This event will be introduced by Dr Aviva Dautch. Speaker Details: daisy abboudi photo daisy abboudi Daisy Abboudi was born in London. Her grandparents were Jews from Sudan and this inspired her to create the website Tales of Jewish Sudan in 2015. Tales of Jewish Sudan brings together oral histories and recipes with historical research. Her interests include questions of identity, heritage and education. Her work on the Jewish community of Sudan has been featured in both national and international press. Dr Aviva Dautch is the Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance, the UK's Jewish arts and culture quarterly. She lectures on modern Jewish literature at the London School of Jewish Studies and JW3 and contributes to programmes on BBC Radio 4. She is an award-winning poet whose residencies and commissions have included The British Museum, The National Gallery and Bradford and Hay Literature Festivals. Aviva is the Jewish Women’s Voices OCLW Visiting Scholar for 2025-6. About Tales of Jewish Sudan: Tales of Jewish Sudan is an online archive of oral history interviews and photographs relating to Jews who lived in Sudan and who now live all over the world. Many live in Israel and the United States of America, but a small community still live in Britain. The Tales of Jewish Sudan archive consists of over 65 interviews and over 300 photographs. It covers daily life in the cities Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman and the towns of Wad Medani and Port Sudan. The Jewish community of Sudan was formally established in 1901, although Jews were living in the country before this. At its peak, the community numbered 250-300 families. The last members of the Jewish community left Sudan in the early 1970s. Tales of Jewish Sudan is a part of the private research conducted by Daisy Abboudi on this small but vibrant Jewish community. About the Jewish Women’s Voices Programme: A white and blue text with green text AI-generated content may be incorrect. Jewish Women's Voices is a collaborative initiative by Dr Kate Kennedy, Director of the ‘Oxford Centre for Life-Writing’, and Dr Vera Fine-Grodzinski, a scholar of Jewish social and cultural history. The Programme is the first of its kind at any UK academic institution. Launched in October 2023, the Programme celebrates the life-writing of Jewish women often underrepresented in mainstream history accounts. The Programme is a three-term seminar series dedicated to exploring the diverse experiences of Jewish women across centuries, countries, and cultures. Further information about the Programme can be found here. Further Details and Contacts: This hybrid event is free and open to all; however, registration is required. This event will be recorded and made available soon after on the OCLW website. Registration will close at 5:00pm on 13 May 2025. Successful registrants will be informed soon after. Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
How do we study contemporary forms of startup capitalism under which work unfolds seemingly everywhere? How do we study labour when it is presented to us as enjoyable and fun, and as not work at all? This talk offers one conceptual navigation of these times, developing “labour as method” to meet the fragmentation of work and life across city spaces, sites of work and home, and blurred boundaries between labour and leisure. Drawing on fieldwork and multimodal collaborative video making conducted in the entrepreneurial economy of Bangalore/Bengaluru, India, “labour as method” unfolds the ideals of startup capitalism—tenets of risk, flexibility, experimentation—by locating the work of caste, class, and gender that animate them. Dr. Hemangini Gupta is a Lecturer in Gender and Global Politics at the University of Edinburgh. Her monograph, Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India was published by the University of California Press, and her writing has appeared in Feminist Studies, Antipode, feminist review, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience amongst others.
By situating Hebrew textbooks for adults within their historical and social contexts, this lecture sheds light on the intricate relationship between pedagogy, national identity, and the challenges faced by immigrants adapting to a new homeland. Employing the concept of Entangled Histories, it connects global pedagogical knowledge of language instruction with the unique adaptations developed in Mandatory Palestine and the State of Israel for adult learners. Through an examination of Hebrew textbooks, their authors, and their integration into Hebrew classes for adults, often conducted as evening lessons, my research highlights the interplay between imported methodologies and local innovations. The lecture explores how Hebrew textbooks became a medium for navigating the tension between preserving cultural heritage and fostering integration into a rapidly evolving society. Rakefet Anzi is a PhD candidate in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a 2024/25 Leo Baeck Fellow of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Her dissertation explores Hebrew language education for adults in Mandatory Palestine and early Israel (1930s–1950s), focusing on its role in shaping national identity and society-building. She has been affiliated with the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Center and the Cherrick Center, contributing to research on German-Jewish history and the Yishuv. In May–July 2025, Rakefet will be a Junior Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Alongside her research, she teaches at the Hartman High School for Girls in Jerusalem, blending her passion for history and education.
For more than 20 years, my research has focused on the professional knowledge of mathematics teachers. In 2002 this research 'entered the classroom', to observe how teachers apply what they know in the act of teaching mathematics. The result was the Knowledge Quartet (KQ), a theoretical framework for analysing and developing mathematics teaching. I shall describe how the KQ emerged, and how the scope of the KQ has since been extended from its origins in English elementary classrooms - including the application of the KQ to the teaching of other disciplines, such as science, technology and English
OCPSG is pleased to announce its inaugural speaker event 'Generative AI for Predictive and Causal Inference' featuring Professor Kosuke Imai from the Department of Government and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. He is currently a CESS/Politics Academic Visitor at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Professor Imai specializes in statistical and machine learning methods within the social sciences, particularly focusing on causal inference, computational social science, program evaluation, and survey methodology. He is the author of Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction published by the Princeton University Press. Outside of Harvard, Imai served as the President of the Society for Political Methodology from 2017 to 2019. Join us for this exciting opportunity to explore cutting-edge insights at the intersection of generative AI and causal inference. The hybrid event takes place in the Lecture Hall at the Manor Road Building on Tuesday, 20 May, at 14:30. It is open to both Oxford and non-Oxford students and researchers, who also have the option to join the event online. The Oxford Computational Political Science Group (OCPSG) is a non-partisan research initiative based at the University of Oxford and supported by the Department of Politics and International Relations. We are dedicated to advancing the study and application of computational methods in political science. By offering a collaborative environment that blends political science with computational techniques, OCPSG empowers students and researchers to explore innovative solutions to complex political questions.
Are you preparing a poster presentation for an upcoming conference, meeting or symposium? This interactive session, or ‘poster clinic’, will include a group discussion of different examples of poster presentations, as well as an opportunity to present your own draft of your poster presentation to your fellow attendees. It is expected that the small group of peers in attendance will provide feedback and respectful comments on each other’s work. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Chin's humour-filled memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, tells his story about growing up Asian in Detroit and coming out to his working class immigrant family, all set against the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, AIDS, and his family's popular Chinese restaurant. The book has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, as well as CBS Saturday Morning News and NBC News. It's also been honoured by the State of Michigan and the American Library Association. Curtis Chin is a co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City and served as the non-profits’ first Executive Director. He went on to write comedy for network and cable television before transitioning to social justice documentaries. Chin has screened his films at over 600 venues in twenty countries. He has written for CNN, Bon Appetit, the Detroit Free Press, and the Emancipator/Boston Globe. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Chin has received awards from ABC/Disney Television, New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and more. His memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, was published by Little, Brown in Fall 2023. His essay in Bon Appetit was selected for Best Food Writing in America 2023.
The Bender Lab is interested in understanding how the brain encodes information at the synaptic, cellular, and network level. We employ a variety of electrophysiological, optical, and genetic techniques to probe information processing across neuronal compartments, from synaptic inputs onto dendritic spines, to the site of action potential initiation in the axon initial segment, to transmitter release in axonal boutons. This work is complemented by biophysical studies of single channels, compartmental modeling, and in vivo recordings and behavior. Lean more about the Bender Lab: benderlab.ucsf.edu
In many markets, firms increase product complexity through add-on features, which can make the evaluation and comparison of products difficult, and thus increase buyers’ search cost. Does this product obfuscation limit buyers’ search behavior and induce them to buy overpriced products? And if so, why does competition not eliminate obfuscated products? We show – based on competitive experimental markets with surplus-enhancing obfuscation opportunities – that obfuscation via product complexity severely constrains the depth and breadth of buyers’ search. Sellers anticipate and take advantage of this by hiding unattractive product features and selling add-ons persistently above marginal cost. Even the most favorably priced product in the market is offered above marginal cost, and buyers persistently fail to find the best product such that inferior products have a good chance of being bought, leading to enduring price dispersion. Surplus-enhancing obfuscation opportunities are the causal driver of persistent profits and price dispersion because if we remove these opportunities, overall prices quickly converge to marginal cost. However, if add-ons merely complicate the products without generating additional surplus, obfuscation via product complexity becomes quite fragile because buyers display an aversion against complex products.
As global competition for Arctic resources intensifies, the Chinese state is increasingly involving itself in the region’s governance. Drawing on a review of policy texts and media reports, complemented by observations at an Arctic conference held in China and three field visits to the Arctic in 2018–2019, I advance knowledge of the politics and processes underlying Chinese tourism in an emerging destination. Specifically, I put mobilities theory, biopolitics and critical geopolitics into a dialogue to show how China is applying biopolitical logics upon its outbound tourist populations while seeking to envision, regulate and extract value from three key forms of tourism resources: tourists, infrastructure and data. Overall, I contribute to a tourism geopolitics that reflects upon how tourism can be a means through which governments may develop resources, exercise authority, and exert power over their own citizens in spaces where they lack territorial sovereignty. Bio: Benjamin Lucca Iaquinto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong. His research explores the environmental and political implications of tourism mobilities. He is an Associate Editor of Tourism Geographies and a Steering Committee Member of AusMob, the Australian Mobilities Research Network.
Description: The seminar will explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, AI, and technological innovation, co-taught by a philosopher and a technologist. The seminar will welcome a variety of visiting discussants from philosophy, computer science, and the technology industry throughout term. The focus will be on how a concern for human flourishing can be embedded in the global technology development pipeline, and on exploring how broader bridges can be built between philosophy and technology. The seminar is primarily aimed at philosophy graduate students and computer science graduate students but participants from other levels and areas are welcome. Topics include: truth-seeking AI, privacy, collective intelligence, decentralization in science and AI, and approaches to human autonomy. The seminar culminates in a clinic to facilitate grant applications for independent summer projects on the themes of the seminar. Fast grants: New for this year, Cosmos Ventures has established a dedicated funding pool that seminar participants can apply to for independent summer building projects on related themes. Prerequisites: please email HAI Lab philipp.koralus@philosophy.ox.ac.uk no later than April 27th with a (very) brief explanation of your interest in the seminar to reserve a spot, and the subject line “TT Seminar”. Space limited to maintain quality of discussion. Readings: ● Polanyi, “Republic of Science” (https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5100/polanyi_1967.pdf) ● INTELLECT–1: The First Decentralized Training of a 10B Parameter Model.” (https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/intellect-1) ● Accelerating Scientific Breakthroughs with an AI Co-Scientist (https://research.google/blog/accelerating-scientific-breakthroughs-with-an-ai-co-scientist/) ● The AI Scientist: Toward Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery (https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/) ● DeepSeek-R1: A Decentralized AI Research Platform. (https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1/blob/main/DeepSeek_R1.pdf)
Civic freedoms and human rights are under attack in many parts of the world. At the same time, commitment to climate action feels frail, democracy seems weak, and the multilateral system is being dismantled. Drawing on his new book, Power to the People, Dr Sriskandarajah will argue why protecting and nurturing citizen action is key to sustaining climate action and protecting democracy. When citizens have the freedom to express their views, assemble peacefully, and access information, they can organise and mobilize on the things that matter to communities, including environmental action. This active participation ensures that diverse voices are heard and protecting civic freedoms strengthens democratic institutions and global decision-making, all of which are crucial for addressing complex global challenges like climate change. He will set out the reasons why and how this can be the century of the citizen.
Calcium (Ca2+) is a requisite second messenger in all living organisms. From C. elegans to mammals, Ca2+ is necessary for locomotion, bodily functions, and neural activity. However, too much of a good thing can be bad. Intracellular Ca2+ overload can result in loss of function and death. Intracellular Ca2+ release channels evolved to safely provide large, rapid Ca2+ signals without exposure to toxic extracellular Ca2+. Ryanodine receptors (RyRs) are intracellular Ca2+ release channels present throughout the zoosphere. Over the past 35 years, our knowledge of RyRs has advanced to the level of atomic-resolution structures revealing their role in the mechanisms underlying the pathogenesis of human disorders of heart, muscle, and brain. Stress-induced RyR-mediated intracellular Ca2+ leak in the heart can promote heart failure and cardiac arrhythmias. In skeletal muscle, RyR1 leak contributes to muscle weakness in inherited myopathies, to age-related loss of muscle function and cancer-associated muscle weakness, and to impaired muscle function in muscular dystrophies, including Duchenne. In the brain, leaky RyR channels contribute to cognitive dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease, posttraumatic stress disorder, and Huntington’s disease. Novel therapeutics targeting dysfunctional RyRs are showing promise.
Economic Historians have long assumed that colonial Spanish American finance was poorly developed. 19th and 20th century fiscal and financial woes of Spanish American societies were read as part of a colonial legacy that weighed on former Spanish colonies from their moment of Independence (1808-20s). A sizeable theoretical literature has offered possible causal links between colonial rule and poorly developed financial intermediation pointing primarily to a lack of secure property rights. This paper seeks to propose an alternative explanatory path. It discusses the existence of a sui generis financial system that provided cheap and ubiquitous public and private credit. It analyses the subscriptions to one particularly large loan to the public purse in the 1770s to zoom in on the functioning of public credit, its link with private finance, the composition of the subscribers, and the role of the merchant corporation. The paper suggests that reading the evidence within a theoretical frame of financialisation may be more helpful than the traditional institutionalist political economy analysis. While the concept of financialisation is at present poorly theorised, it helps to ask important questions about the economic impact of easy credit in colonial Spanish America.
This online workshop, in collaboration with the Thomas More Centre for International Relations at CEU Fernando III, will cover a wide range of topics from disinformation to Gaza. Richard Finn O.P. and Carlos Espaliú will co-chair. All are welcome, registration is required.
*Carlo Ginzburg will present the Oxford Centre for European History and Isaiah Berlin Annual Lecture* *Carlo Ginzburg* received a PhD from the University of Pisa in 1961 and has held teaching positions in several universities across Italy and America, including the University of Bologna, and the University of California, Los Angeles. His areas of specialism range from the Italian Renaissance to early modern European history, and he is a pioneer in the field of microhistory – intense investigations of well-defined topics leading to broader generalisations. Professor Ginzburg has published a significant number of papers and books on topics from witchcraft and agrarian cults in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1966), to Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes (1984).
Economic Historians have long assumed that colonial Spanish American finance was poorly developed. 19th and 20th century fiscal and financial woes of Spanish American societies were read as part of a colonial legacy that weighed on former Spanish colonies from their moment of Independence (1808-20s). A sizeable theoretical literature has offered possible causal links between colonial rule and poorly developed financial intermediation pointing primarily to a lack of secure property rights. This paper seeks to propose an alternative explanatory path. It discusses the existence of a _sui generis_ financial system that provided cheap and ubiquitous public and private credit. It analyses the subscriptions to one particularly large loan to the public purse in the 1770s to zoom in on the functioning of public credit, its link with private finance, the composition of the subscribers, and the role of the merchant corporation. The paper suggests that reading the evidence within a theoretical frame of financialisation may be more helpful than the traditional institutionalist political economy analysis. While the concept of financialisation is at present poorly theorised, it helps to ask important questions about the economic impact of easy credit in colonial Spanish America. *If you would like to meet the speaker before the seminar, please sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/23druvdp*
'The World after Gaza' takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad revaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West’s triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and most people around the world’s frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world’s population. As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis — about whether some lives matter more than others, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration. The World after Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future. Pankaj Mishra’s books include 'Age of Anger' and 'From the Ruins of Empire'. He contributes political and literary essays to the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. In 2024, he was awarded the Weston International Award and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Gravity shapes our everyday experiences, from apples falling from trees and the ebb and flow of tides to the motion of planets and galaxies. It also governs the universe's most extreme phenomena, such as the formation of black holes and the emission of gravitational waves. In this month's Balliol Online Lecture, Dr Romain Ruzziconi will trace the evolution of our understanding of gravity, from the major breakthroughs of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein to the modern concept of holography. Unravelling the mysteries of gravity helps us confront profound questions about the cosmos: What is the fate of an observer falling into a black hole? What are the origins of the universe itself? Dr Romain Ruzziconi is the Walker Early Career Fellow in Mathematical Physics at Balliol College and a Titchmarsh Research Fellow at the Oxford Mathematical Institute, his core subject area is theoretical high-energy physics. His research focuses on theoretical aspects of classical and quantum gravity, employing the methods of holography, asymptotic symmetries, and scattering amplitudes. Currently, his work is concentrated on flat space holography and exploring the interplay between celestial amplitudes and Carrollian physics. He is leaving his Balliol fellowship a year early, in October 2025, to take up a Global Marie Curie Fellowship at Harvard and the École Polytechnique Paris.
All welcome; refreshments provided
In the mid-nineteenth century surgery was a rapidly evolving field. Those who practised it successfully found growing prestige and authority in both the medical world and among the wider public. ‘Diseases of women’ were a central component to the profession’s changing identity. Theories and practices of surgery and obstetrics blended to form a suite of increasingly invasive procedures to treat conditions of the female reproductive system. In the middle decades of the century the justifiability of performing the caesarean operation began to be widely discussed. Some doctors turned to the procedure in desperate cases of obstructed labour as an alternative to the craniotomy procedure. This talk seeks to illuminate the ethical dialogue which emerged around its practice at this time. Its discussion was underpinned by changes in print culture and attendant notions of accountability, assertions about the national identity of medical practice, theological discourse, perceptions of the ‘deformed’ pregnant body and its risks, and the fraught meaning of ‘necessity’ in guiding whether to operate. Ultimately what emerged was a debate fuelled by cultural anxieties around the relative value of maternal and foetal life, female autonomy in reproductive choice and the extent of doctors’ authority to choose when to operate.
Visiting speakers, workshops, and in-house talks open to all researchers (graduate, postdoctoral, academics) and those with research interests in literature of the long eighteenth century 1660-1830
Professor Moody-Adams’ paper will explore Mill’s claim that Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were the two great “half-men” of their time, asking whether this assertion illuminates Mill’s view of the relationship between tradition and progress, or does it reveal a fundamental ambivalence at the core of Mill’s thought, and what this might tell us about Mill’s understanding of truth.
COURSE DETAILS You will learn how to read a group, deal with difficult situations, use humour, match your presentation to the audience, and make an impact. You will learn how to get your message across so it is remembered. You will learn about timing and when you should deliver key messages. You will develop your self-awareness and understand its role in presenting. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will understand more about: How to structure your presentation for impact. How your psychological state affects your presentation skills and how you can manage it. How to read a group and how to deal with difficult situations. How to deliver your presentation with more confidence.
If you are planning to run a ‘non-CTIMP’ research study this introductory course is for you. Not all research is subject to clinical trials regulations, but the same standards of conduct apply. This course in Good Clinical Research Practice covers the legislation that applies to ‘non-CTIMP’ research, along with the detailed principles of good practice in clinical research studies. This three-hour online course consists of trainers’ led presentations, short video-talks from those experienced in the conduct of clinical research and interactive exercises. The course is run by the experienced research support specialists from the University of Oxford and Oxford University Hospital’s Joint Research Office, JRO. Join this online presentation through Microsoft Teams for an overview of: • Purpose of Good Clinical Research Practice including historical background • Difference between Clinical Care and Research Practice • Ethical and Regulatory Considerations in the UK • Research Study Requirements and Documentation • Research Study Conduct and Management
EndNote is a desktop-based reference management tool for Windows and Mac users. It helps you to build libraries of references and insert them into Word documents as in-text citations or footnotes, and to automatically generate bibliographies. This online introduction to EndNote is open to all University of Oxford students, researchers and staff and teaches you how to use the software so that you can effectively manage your references. The workshop will cover: what EndNote can do for you; adding references to EndNote from a range of sources; managing your references in an EndNote library; adding in-text citations and/or footnotes to your essays and papers; and creating bibliographies. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Trusted Research is a dynamic landscape - do you know what the challenges are for international collaborations in your department? With the acute changes in the geopolitical landscape, university research is increasingly viewed as having a significant impact on national security. The threats are real, the impact of a malicious act could include reputational damage, constraint of academic freedom, legal or regulatory breaches, barring from holding funding from certain funders, and loss or compromise of results, data and intellectual property or cyber or physical infrastructure. The Research Services Trusted Research team supports compliance and safeguarding the integrity of the University’s vital international collaborations. We invite University staff to join the Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) to learn how this changing landscape might affect you or the activities within your department. Hear more from the experts, and take the opportunity to ask questions about how this could affect you. Wednesday, May 21st 2025, 9:30am Presentation approx. 45 minutes, with added time for questions to follow. The Richard Doll Building- G Lecture Theatre, Old Campus Road, Oxford OX3 7LF **Please visit either our Trusted Research or Export Control Webpages to pre-register by Friday May 16th 2025
For online access, Microsoft Teams links will be sent to the mailing list in advance or email "$":mailto:christina.debellaigue@exeter.ox.ac.uk for a link.
Newspapers are a valuable resource for researching not only news but also many other aspects of political, economic, social and cultural life. In this session we will introduce key online sources of news and how to make best use of them. The focus will be on historical and contemporary newspapers from the 17th century across most countries of the world. After the session participants will understand: the value of newspapers in research; the difficulties of using newspapers in research and effective search techniques, and be able to use a range of sources for searching and reading. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
This event will help you to position yourself for the next stages of your career (at Oxford, within academia or beyond); to enable to you to reflect on your professional and personal development activities so far and provide useful tools and resources to help you achieve your future aspirations with confidence. Joining the event will be colleagues from across the University with expertise in professional and career development for researchers. It has been designed to support your specific needs now that you’re some way through your contract.
The Lunchtime Lab Talks aim to introduce and highlight the broad spectrum of research that is carried out at the Centre and encourage multidisciplinary interactions. Throughout the year, groups are invited to speak and present their work to our community. Lunch is available from 12:15 in Room A&B and talks run from 12:30–13:30. Speakers: Catherine Lidbetter and Dr Louisa Chenciner, CPM Title: Recent developments at the Centre for Personalised Medicine Speaker: Dr Susie Weller, CPM and CELS Title: Life with an undiagnosed rare condition: a new Rare Disease Research UK project Speaker: Dr Kate Lyle, CELS Title: Beyond the test: ethical and social implications of genomics newborn screening
Are you looking for a streamlined approach to gathering, managing and citing your references? Join us for this interactive online session in which we introduce RefWorks, a subscription reference management tool that University of Oxford members can use for free during their time at the university and as alumni. RefWorks is web-based and helps you to collect and manage references and insert them into your word-processed document as in-text citations or footnotes, and you can generate bibliographies. Being web-based, RefWorks can be used with any operating system and, to cite your references in a document, provides a plugin for Microsoft Word on Windows or Mac computers. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Join Neil Jefferies for an overview of how to analyse, annotate and collate images from different websites using the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) technology. Discover how IIIF can be used in research processes and explore examples from the Digital Bodleian collection. This free in-person event is open to University of Oxford staff and students only. Registration is required.
Join our first AFRHiCARE webinar series on African hospitals. Our first webinar will focus on gender and intersectional analysis in African hospitals, with three amazing speakers: - Dr. Bintu Mansaray (University of Bristol) - Prof. Ivy Lynn Bourgeault (University of Ottawa) - Evelyn Kabia (KEMRI-Wellcome Trust)
Achieving net zero emissions requires a structural transformation of the energy system, yet the economic and financial consequences of this shift remain poorly understood. Studies often focus on specific features of the transition – such as green investment and its financing, technological change and cost shifts, or financial transition risks – and consequently offer differing perspectives on its potential impacts. Economic models, in turn, typically focus on a limited number of these transition features, and may also be methodologically constrained in their ability to capture others (such as financial-real economy interactions). As a result most economic models fail to account for several key energy transition features and the potential interactions between them. To address this gap, we present TranSim 2, a stock-flow consistent, input-output macroeconomic model capable of integrating multiple transition features - including green investment and it's financing, technological/cost change, and financial transition risks - and the interactions between them. We use this model to simulate the macroeconomic and financial consequences of orderly vs. disorderly and anticipated vs. unanticipated energy transitions. Our simulation results show that: i) faster, more ‘disorderly’ transitions are more disruptive than slower, more orderly transitions; and that ii) transitions in which fossil fuel firms and investors on financial markets are slow to anticipate the transition are more disruptive than those in which expectations adjust more quickly. In general, faster transitions are more disruptive as they generate more inflation, loan defaults, interest rate hikes, asset price fluctuations, functional income shifts, and cost increases. On the other hand transitions in which expectations adjust more slowly are more destabilising to financial markets as misaligned expectations leads to overinvestment by fossil fuel firms and the misallocation of financial assets. About the speaker: Andrew Jackson is a senior research fellow at the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) at the University of Surrey. His research focuses on the macroeconomic consequences of transitioning to a low-carbon economy, monetary and banking systems, and fiscal and monetary policy. His ongoing work includes the development of a large-scale stock-flow consistent input-output model to examine macroeconomic, sectoral, and financial interactions in energy transitions, an analysis of monetary and fiscal coordination in post-growth and net-zero transitions, and an investigation into the determinants of inflation in energy transitions and potential policy responses. Andrew is currently a principal investigator on the EU Horizon funded project Models, Assessment and Policies for Sustainability (MAPS). He was previously a co-investigator on the ESRC funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics project ‘Modelling transition risk: developing an agent-based, stock-flow consistent, input-output macroeconomic framework’. Andrew holds a PhD from the University of Surrey, and a master’s and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Sussex. Prior to completing his PhD and starting work at CUSP, Andrew spent several years working as Head of Research for a think tank that specialises in research into monetary and banking systems.
TBC
Neural circuits continuously integrate noisy sensory stimuli with predictions that often do not perfectly match, requiring the brain to combine these conflicting feedforward and feedback inputs according to their uncertainties. However, how the brain tracks both stimulus and prediction uncertainty remains unclear. Here, we show that a hierarchical prediction-error network can estimate both the sensory and prediction uncertainty with positive and negative prediction-error neurons. Consistent with prior hypotheses, we demonstrate that neural circuits rely more on predictions when sensory inputs are noisy and the environment is stable. By perturbing inhibitory interneurons within the prediction-error circuit, we reveal their role in uncertainty estimation and input weighting. Finally, we link our model to biased perception, showing how stimulus and prediction uncertainty contribute to the contraction bias.
Join via Microsoft Teams here: https://tinyurl.com/5d5s7x5k
The collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the most significant geopolitical shifts of the 20th century. Today, more than three decades later, its legacy continues to shape the worldview of the Kremlin and the strategic ambitions of Vladimir Putin. As the possibility of a more permanent ceasefire in Ukraine looms, new questions arise about how Russia’s past informs its present—and what this means for the future of European and global security. Join the Oxford University International Relations Society for a fireside chat with Professor Vladislav Zubok as he reflects on the lessons of the Soviet collapse, the evolution of Russian grand strategy, and the enduring influence of Cold War memory on today’s geopolitical tensions. This event is open to all members of the University of Oxford. Vladislav Zubok is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, specializing in the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and 20th-century Russian intellectual history. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including A Failed Empire (2007), Zhivago’s Children (2009), and The Idea of Russia (2017). His most recent work, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (2021), was a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. Originally from Moscow, Professor Zubok has held academic positions and fellowships at leading institutions in the US and Europe, and has advised on major documentary series such as CNN’s Cold War.
If you are interested in attending any of these events, please send an email to plp@law.ox.ac.uk to indicate i) which events you plan to attend, ii) whether you would like to join the speaker for dinner that evening, iii) whether you plan to attend the student seminar accompanying the Colloquium. For more information, visit the PLP Colloquium website: www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-and-subject-groups/jurisprudence-oxford/PLP-colloquium where up-to-date information is listed.
Over the last 20 years, evidence from correlational studies and experiments has accumulated, which suggests that engagement with written fiction impacts on social cognition processes. In this presentation, I will review this research and the theoretical models that have been proposed to account for such effects, and present my own model on this line of inquiry, which distinguishes between types of fiction and extends to cultural products other than written fiction. I will summarize the extant correlational and experimental evidence stemming from my own research with human participants, as well as the most recent studies I have conducted using Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence tools, which provide support for the theoretical account that I propose. Emanuele Castano conducts research and writes about topics such as violent intergroup conflict and reconciliation, nationalism and international relations, and the existential motives of human behaviour. His latest work is on the impact of cultural products on social cognition and on democracy. He has published over 60 scientific articles in top tier scientific journals and he is the recipient of numerous research grants from various agencies and foundations, such as the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the European Commission. He is Professor of Psychology at the University of Florence, and a researcher at the Institute for Cognitive Science of the Italian National Research Council. The seminar is convened by Professor Ben Morgan (ben.morgan@worc.ox.ac.uk) and Dr Naomi Rokotnitz (naomi.rokotnitz@worc.ox.ac.uk). As always, the talk will be followed by drinks for all attendees. About the Seminar Series: The Fiction and Other Minds seminar series showcases current research in the Cognitive Humanities by hosting scholars working at the interface between literary studies, visual and performance art, phenomenology, philosophy, and the cognitive sciences. The seminars explore how features investigated by the cognitive sciences can be tested and expanded across different cultural contexts, media, and artistic genres. In particular, we explore how literary texts often challenge and differentiate theoretical insights—especially through their attention to the culturally situated aspects of cognition—and how cognitively informed approaches to literature can deepen our understanding of the embodied and affective processes that underpin meaning-making, including literary reading. For more information, please see the Fiction and Other Minds research strand page.
RSVP to Ilaria Prezia "$":mailto:antiquities@ashmus.ox.ac.uk / 01865 278 020
COURSE DETAILS The course will include: Critique of readability in relevant papers. Use of tenses in academic papers. Writing with impact. Concise writing. Grammar and proof reading. Scientific table and chart technique. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the session participants will be able to: Develop understanding of the characteristics of scientific writing; write in simple, clear and concise scientific English. Develop knowledge of how to write grammatically correct English. Improve proof reading skills; organise the sections of a scientific paper effectively. Develop a scientific argument with appropriate language that conveys the message effectively. Make effective use of charts and tables.
In this online interactive workshop, you will learn how to create an effective search query and have the opportunity to try out a range of tools that you can use to search for scholarly materials to support your research. You will: learn how to find books and other scholarly items in Oxford libraries using SOLO; search for journal articles using subject databases and scholarly search engines; and be signposted towards learning materials you can use if you are interested in searching for conference proceedings, theses and dissertations. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
This talk is an attempt to clarify a longstanding controversy in the history of humanities scholarship in the university, namely its relation to political activism, and to the political in general. Guillory’s hypothesis is that the appropriate frame for understanding this relation is the autonomy of social spheres, as expressed in the historical tendency of different spheres to become depoliticized over time. The paradigm case for this tendency is the depoliticization of the religious sphere with the end of the wars of religion at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He argues that depoliticization enabled the development of autonomous social spheres, resulting in many social benefits, beginning with the condition of peace following the wars of religion. At the same time, autonomous social spheres are periodically subject to re-politicization for various reasons, a tendency manifest in university scholarship at the present moment. Guillory examines several recent arguments defending the identity of scholarship with political activism, attempting to grasp thereby the forces impelling politicization and depoliticization.
In this session we will examine metrics for individual researchers. Using tools such as Web of Science, Google Scholar and Scopus you will learn about the researcher h-index and its limitations. You will be introduced to additional metrics tools such as author beamplots which help to contextualise a researcher’s output over time. By the end of the session, you will be familiar with: accessing citation data for specific researchers on Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar; understanding how the h-index is calculated and its inherent limitations; creating an ORCID number to help track all your own research outputs; and the importance of research outputs beyond journal and conference papers when assessing a researcher’s impact. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Elisabeth Siegel at elisabeth.siegel@politics.ox.ac.uk or Brian Kot at brian.kot@politics.ox.ac.uk in advance to participate or with any questions. Remote attendance is possible, but in-person attendance is prioritized (and provided refreshment). About the speaker: Karuna Nandkumar is the Head of Policy Programmes at the Oxford China Policy Lab. Her research focuses on Chinese foreign policy and diplomacy. Prior to OCPL, she worked on Indo-Pacific policy at the US Department of Defense in D.C. and coordinated US-China Track II dialogues with the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Beijing. She speaks Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. She received her MA in Global Affairs as a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University and her BA in Public Policy from the University of Michigan.
Effective and regular communication with academic supervisors is vital to the successful completion of a doctoral degree. Structured discussions help students refine research questions, strengthen methodologies, and navigate both theoretical and practical challenges. However, the format and frequency of supervisory meetings can vary significantly — shaped by departmental expectations, research disciplines, and supervisory styles, including the number of supervisors and their preferred working methods. While some students benefit from weekly, in-depth meetings, others rely on occasional, student-initiated check-ins. Feedback can be detailed and regular or sporadic and unpredictable, even within the same department. Regardless of the format, clear and consistent communication is key to sustaining research momentum, developing academic skills, and enhancing research quality. Well-organised, purposeful meetings also support time management and productive engagement with feedback. This panel brings together experienced doctoral students to share strategies for making supervisory meetings more effective and rewarding. Rather than focusing on common challenges, the discussion will highlight best practices for structuring meetings, setting achievable objectives, engaging with feedback, and fostering open and transparent communication with supervisors. Attendees will leave with practical tips to strengthen their supervisory experience and support steady progress throughout their doctoral journey. Objectives • Recognise the key components of productive, goal-oriented supervisory meetings that support steady research and writing progress. • Develop effective strategies for setting clear, achievable objectives to guide future supervisory discussions. • Reflect critically on their current supervisory relationships and identify practical actions to improve meeting structure, communication, and overall research progress. Moderator Keiko Kanno Panellists TBC
From what time we wake up to what we choose to wear to whom we marry, choice is a defining feature of the human experience. Sheena Iyengar, S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, has spent decades studying the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms behind decision-making—why we choose, how choices impact our happiness, and whether more choices empower or overwhelm us. Blending empirical research with real-world applications, Iyengar challenges common assumptions to show how complex our decision-making processes truly are. Are more choices enabling or crippling? Does careful planning always help us make better decisions? How does our environment affect our preferences? Her research spans healthcare, consumer behavior, medicine, leadership, and innovation to uncover the hidden dynamics of choice. By deepening our understanding of the forces that drive decisions, Iyengar equips us to choose with greater awareness, confidence, and clarity—whether that means exercising our freedom to choose well or recognizing when we would rather not choose at all. SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY Sheena S. Iyengar is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business and the Academic Director of the Innovation Hub at the Columbia Business School. She is one of the world’s experts on choice and innovation. Iyengar is the recipient of the Thinkers50 2023 Innovation Award and the author of two award-winning books, The Art of Choosing (2010 Financial Times Business Book of the Year and #3 Bestselling Business Book on Amazon) and Think Bigger: How to Innovate (2023 Gold Medal recipient for the Axiom Business Book Awards and Thinkers50 Top 10 Management Book of the Year). Her recorded TED Talks have received a collective 7 million views. She regularly appears in top tier media such as The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, CNBC, CNN, The BBC, and NPR. Iyengar is famously recognized her “Jam Study,” which revolutionized how we approach product offerings and customer curation. The study revealed that too many choices reduce customer purchasing and corporate growth. Since then, over 1,000 studies on choice overload have been conducted, leading to the widely recognized 80/20 rule, which shows that 80% of a company’s outcomes (outputs and revenue) come from 20% of causes (inputs and choices). Leveraging her expertise in choice, Iyengar has advised hundreds of companies across business, technology, consumer retail, media, consulting, investing, and STEM, helping them transform decision-making and enhance stakeholder experiences. Iyengar created the Think Bigger method for innovative thinking and problem-solving based on recent advances in neuro- and cognitive sciences. Where prevailing methods for innovation, such as Design Thinking, teach customer research and feedback methods, Think Bigger concentrates on how creative ideas form in your mind and teaches a six-step process for innovation. In 2024, Iyengar was awarded the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) Scientific Impact Award. She was ranked by the Thinkers50 as a Top 10 Management Thinker in 2023. In 2022, Iyengar was ranked by the Asian American Business Development Center as one of the 50 Outstanding Asian Americans in Business. She received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the CBS Executive MBA Class of 2021. In 2012, Iyengar was recognized by Poets and Quants as one of the Best Business School Professors for her work merging academia with practice. In 2002, she was the only social scientist to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the Office of the President. Iyengar holds a dual degree from the University of Pennsylvania, with a BS in Economics from the Wharton School and a BA in psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences. She received her PhD from Stanford University. In her personal life, as a blind woman, Iyengar intuitively used Think Bigger to find her calling and strives to inspire others to do the same.
Model-informed drug development (MIDD) is increasingly adopted to support global health equity by providing guidance on the safe use of medications in lactating women and their nursing infants. In this webinar, we will explore how MIDD enhances clinical lactation studies to support more informed decision-making regarding the safety of administering medication to lactating mothers. Plasmodium vivax malaria remains a global health issue, with 6.9 million cases in 2022. Primaquine is a drug used to prevent relapse and treat P. vivax malaria (radical cure). Until November 2024, when the last WHO guidelines for malaria were published, its use was restricted for lactating women if their children were < 6 months, fearing infant harm from exposure via breast milk. A major change was implemented in the last guideline, adjusting the restriction age to < 1 month. This was supported by a clinical lactation study, which was conducted to measure primaquine concentration in breastmilk and in nursing infants > 1 month old. Results showed that primaquine concentrations in infant plasma were extremely low, with no measurable effects on infants. Many women in malaria endemic communities live far from healthcare facilities. The postpartum period is an operationally strategic time to provide radical cure for women who have vivax malaria in pregnancy, but primaquine is still not recommended for women breastfeeding neonates. Planned follow-up studies in the neonatal period have been delayed by concerns about neonatal safety by ethical approval boards. Physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) and population pharmacokinetic (PopPK) modeling approaches were used to complement the clinical study by predicting risk from drug exposure in breast milk and extrapolating data to neonates < 1 month old. The modeling results predicted negligible risk, suggesting that studies during this physiologically vulnerable time could safely be conducted, and that expansion of radical cure to this group is likely possible.
Speaker and title to be confirmed - more information will be available shortly.
What’s new in inflammatory bowel disease? Public information event What’s on… What’s new & what’s coming in medicine & surgery? State of the art lecture (Dr Alissa Walsh, Dr Oliver Brain & Mr Mark Bignell) Diet and IBD: Progress at last (Professor Kevin Whelan, London). Presentations on the latest research into the management of Crohn’s disease & Ulcerative Colitis Growing up with IBD: State of the art lecture (Dr Hannah Gordon & Professor Holm Uhlig) Panel Question & Answers Session Presentations from charities CCUK and CICRA We are very pleased to invite you to attend our third educational evening focussing on progress in Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Presentations from Oxford consultants and specialists will cover latest progress in the medical and surgical management of these diseases, current research studies, and a special session focussing on young people growing up with inflammatory bowel disease. In addition, we are delighted that Professor Kevin Whelan, from King’s College London is coming to give a state of the art talk on diet and inflammatory bowel disease. He is a well-recognised expert in this area. All of the speakers will take part in a Question & Answer session. There is no charge for the event, and we will plan to make arrangements for car parking, and refreshments. If you are not able to attend, but would still like to ask a question, please ask here: https://forms.office.com/e/Bn5J63ic5y
What does it mean to live collectively in the afterlife of a catastrophe? How do we frame the traumatic crises of the 21st century— life post-9/11, pandemics, ethno-nationalist autocracies, imperial invasions, border brutalities and refugee crises—in a vocabulary that encapsulates responsibility, accountability, agentic expression, and above all, the shifting registers of selfhood? Through a series of three lectures The Time of our Life interrogates the public culture of ‘trauma’ in the current climate of inflammatory polarisation. Join Homi Bhabha as he deconstructs and reconfigures new schema for understanding the politics of identity, culture wars, and the on-going “war of wounds and words” that haunts the moral and political economy of the US, alongside anti-minoritarian racial or ethnic equivalents around the world.
Please contact "$":mailto:sarah.apetrei@campion.ox.ac.uk for the Teams link to join remotely.
The aim of the seminar is to foster a dynamic and interdisciplinary postcolonial research culture supportive of individual scholarship. Finalists, M.St. and D.Phil. students, lecturers, fellows, scholars from across the university community – all are welcome. If you’d like to appear on the seminar mailing list, please email zana.mody@kellogg.ox.ac.uk, riley.faulds@worc.ox.ac.uk OR hannah.fagan@mansfield.ox.ac.uk
This years Rex Nettleford Lecture on Colonialism and its Legacies will take place on Thursday 22 May in the Harris Lecture Theatre from 5.30pm. Our speaker will be award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester, Gary Younge. Gary will be speaking on “”The man who photobombed De Gaulle” for more information about him, please see below. After the talk there will be drinks, from 6.30pm, and a chance to speak to our speaker further. The lecture, named in honour of former Honorary Fellow and Orielensis Professor Rex Nettleford, former Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, is intended to contribute to the advancement of academic research into the legacies of colonialism in all its forms.
This talk explores the contested evolution of Denmark’s national assessment and quality assurance system, focusing on its decade-long experiment with adaptive online testing in public education—examining its design, purpose, and implementation. National tests have long been at the centre of political and professional debate, a contention that intensified as new assessment policies took shape before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The talk investigates how key stakeholders—teachers, school leaders, politicians, and civil servants—have navigated these shifting policies, negotiating the role of standardized assessment in a changing educational landscape. Critically engaging with the role of expertise in education policy, the talk questions the extent to which knowledge and evidence genuinely inform decision-making. It also unpacks the influence of bureaucratic logics, political agendas, and intermediary actors in shaping assessment policies, highlighting the tensions between research-based policymaking and political imperatives. By examining Denmark’s evolving approach to national testing and the broader mechanisms of quality assurance, this talk offers insights into the power dynamics, institutional structures, and governance processes that shape the development and transformation of assessment policies in democratic education systems. Online link registration: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NGJjM2FhMjYtNTYxMS00N2UxLTllNGQtMjZlOTg4ZTYyM2U1%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%227e40180b-c61c-4bbb-b2cc-6ab5136a4dca%22%7d
Professor Nesbitt introduces readers to an eclectic cast of remarkable women from different walks of life. Among these women are figures like daring big game hunters, novelists, poets, photographers, and even a flamenco dancer who transformed into a Empress, or maharani. Their stories reveal vibrant and often deeply personal encounters with Sikh culture. This monumental collection brings together the forgotten voices of 170 Western women who formed fascinating connections with the Sikh culture. From queens and missionaries to spies, nurses, journalists, and artists, these women played remarkable roles—yet their experiences have been overshadowed in male-dominated historical narratives. Their unique perspectives, drawn from a rich mix of personal encounters, offer a human touch to major historical events, battles, and religious transformations. This magnificent work also brings together for the first time a stunning collection of over 440 rare illustrations, including sketches, paintings, and photographs, many of which were created by the women themselves. These visuals capture the essence of their journeys and highlight their artistic contributions to recording Sikh history. This volume is a special, limited-edition release, available exclusively from www.kashihouse.com
The Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that attendance at the Surgical Grand Rounds can count toward internal CPD, with 1 point awarded per hour. Please note that in-person attendance is required, and you will need to sign the attendance register. Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend online.
Scholars have used the concept of the 'Komnenian Restoration' of Byzantium for many years, and yet the term has never received a critical analysis: what did the Komnenoi believe they were restoring? Did they achieve any of their aims, in what ways, and what was the legacy of their successes and failures? This symposium aims to gather both established and emerging Komnenian Scholars to analyse these questions, and to do so across all fields including cultural, religious, administrative, legal and societal history as well as military. Likewise, it will have an especial focus on the Komnenian legacy, both towards the Byzantine successor states of the 13th century, and also the Turkish and Latin polities that arose after their 12th century peak. This symposium will also discuss the publication of a handbook of Komnenian scholars, and so welcome attendees who would also consider contributing to such a volume. This event will also involve associated cultural events, such as a workshop on Komnenian manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. For more information, and to register interest in attending, please fill in the online form: https://forms.gle/dneAq4okLfQkpL99A, by 14 April 2025 – late contact will be considered, but the event may have reached capacity by then.
Abstract: Understanding the relationships of causes and their effects is crucial to any science, including medicine where precise treatment recommendations can make crucial differences for patient outcomes. Causal Inference helps quantify these relationships with the help of statistical modelling. In this talk, I highlight the value of bounds on causal effects as a stepping stone towards more robust causal analysis. More robust analysis helps justify results in classical biomedicine studies using methods such as Mendelian randomisation, IV and more. Through that, bounds will play a crucial role in making those results more accessible, impactful and ultimately, more successful. Bio: Jakob Zeitler researched causal inference under the supervision of Ricardo Silva at University College London during his PhD in Foundational Artificial Intelligence, funded by Google Deepmind. During his PhD he interned at Spotify Research, yielding one paper and two patents. At Oxford, he serves as a Pioneer Fellow in the SMARTbiomed centre, joining Robin Evans group at the Department of Statistics to advance methods of causal inference, machine learning and combined.
During the talk I will describe my research on host-pathogen interactions during lung infections. Various modelling approaches have been used, including a hybrid multiscale individual-based model that we have developed, which simulates pulmonary infection spread, immune response and treatment within in a section of human lung. The model contains discrete agents which model the spatio-temporal interactions (migration, binding, killing etc.) of the pathogen and immune cells. Cytokine and oxygen dynamics are also included, as well as Pharmacokinetic/Pharmacodynamic models, which are incorporated via PDEs. I will also describe ongoing work to develop a continuum model, comparing the spatial dynamics resulting from these different modelling approaches. I will focus in the most part on two infectious diseases: Tuberculosis and COVID-19.
Puzzled by PICO? Daunted by databases? Baffled by Boolean? This one-hour online introductory class will offer top tips and advice on how to find literature to answer a research question. No prior experience necessary! Together, we will break down a question into the PICO format, put together a structured search, and try it out in PubMed. By the end of this session, you will be able to: explain what structured searching is, and when to use it; break your research question down into searchable concepts; and make use of Boolean operators (ANDs/ORs) in your structured searches. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Carbonatites, probably the strangest rocks on Earth, are often associated with critical rare earth elements, making them increasingly relevant to society. Such deposits are also often associated with enrichments in Nb, Ba, Zr, Sr, Ti and Cu, as well as apatite and fluorite. Through observations of natural and experimental examples I will review our current understanding of how these intriguing enrichments might occur. Most of the key processes involved, as summarised below (Yaxley et al, 2022), will be presented along with numerous real-world examples and rampant speculations.
Join us for a discussion group which will challenge ‘mainstream’ forms of Black cultural expression, exploring Black presence and engagement with alternative subcultures, such as rock, metal, and punk. The discussion will expand on the concepts and theories around Black alternative culture and expression, as shared by Dr. Francesca Sobande at our previous session. We do ask attendees to consider the chosen materials, however, we welcome anyone who is interested, regardless of the extent you have engaged with the materials. The discussion will be guided by your thoughts and opinions, however, we will also come prepared with prompts to spark conversation. Francesca Sobande, ‘Black artists don’t just make hip hop - why recognition of metal, punk, rock and emo by Mobo is long overdue’, The Conversation, 29 November 2022. https://theconversation.com/black-artists-dont-just-make-hip-hop-why-recognition-of-metal-punk-rock-and-emo-by-mobo-is-long-overdue-195583 Francesca Sobande, ‘Blackness and metal: From Nu-Metal to Baddiecore’, Museum of Youth Culture, 2025. https://www.museumofyouthculture.com/blackness-nu-metal-baddiecore/ ---- Bluesky: raceresistance.bsky.social Subscribe to our mailing list by sending a blank email to: race-and-resistance-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Kimberly Kline is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. From 2011-2022, she was a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at NTU Singapore and a Principal Investigator at SCELSE. Kimberly received a Master’s in Public Health and a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from Northwestern University where she studied Type IV pilus antigenic variation in Neisseria gonorrhoeae. She completed postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm Sweden where she began investigating the pathogenic mechanisms of Enterococcus faecalis. Kimberly has received multiple awards for her contributions to the field of microbiology, including a NIH K99 Career Development Award in 2011, the Singapore National Research Foundation Fellowship in 2011, the ICAAC Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Microbiology in 2014, the Nanyang Education Award in 2017, and election to the American Academy of Microbiology in 2025. Current research interests of her group include the pathogenic mechanisms of polymicrobial biofilm-associated infections, including catheter-associated urinary tract infections, wound infections, and infective endocarditis. Given the intrinsic phenotypic resistance of biofilms to antimicrobials, her team seeks to exploit their fundamental discoveries to identify new therapeutic intervention points for these difficult-to-treat infections.
Adequate oxygen delivery to tissues is a physiological priority and clinical imperative. An abundance of haemoglobin in the circulation aims to support a sufficient convective flow of oxygen between the lungs and tissues, yet disorders of red cells (anaemias) affect over 2 billion people worldwide. However, we diagnose and treat these disorders in terms of oxygen-carrying capacity, largely because this is what haematology analysers measure. Using a microfluidic imaging technique, we showed that the oxygen release rate is also important to consider, and can become problematic in haematological diseases. Specifically, release rates become slower in stored blood which impacts transfusion outcomes. Working with clinical and industrial partners, we investigated the significance of our parameter on tissue oxygenation and designed ways of measuring it for the clinical setting. Our aim is to disseminate our kinetic parameter to improve blood banking and clinical practice. SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY Came from Poland to study Physiological Sciences a Oxford and then a DPhil on cardiac physiology with Richard Vaughan-Jones in what was then called the University Laboratory of Physiology. He then received training from Ken Spitzer in Utah in electrophysiology, before embarking on a Royal Society University Research Fellowship which expanded his interests to cancer. He held an ERC Consolidator Award and continues to be active in the cardiac and cancer areas, focusing on pH regulation, metabolism and oxygen transport. Most recently, he developed new techniques to study red blood cells which has garnered academic, clinical and industrial interests, which is what he will talk about today.
We consider games of incomplete information in which the players' payoffs depend both on a privately observed type and an unknown but common "state of nature." A monopolist data provider knows the state of nature and sells information to the players, thus solving a joint information and mechanism design problem: deciding which information to sell while eliciting the players' types and collecting payments. We restrict ourselves to a general class of symmetric games with quadratic payoffs that includes games of both strategic substitutes (e.g., Cournot competition) and strategic complements (e.g., Bertrand competition, Keynesian beauty contest). The data seller designs a mechanism that truthfully elicits the players' types and sends action recommendations that constitute a Bayes Correlated Equilibrium of the game. We fully characterize the class of all such Gaussian mechanisms—where the joint distribution of actions and private signals is a multivariate normal distribution—as well as the welfare- and revenue- optimal mechanisms within this class. For games of strategic complements, the optimal mechanisms maximally correlate the players' actions, and conversely maximally anticorrelate them for games of strategic substitutes. In both cases, for sufficiently large uncertainty over the players' types, the recommendations are deterministic (and linear) conditional on the state and the type reports, but they are not fully revealing.
"What should I do next?" The answer is simple if there is one obvious choice but complicated if there are multiple options and no standout winner. The brain can deal with both scenarios, engaging circuits that drive more automatic responses in some cases and circuits that support deliberation in others. Understanding how this cognitive flexibility is implemented in the brain has the potential to reveal organizational principles for neural information processing. We have therefore carried out large-scale recordings studies in freely behaving rats performing cognitive tasks to identify signatures of dynamic circuit engagement. Here I will present results from two of these studies, including 1) observations of dynamic engagement of non-local hippocampal representations related to ongoing decision-making and 2) a demonstration of the necessity of the sequential neural activity patterns underlying non-local hippocampal representations for learning a specific task rule. These results highlight the differential engagement of hippocampal information processing at different times in support of flexible behavior.
TBC
Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 12-16 Supplementary: William Morris, ‘Unattractive Labour’ (1885); Attractive Labour’ (1885); ‘As to Bribing Excellence’ (1895)
The lecture will be followed by a discussion with Paula Chan, Faisal Devji, and Alexander Morrison.
The Middle East Centre is honoured to host this year's Devaki Jain Lecture. The series, established in 2015 by Devaki Jain, welcomes esteemed women speakers from the South. Past speakers have included Dr Graça Machel, Professor Eudine Barriteau, and Dr Noeleen Heyzer. https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/middle-east-centre/middle-east-centre/middle-east-events/
*Sonja Drimmer*, Connoisseurship, _Art History, and the Paleographical Impasse in Middle English Studies_ (2022) *Jonathan Alexander*, _Art History, Literary History, and the Study of Medieval Manuscripts_ (1997) *Sydney Cockerell*, _The Gorleston Psalter_ (1907)
A Panel Discussion of Anne McLaren's contribution and legacy. The panel, featuring Prof Dame Kay Davies, Prof Niki Trigoni and Dr Hilary Wynne will discuss the challenges, contributions and achievements of women in science. Dr Anne McLaren was a leading geneticist and stem-cell scientist. She did her undergraduate and DPhil degrees at Oxford after the Second World War. Working with mice in the 1950s she performed the world's first IVF birth, and went on to play a leading role in designing the regulatory framework for the safe use of IVF in Britain. Anne went on to be the first ever woman Officer of the Royal Society (as Foreign Secretary and Vice President) and was a founder of the Association of Women in Science and Engineering (AWiSE). More about the Panellists: Professor Niki Trigoni Dr Hilary Wynne Professor Dame Kay Davies FRS The panel will be chaired by Dr Judith Hillier
Scholars have used the concept of the 'Komnenian Restoration' of Byzantium for many years, and yet the term has never received a critical analysis: what did the Komnenoi believe they were restoring? Did they achieve any of their aims, in what ways, and what was the legacy of their successes and failures? This symposium aims to gather both established and emerging Komnenian Scholars to analyse these questions, and to do so across all fields including cultural, religious, administrative, legal and societal history as well as military. Likewise, it will have an especial focus on the Komnenian legacy, both towards the Byzantine successor states of the 13th century, and also the Turkish and Latin polities that arose after their 12th century peak. This symposium will also discuss the publication of a handbook of Komnenian scholars, and so welcome attendees who would also consider contributing to such a volume. This event will also involve associated cultural events, such as a workshop on Komnenian manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. For more information, and to register interest in attending, please fill in the online form: https://forms.gle/dneAq4okLfQkpL99A, by 14 April 2025 – late contact will be considered, but the event may have reached capacity by then.
A practical workshop designed for all current and future healthcare professionals and those in allied sectors. The aim of the course is to empower you with skills to support yourself, build your community and work in a sustainable manner. We will be using a trauma-informed approach to learn how to address challenging circumstances, power imbalances and our own experiences.
China Centre Book Talk: Institutional Genes: The Origins of China’s Institutions and Totalitarianism by Chenggang Xu (Cambridge University Press, 2025) This book explores the origins and evolution of China’s institutions and communist totalitarianism in general. Contemporary China's fundamental institution is communist totalitarianism. Introducing the concept of Institutional Genes (IGs), the book examines how the IGs of Soviet Russia merged with those of the Chinese imperial system, creating a durable totalitarian regime with Chinese characteristics. Institutional Genes are fundamental institutional elements that self-replicate, guide institutional changes, and are empirically identifiable. The book first analyses the rise of communist totalitarian ideology in Europe and how it led to the creation of a totalitarian system based on the Tsarist Russian IGs. It then examines the origins and evolution of the IGs of the Chinese imperial system, focusing on how these IGs combined with the communist totalitarian IGs introduced to China by the Comintern. This fusion enabled the CCP to establish a totalitarian regime in China. The book further discusses the institutional changes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, analysing how the hybrid of Soviet totalitarian IGs and traditional Chinese IGs gave rise to a Regionally Administered Totalitarian (RADT) system. It also explores how the RADT system facilitated China's rapid economic development during the reform and opening-up period, not only saving the CCP but also transforming China into a totalitarian superpower. The ascent of communist totalitarian China echoes Mises' warning that efforts to halt totalitarianism have failed. Reversing this trend necessitates a thorough understanding of totalitarianism. Chenggang Xu is an economist specializing in political economics, institutional economics, law and economics, and Chinese political economy. He is a Senior Research Scholar at SCCEI, Stanford University, a Board Member of the Ronald Coase Institute, and a Research Fellow at CEPR (Center for Economic and Policy Research). Before retiring from the University of Hong Kong, he was the Chung Hon-Dak Professor of Economics there, a Special-Term Professor at Tsinghua University, and a World-Class University Professor at Seoul National University. He was also a Reader (tenured) at the London School of Economics until 2009 and served as the President of the Asian Law and Economics Association, as well as a consultant for the World Bank and the IMF. He has frequently appeared in the media to analyse and comment on China’s political economy. Dr Xu obtained his PhD in Economics from Harvard in 1991. He was the recipient of the 2013 Sun Yefang Prize and the first recipient of the Chinese Economics Prize in 2016.
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This maxim, frequently attributed to Frederic Jameson, seems to reflect much of the content of our daily news, fueling a growing preoccupation, both political and artistic, with dystopias and decline. But there are also counter efforts – Post capitalist literature, for one. A unique experiment took place in Israel in the years 2020-2023: a think tank was established, dedicated to envisioning a new social and economic reality in the Middle East. Following a year of concentrated research and debate, four fiction writers set out to write novels encapsulating such a reality, so that readers may begin to engage with concrete possibilities for its realisation. The lecture will present the process of this collaborative investigation, the models and questions considered, and the four novellas written as a result, that illustrate and elucidate how such a future might be imagined. The presentation will be followed by discussion and drinks. The event is free. Advance registration below is required from all attendees. This event will take place in accordance with the framework developed by a number of Oxford colleges, including Worcester College, to promote free speech at Oxford. Details of this framework and ‘tips’ for productive discussion of difficult topics are to be found at: www.worc.ox.ac.uk/fos. By attending this event, attendees agree to adhere to these guidelines and the terms and conditions of the event which uphold Worcester College’s commitment to freedom of speech: www.worc.ox.ac.uk/fos/massada-2025
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will understand more about: What experience and characteristics you need to have to gain a fellowship. The application process. How to work with University’s systems and procedures to optimise your application and its chance of success. You will have an opportunity to practice interviewing/being interviewed for fellowship applications.
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the session, participants will have: Developed an awareness of what makes a presentation effective. Understood why planning and practice are crucial to the success of a presentation. The confidence to choose and use a variety of techniques to engage the audience. Practiced delivering a short presentation and gained constructive feedback. INTENDED FOR PGR and Research Staff with limited experience of giving presentations.
Rowan Wilson (University of Oxford) Feeling Aliene, Now and Then: Work, Contemplation, and Alienation between Medieval Devotion and Modern Academia and Anine Eglund (University of Oxford) The Speaking Dead: Conversing with the Living from Beyond the Grave in Early English Literature Seminars followed by a sandwich lunch. All welcome!
Many of the major public health challenges of the 21st century result from complex and inter-related social, biological, political, and economic dynamics. Here, I will discuss three very different projects - measuring the impact of gold mining on malaria in the Amazon, responding to extreme weather events, and measuring the impact of extreme heat on the physiology of informal workers in India - that illustrate the range of data challenges associated with public health surveillance, and argue that many of the modeling approaches currently being used to guide policy decisions at the highest levels are often fundamentally flawed. Finally, I will discuss the potential role of technology and AI in shifting how health research is conducted to the community level. Biosketch of speaker: Caroline Buckee is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health with a focus on infectious disease ecology and evolution. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, and prior to her appointment at Harvard in 2010, she was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, and a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kenya Medical Research Institute and the University of Oxford. From 2013-2023, Dr. Buckee was the Associate Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard. She co-founded and co-directs Crisis Ready (crisisready.io), a joint platform between Harvard's Data Science Initiative (HDSI) and Direct Relief, to support data-driven responses to public health emergencies and disasters. Dr. Buckee co-leads the South Asia Climate and Health Research Cluster supported by Harvard's Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. Dr. Buckee's research interests span infectious disease epidemiology - with a focus on vector borne diseases including malaria and dengue - human mobility and the impact of labor migration on the spread of epidemics, and the intersection of climate risks and human health and well-being.
1. Zhao J et al. Intracerebral hemorrhage among blood donors and their transfusion recipients. JAMA 2023;330:941-950; 2. Kaiser JH, Zhang C, Kamel H, Navi BB, Razzak J, Liberman AL. Stroke risk after emergency department treat-and-release visit for a fall. Stroke 2024;55:2247-8; 3. Berghout BP, Heshmatollah A, Bos D, Kavousi M, Ikram MK. Risk of cardiovascular diseases after nonfocal transient neurologic attacks in the elderly: the Rotterdam study. Neurology 2025;104:e210214
We study the role of financial frictions in determining the allocation of investment and innovation. Empirically, we find that established firms are investment-intensive when they have low net worth but become innovation-intensive as they accumulate net worth. To interpret these findings, we develop an endogenous growth model with heterogeneous firms and financial frictions. In our model, firms are investment-intensive when they have low net worth because their returns to capital are high. Financial frictions determine the rate at which firms drive down the returns to capital and shift towards innovation. Quantitatively, the aggregate losses due to lower innovation are large, even though the allocation of capital to existing ideas is comparatively efficient. If innovation has positive spillovers, a planner would lower investment among constrained firms to finance more innovation. An innovation subsidy does not generate the correct distribution of investment and innovation to exactly decentralize this outcome.
Tycho van der Hoog is an Assistant Professor of International Security Studies at the Netherlands Defence Academy. He completed a PhD at the African Studies Centre of Leiden University on the relations between North Korea and African revolutionaries. The resulting book, Comrades Beyond the Cold War: North Korea and the Liberation of Southern Africa, was published by Hurst and Oxford University Press in 2025. Over the course of ten years, Tycho has conducted extensive archival research in repositories across four continents, including multiple countries in Africa. He is the recipient of the BISA African Affairs Postgraduate Paper Prize in 2021 and was elected as one of the ‘Faces of Science’ by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. His work is published in peer-reviewed journals such as Cold War History, History in Africa, and Africa Spectrum. During his time in Oxford, Tycho will work on a new research project will highlight the contribution of African liberation movements to the global order, with particular attention to African military thought.
Modern researchers need to have an up-to-date understanding of working with research data. This relates equally to the material they create themselves and that obtained from other sources. Academic institutions, funding bodies and even publishers are now expecting competence in these issues. This workshop will provide a grounding in the different ways quantitative and qualitative data is being made available to benefit researchers. It will provide an overview of macro and micro data sources available at the University of Oxford, including national data archives, subscription services, business data, and offers some pointers for further searching. By the end of the workshop you will also have some insight into how your own future work could add to the process and become part of the research discourse. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Faculty Presentations
Refugee camps, regardless of location, are supposed to be “temporary,” a euphemism for biopolitical holding pens that have no end in sight. Host countries thus do not allow permanent structures, and shelters must be made of perishable materials. Such constraints cause particular problems for a camp of the scale of Kutupalong, Bangladesh, which hosts around 900,000 Rohingya. The government of Bangladesh, the UN, and over 100 NGOs who are responsible for this massive population have different agendas and modus operandi. Architects in charge of shelters and public structures must negotiate the tensions between these different groups and between host communities and migrants. This talk will focus on architect Rizvi Hassan. Working closely with refugees, he emphasizes their resilience and creativity rather than victimhood. The fruit of participatory collaboration, the final designs incorporate their artistic skills and help alleviate trauma by giving visible form to the memories of their lost homes and villages. Esther da Costa Meyer, Professor emerita in the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, was the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History, Yale School of Architecture (2019) and the Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts (2024). Her research has focused on the architectural practices of old colonial powers and the resilient cultures of resistance in colonized nations. Her book Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852-1870 (Princeton University Press, 2022), won the French Heritage Society Book Award in 2024. In recent years, her teaching has centered on architecture’s complicity with climate change, as well as the architecture of refugee camps around the world.
Against the backdrop of the (pseudo)expansion of higher education in Nigeria, this presentation develops an understanding of the everyday work that goes into enacting disability inclusion policies in higher education institutions in Nigeria. Through a decolonial institutional ethnography, it brings the social organisation of policy texts (Smith, 2005) in dialogue with the colonial matrix of power (Quijano, 2007) to explicate how and why higher education policies and practices in Nigeria are still trapped in the ideological knowing and doing of disability, inclusion and inclusive education. Drawing ethnographic interviews conducted with students with disabilities (SWDs) and other policy “actors”, such as disability unit staff, lecturers, and principal officers across three universities in Nigeria, this seminar shows how disability discourses, institutional policies, and support services are being deployed to “contain” the experience of students with disabilities in higher education institutions. It maps the daily and nightly “policy work” SWD undertake to access, participate, and transform universities that are not designed for people like them.
This session will cover some more advanced techniques for finding medical literature to answer a research question. We will recap some basics, then demonstrate searching in several medical databases, including using subject headings (MeSH) and the differences between different platforms. After the main 90-minute workshop, one of the Bodleian Health Care Libraries Outreach Librarians will be available for another 30 minutes to answer questions about your own searches, so feel free to bring along what you are working on. By the end of this session, you will be able to: explain what subject headings are, and how to use them; search for words that appear near to other words; take a search from one database into another; and save a search and document it. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
In the simplest of terms, this nation’s history of memorializing Black figures consists of two phases: before photography arrived in the United States and ever since. From the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839 up through the twentieth century, Black and non-Blacks used photography to signify, cement, and remember the importance of certain Black figures. Examples include Harriet Tubman, Dred Scott, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Huey Newton, and Barack Obama. Studio portraits and photojournalistic images of these Black activists and political figures are among the most celebrated images of Black Americanness from the 19th and 20th centuries. Scholars have commented on the cultural and political significance of most, if not all, of these images as important representational events. This paper considers the significance of a commonality visible across the lot: sitting. All Black figures listed above are seated in one or more of the photographic images that we, in the U.S., rely upon most to learn about and venerate them. Why African Americans sit in these images is a question that can be – and has been – answered through contextualization. The concern here is how these iconic photographs – representative of Black people, the Black past, and Black protest – function in the aggregate as an archive of Black iconicity, the central motif of which is the seated Black subject.
Description: The seminar will explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, AI, and technological innovation, co-taught by a philosopher and a technologist. The seminar will welcome a variety of visiting discussants from philosophy, computer science, and the technology industry throughout term. The focus will be on how a concern for human flourishing can be embedded in the global technology development pipeline, and on exploring how broader bridges can be built between philosophy and technology. The seminar is primarily aimed at philosophy graduate students and computer science graduate students but participants from other levels and areas are welcome. Topics include: truth-seeking AI, privacy, collective intelligence, decentralization in science and AI, and approaches to human autonomy. The seminar culminates in a clinic to facilitate grant applications for independent summer projects on the themes of the seminar. Fast grants: New for this year, Cosmos Ventures has established a dedicated funding pool that seminar participants can apply to for independent summer building projects on related themes. Prerequisites: please email HAI Lab philipp.koralus@philosophy.ox.ac.uk no later than April 27th with a (very) brief explanation of your interest in the seminar to reserve a spot, and the subject line “TT Seminar”. Space limited to maintain quality of discussion. Readings: ● Hayek, “The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization” ● Stray, Vendrov, Nixon, Adler, Hadfield-Menell, “What are You Optimizing For? Aligning Recommender Systems with Human Values.” (https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10939) Optional: ● Christiano, “What Failure Looks Like.” (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBxe6wdjxK239zajf/what-failure-looks-like) ● Jordan, “Dr. AI or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Economics.” (https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/2imtstfu/release/8?readingCollection=72befc2a)
Despite their importance to the early modern economy, female servants’ experiences – including their patterns of work and conditions of employment – have received little attention. This paper draws on evidence recorded in church court witness testimony, excavating experiences of over 1000 female servants between 1532 and 1649. Moving beyond regulatory codes of service prescribed by law and decoupling ‘female servant’ and ‘domestic’, this paper argues that service for women was more varied, fluid and contingent than existing scholarship recognises. In early modern England, service as a form of labour was in flux, raising questions about the ‘institution’ of service and its role in controlling and regulating youth and poverty. Panning out from England, the paper then interrogates the term ‘servant’ and its application across the world. I explore the potential of situating the experiences of early modern English servants within a global frame and ask: is it possible to write a global history of service for women? *If you would like to meet the speaker before the seminar, please sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/23druvdp*
On the anniversary of the death of Francisco Franco, this seminar aims to critically examine the Spanish transition to democracy, moving beyond traditional narratives to address dimensions of the process that are sometimes overlooked. While the transition has been widely studied as a model of political change, it is essential to reassess its complexities, including the role and experience of women, the regional disparities in its development, and the persistence of violence that accompanied it. By bringing together scholars from different backgrounds, this event aims to foster a discussion of the challenges, contradictions and legacies of the transition, ensuring a more comprehensive understanding of this key period in Spanish history.
What if you could draw sound? What if there was a way to sketch music that was so intuitive that school children could pick it up with ease, yet powerful enough that it could revolutionise the creative process for professional composers, liberating them from the constraints of traditional notation? In 1977 visionary Greek-French composer and polymath Iannis Xenakis brought this idea to life with UPIC, a groundbreaking machine that transformed visual gestures into audio signals; a user could draw on a board and UPIC would convert these drawings into sound. Xenakis’s pioneering work has profoundly shaped my own music compositional journey, inspiring me to explore the deep connections between drawing and music and between what we see and what we hear. In this talk I will delve into the fascinating relationship between sound and image and how this interplay informs my music. My solo violin cycle, “Nicosia Etudes”, set to premiere at New College in late May, intertwines musical gestures with the soundscape of Nicosia in Cyprus, the last divided capital in Europe. I will discuss how this piece draws on the spirit of UPIC and will demonstrate how gestures evolve into sound through live examples and performances on musical instruments. There will be a drinks reception in the Sybil Dodd Room following the talk to which everyone is welcome. If you'd like to attend, please register at: https://www.stx.ox.ac.uk/event/designing-sound-sculpting-gesture
The Bingham Lecture in Constitutional Studies is an annual lecture series, established in 2014 in honour of Lord Bingham of Cornhill (History 1957, Honorary Fellow and Visitor) through generous gifts from a former colleague of Bingham’s. The lectures aim to encourage a greater understanding of, and interest in, constitutional matters amongst members of Balliol — past, present, and future. Relationships between the UK and devolved governments are central to the effective functioning of devolution and ultimately to the stability of the Union. Intergovernmental relations (IGR) can help manage interdependencies, foster cooperation in the face of common policy challenges, and help to prevent and resolve intergovernmental disputes. Or, conversely, poor IGR can generate competition, tensions and mistrust. Yet, IGR have long been the weak link in the UK’s system of devolution and in the years following the Brexit referendum, they were placed under considerable strain. The Labour Party entered office with a commitment to resetting those relationships. This lecture will reflect on developments in IGR since the general election, set within a broader context of intergovernmental dynamics over the past decade. In so doing, it draws upon the family metaphor and concepts from the study of families and relationships to lend insight into evolving relationships between the UK’s four governments. Professor Nicola McEwen is a Professor of Public Policy and Governance in the College of Social Sciences and Director of the Centre for Public Policy at the University of Glasgow. She was previously at Edinburgh University from 2001, first as Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer in 2006, and as Professor of Territorial Politics from 2014. She was founding Co-Director of the Centre on Constitutional Change, where she remains a Research Fellow. Nicola completed a Senior Research Fellowship with the ESRC UK in a Changing Europe, having previously been Principal Investigator of one of its prestigious Brexit Priority Grants. Her project, entitled A Family of Nations? Brexit, Devolution and the Union, explored intergovernmental relations in UK-EU negotiations, and the implications of Brexit for devolution and the future of the Union. From 2019-2022, she was Research Fellow in a major ESRC-funded project, Between Two Unions: The Constitutional Future of the Islands after Brexit, where she led the research strand charting the evolution of intergovernmental relations. She has published widely in the field of territorial politics, nationalism, multi-level government and policy-making, and multi-level parties and elections. She is actively involved in informing debate within the wider policy and political community, through with extensive experience in providing analysis in broadcast, print and social media, public engagement, advice to governments and parliamentary committees, and consultancy.
René Provost Ad.E. FRSC is the James McGill Professor of Justice Beyond the State at the Faculty of Law of McGill University. He holds an LL.B. from the Université de Montréal, an LL.M. from the University of California at Berkeley, and a D.Phil. from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He served as law clerk to Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé at the Supreme Court of Canada in 1989-1990. He joined the Faculty of Law of McGill University in 1994, where he was Associate Dean (Academic) from 2001 to 2003 and the founding Director of the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism from 2005 to 2010. Professor Provost teaches Public International Law, International Human Rights Law, International Humanitarian Law, International Environmental Law, Legal Anthropology, and various courses in legal theory. His latest book is Rebel Courts – The Administration of Justice by Armed Insurgents (Oxford University Press 2021), winner of the 2022 ICON-S Prize for Best Book in Public Law and the 2023 American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit for Creative Scholarship.
TBC
Despite their importance to the early modern economy, female servants’ experiences – including their patterns of work and conditions of employment – have received little attention. This paper draws on evidence recorded in church court witness testimony, excavating experiences of over 1000 female servants between 1532 and 1649. Moving beyond regulatory codes of service prescribed by law and decoupling ‘female servant’ and ‘domestic’, this paper argues that service for women was more varied, fluid and contingent than existing scholarship recognises. In early modern England, service as a form of labour was in flux, raising questions about the ‘institution’ of service and its role in controlling and regulating youth and poverty. Panning out from England, the paper then interrogates the term ‘servant’ and its application across the world. I explore the potential of situating the experiences of early modern English servants within a global frame and ask: is it possible to write a global history of service for women?
The abolition of slavery remains a relatively new concept in human history and scholars from all religious traditions have attempted to navigate the religious and ethical questions raised by the historical acceptance of the practice. In this seminar, Haroon Bashir explores how scholars promoting abolition in the name of Islam transformed the debate around Islam and slavery. The seminar explores how abolitionism became the hegemonic position within contemporary Islamic thought and provides a genealogy of ‘Islamic abolitionist’ thought. Abolitionist arguments were not simply accepted when originally articulated, with defenders of the slave trade using the weight of historical tradition to emphasise the legitimacy of slavery. The strongly contested debates that ensued had huge ramifications for understandings of authority, tradition, and modernity within Islamic thought that are as present as they are past.
Duke Ellington said that there are only two kinds of music: good and bad. My belief is that the difference lies in the honesty of the music making. Does the composer or performer really mean it, or are they just showing off? Does he or she want to communicate genuine feeling or just make a pretense of doing so? But in order to determine “greatness,” I suggest expanding the criteria to include three things: musical interest, originality, and integrity. And this applies to all music: classical music, jazz, popular music – all kinds of music making. This paper will attempt to show that there was one American rock band that fulfills these criteria in the years around 1967-1972, when there were a large number of contenders for the title. I shall start by soliciting a vote from audience members as to their choice for “greatest American rock band,” and then discuss my own choice and attempt to justify it by playing and discussing examples of this band’s work. At the end we shall tally the audience’s votes.
All welcome; refreshments provided
*Laure Miolo* (Lincoln College) Predicting and observing eclipses in fourteenth-century Paris: what the manuscripts tell us *Shazia Jagot* (University of York) Astrolabe as archive and an archive of astrolabes: Chaucer’s astrolabe and its Islamic affordances
Kofi Annan, the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, reinvented the role of Secretary-General and exercised global leadership during a turbulent period in world affairs. He tried to rescue the UN from irrelevance. Despite many obstacles, he kept the UN central to international diplomacy and norm setting. A transformational leader, he introduced enduring changes to improve the way the UN operates. With the UN in the crosshairs again, the lessons from Kofi Annan are particularly relevant to the UN’s retention of legal and moral authority. Dr Abiodun Williams is Professor of the Practice of International Politics at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and The Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. He was Director of Strategic Planning for United Nations Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban KiMoon. He served in UN peacekeeping missions in North Macedonia, Haiti, and Bosnia, in senior political and humanitarian roles. Dr. Williams has also held leadership positions in think tanks. He has taught at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the University of Rochester. He is past Chair of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), and a former member of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. He is the recipient of the Dr Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award from Tufts University, and the Constantine E. Maguire Medal from Georgetown University. His latest book is Kofi Annan and Global Leadership at the United Nations.
Are you looking for a streamlined approach to gathering, managing and citing your references? Join us for this interactive online session in which we introduce Zotero, a reference management tool that helps you to collect and manage references and insert them into your word-processor document as in-text citations or footnotes, as well as generating bibliographies. The demonstration will be on Windows although Zotero is also available for Mac and Linux. By the end of the session, you will understand: how Zotero can help you; how to add references to Zotero from a range of sources; how to manage your references; how to add in-text citations and/or footnotes to your documents; how to create bibliographies; and where to get help with Zotero. Please note that, whilst this session is mostly aimed at beginners, there will be a chance at the end to ask more specific questions about how to use Zotero. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
COURSE DETAILS During the course you will have the opportunity to manage a project. You will be able to apply the techniques you learn to a project that you bring along. Topics covered: project initiation, managing stakeholders and risk, time estimation, planning. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will understand more about: The importance of planning. The tools to make project management succeed. How to estimate the time a project will take realistically. The skills you need to be a good project manager.
The annual Oxford-Georgia Forum serves as a dynamic platform for fostering dialogue and advancing partnership initiatives between Georgia and the United Kingdom. Bringing together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers, the forum draws on a broad range of academic disciplines, including political science, international relations, anthropology, sociology, history, literature, archaeology, cultural studies, economics, and business. This year’s forum centres on Georgia’s ongoing political turmoil, the recent wave of public protests, and the evolving geopolitical landscape of the South Caucasus. Programme of event: Welcome Coffee/Tea 09:30 - 10:00 Opening Remarks 10:00 – 10:15 Professor Paul Chaisty, Professor of Russian and East European Politics and Head of the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) Professor Roy Allison, Director of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre. Professor Michael Rochlitz, Associate Professor in the Economies of Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia at OSGA and Georgian Programme Coordinator. Keynote Speech 10:15 – 11:45 Title: Political Protest and Impact on Higher Education and Research in Georgia? Speaker: Professor Marine Chitashvili Professor of Psychology at Tbilisi State University Panel 1: Protests, Civil Society, and Media Resilience 11:45 – 12:45 This panel explores the current turbulent landscape of Georgian politics, marked by contested elections, mass protests, and growing authoritarian tendencies. It examines the pivotal role played by civil society actors and independent media in resisting democratic backsliding and defending Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations. The speakers, representing Georgian civil society, the protest movement, and independent media, will share insights from the ground, reflect on strategies of resistance, and discuss the challenges and opportunities facing Georgia’s pro-democracy and pro-European forces today. Chair: Professor Roy Allison, Director of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre. Mariam Nikuradze, Co-Founder of OC Media. Dr Giorgi Cheishvili, Member of the Movement ‘Education is in Danger’, Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre. Irine Kurtanidze, Political Campaign Advisor, Phd student at Queen Mary University. Alexander Zibzibadze, Founder of the Future Academy of Georgia, Chevening Scholar at the University of Oxford. Lunch Break 12:45 – 14:00 Panel 2: Georgia’s Foreign Policy and the Role of International Actors 14:00 – 15:00 This panel examines the implications of Georgian Dream’s recent anti-Western pivot for the country’s EU and NATO aspirations, against the backdrop of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine. It will explore the mounting challenges to Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration and assess the roles of key international actors—including the US, EU, Russia, Turkey, and the increasingly influential China. The discussion will consider how the war in Ukraine, shifting global dynamics have reshaped regional alignments and intensified the strategic stakes for Georgia’s foreign policy orientation and its place in the evolving global order. Chair: TBC Dr Natalie Sabanadze, Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House. Dr Marnie Howlett, Departmental Lecturer in Russian and East European Politics, Univeristy of Oxford. Dr Jody La Porte, Gonticas Fellow in Politics & International Relations at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Dr Michael Cecire, Policy Researcher at RAND, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. Dr Samuel Ramani, Associate Fellow at RUSI. Panel 3: Roundtable: The Future of Georgian Studies Abroad 15:00 – 16:00 This panel explores the evolving landscape of Georgian Studies programmes outside Georgia amid the country’s ongoing political turmoil. As democratic backsliding, civic resistance, and shifting foreign policy orientations capture international attention, academic engagement with Georgia is both more urgent and more complex than ever. The discussion will address institutional, intellectual, and funding challenges facing Georgian Studies abroad, while also considering new opportunities for critical scholarship and collaboration in response to the country’s dynamic political context. Chair: Professor Maia Chanskeliani, Associate Professor of Comparative and International Education at the University of Oxford. Professor Michael Rochlitz, Associate Professor in the Economies of Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia at OSGA and Georgian Programme Coordinator. Dr Natia Chankvetadze, Director of the Programme on Georgian Studies at Davis Center, Harvard University. Professor Stephen Jones, Founding Director (former) of the Programme on Georgian Studies at Davis Center, Harvard University. Professor Marina Chitashvili, Professor of Psychology at Tbilisi State University. Coffee Break 16:00 – 16:30 Panel 4: Studying Georgia 16:30 – 17:30 This panel brings together research students and scholars whose work focuses on Georgia from diverse disciplinary perspectives, including political science, history, anthropology, and cultural studies. Showcasing ongoing interdisciplinary research projects, the panel highlights the richness and complexity of Georgia as a site of academic inquiry. The discussion will explore how cross-disciplinary approaches can deepen our understanding of Georgia’s past, present, and future. Chair: Professor Tamar Koplatadze, Associate Professor in Russian, University of Oxford. Dr Giorgi Matcharavashvili, Georgian Studies Fellow, University of Oxford. Dr Tea Kamushadze, Georgian Studies Fellow, University of Oxford. Molly Walker, PhD student at Harvard University. Levan Tevdoradze, Chevening Scholar at King’s College. Mariam Vekua, Founder and President of the UCL Georgian Society. Gregorio Paz Iriarte, PhD Student at École normale supérieure - PSL. A play by the Oxford Georgian Translation Project 17:30 – 18:30 The members of the Oxford Georgian Translation Project present the translation of Tamta Melashvili’s new play The Dress. A Gulag survivor in her seventies, recently returned from exile, sets out to wear a newly sewn dress — an act of healing and defiance against the Stalinist regime. Chair: Professor Michael Rochlitz, Associate Professor in the Economies of Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia at OSGA and Georgian Programme Coordinator. Lia Chokoshvili, Georgian Language Instructor and Head of the Oxford Georgian Translation Project. Tamta Melashvili, Georgian Writer. Play Reading by Members of the OGTP: Marcus Choo, Andrew McCann, Giles Humphreys-Evans, Deepthi Gopal.
Persistent Identifiers (PID’s) provide a consistent way of digitally referencing items that aims to be more reliable than a simple web address. This is important for scholarly communications because citation and attribution are essential elements of scholarly apparatus. This course will introduce you to the concept of Persistent Identifiers, the problems that they address, and how they can be used in the academic environment to simplify some tasks. It will examine several different types of identifier, some of which are currently widely used (DOI’s for publications/data and ORCID’s for researchers) and others which are emerging in importance. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
China’s accession to the WTO created new economic opportunities in certain cities. A shift-share identification strategy shows that residents of adjacent rural areas migrated in and advanced economically. Longitudinal panel data on children reveals that their sons benefit, but counter-intuitively, daughters suffer worse mental and physical health, complete fewer years of schooling, and remain poor later in life. We explore why, and learn that hukou policy that restricts migrant children’s access to urban schools is a factor. Triple difference research designs reveal that migrant parents become discontinuously more likely to leave middle-school-aged daughters (but not sons) behind in rural areas – often without either parent present – exactly when and where hukou policy makes schooling more expensive. 69 million Chinese children are left behind in rural areas, and girls are harmed even when trade liberalization increases family income. Written with X. Gao, W. Liang, A. M. Mobarak, R. Song https://spinup-000d1a-wp-offload-media.s3.amazonaws.com/faculty/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2024/04/China_Children_paper_reversed_Dec_23__2023.pdf
The Nineteenth-Century Graduate Forum will be holding its Trinity Term session on Wednesday of Week 5 (28 May), from 13:00 to 15:00. If you’re working on any aspect of the long nineteenth century and would like to share your research in a supportive and collegial setting, we’d love to hear from you! You can sign up to present using the form below: https://forms.office.com/e/ZDfGweQQPL Also, a quick note: Leonor and I will be stepping back as convenors after this term, so we're looking for people to take up the role going forward. If you're interested in getting involved with organising the forum (it's light-touch and genuinely enjoyable!), please do drop us an email. Looking forward to hearing from many of you!
Coaching skills can help you build positive and effective working relationships with all those you work with. Coaching is a highly impactful approach to people development and can support individuals to identify goals, gain insights into challenges, consider options and plan actions. They are a valuable asset to leaders and managers and can be useful in a range of workplace conversations, such as feedback, delegation and career development reviews.
Curious about AI but don’t code? 🤔 Join us for a hands-on workshop exploring AI for Humanists – no programming required! Learn how no-code/ low-code tools can help transcribe manuscripts, analyse interviews, and unlock new research possibilities in the humanities. Discover how AI can power your next project – and help you pitch it too. 📍 Hosted by Digital Scholarship @ Oxford
Despite its name, the Open Science Framework (OSF) is an online tool for managing academic projects in any discipline. Rather than trying to reinvent tools and systems that scholars already use, OSF integrates with a growing list of existing services and provides a single place where researchers can see and manage all the components that make up their project - including files, software, data and publications. This course will introduce you to the Open Science Framework at Oxford. It will explain how to get access to OSF using your Oxford SSO, give an overview of what it can and cannot do, and provide some examples of how it can be used with other research services. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
OCPSG is organizing a workshop 'Synthetic Agents for Social Science' with Emma Madden from the Department of Politics and International Relations. This two-hour workshop will examine the role of the social science research applications of AI‑driven generative agents: virtual “participants” that can mimic survey respondents, simulate how opinions spread, and preview policy messages. The workshop will surface the core assumptions behind these tools and explore methods for checking their outputs against real data. It will also address common challenges and confront ethical questions around bias and privacy. By the end of the session, participants will have co‑created a set of practical guidelines for responsible use and will leave with a bibliography and toolkit to support the use of synthetic agents in future research projects. The workshop will not cover any coding tasks (to hopefully be covered in a follow-up session), but will serve as an overview of the viability and use cases of generative agents. Emma is DPhil researcher at the University of Oxford specializing in computational methods in social science with a particular interest in modelling complex social systems through the lens of political opinion. Some of her research topics include: Replication of social science experiments with LLM-backed synthetic agents; Network theory and complexes systems applications in modelling collective behavior and opinion change dynamics; Experimental validation of synthetic social agents; Evaluating LLM bias reduction methods. She also works as a data scientist and methodologist on social surveys for London-based firm Complexas. Her fieldwork is concentrated in the developing world, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa. The workshop takes place in person in the Seminar Room A at the Manor Road Building on Wednesday, 28 May, at 15:30. It is open to both Oxford and non-Oxford students and researchers, who also have the option to join the workshop online. The Oxford Computational Political Science Group (OCPSG) is a non-partisan research initiative based at the University of Oxford and supported by the Department of Politics and International Relations. We are dedicated to advancing the study and application of computational methods in political science. By offering a collaborative environment that blends political science with computational techniques, OCPSG empowers students and researchers to explore innovative solutions to complex political questions. Should you have any questions, please contact emma.madden@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk for more information.
TBC
The medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) hosts many of the brain’s circuit elements for spatial navigation and episodic memory, operations that require neural activity to be organized across long durations of experience. We have previously found that when mice were head-fixed on a wheel and ran at their own pace in darkness, entorhinal cells organized their activity into ultraslow oscillations (frequency < 0.1 Hz) that manifested as periodic sequences of activity in the neural population (Gonzalo Cogno et al., 2024). It remains unknown, however, whether the sequences also occur during more naturalistic behaviours, for example while mice run in an open field arena, or during sleep. In this presentation I will show that in free foraging conditions, MEC neuronal activity can organize into sequences. We found much variability in the duration of the sequences, yet all sequences were in the tens of seconds time scale. Moreover, we found found that within a session, the MEC always generates the same sequence ordering, and this ordering recurs over time. The sequences, however, are now characterized by resettings and interruptions. By developing a computational model, we investigate the conditions under which the sequences reset. In addition, we found that that ultraslow periodic activity persisted during sleep, particularly during slow wave sleep. However, this ultraslow activity manifested as ultraslow oscillations that were highly synchronous across the population, and not as sequences. The oscillations also manifest in the hippocampus, and are highly synchronized with those in the MEC. Our results point to the existence of internal dynamics that unfold at ultraslow time scales, and that are modulated by sensory information and cognitive demands.
Join via Microsoft Teams here: https://tinyurl.com/5d5s7x5k
Abstract: In the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, Palestinian civil society underwent a profound transformation marked by the rise of international donor-driven NGOs, a process commonly referred to as the "NGOization" of resistance and community organizing. This event critically examines the socio-political consequences of NGOization, including the depoliticization of grassroots activism, the fragmentation of collective struggle, and the institutional dependency on external funding. Drawing on lived experiences, scholarly critiques, and community narratives, this event explores community-based alternatives that center self-determination, mutual aid, and indigenous knowledge. Participants will engage in dialogue around reclaiming autonomous spaces for organizing that resist co-optation and foster genuine liberation. By weaving together praxis and theory, the event aims to chart actionable pathways out of NGO-centric models toward more sustainable, rooted, and emancipatory civil society structures in Palestine. Speakers: Dr Amal Nazzal is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Business and Economics at Birzeit University and currently a George Antonius Birzeit Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s at Oxford University. She holds a Ph.D. in organizational studies where she was awarded the PhD Studentship in Organizational Studies to complete her PhD at the University of Exeter in 2013. Her research interests include decolonized organizational mechanisms and dynamics in organizations, indigenous theory in OS, indigenous organizing (Sumud), intersectionality, feminist organizing, social capital, social networking theory and new social media in organizations. She is also interested in new research methods such as digital ethnography and social media content analysis. In 2024, Dr Amal was awarded the George Antonius Fellowship at St. Antony’s College at University of Oxford for her research about the structural and organizational transformations of the Palestinian organizational modes and modalities through the “NGOization” processes in the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Palestine. She is an advisory board member at the Institute of Women Studies (IWS), BDS movement, and Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University. Her research has been published in journals such as Journal of Business Research and Human Relations, International Journal of Communication, and has written opinion pieces in different outlets. Soheir Asaad is a Palestinian political and feminist organizer and a movement advocate. She leads international advocacy at Rawa, an initiative/ community participatory fund that works within progressive philanthropy and cross-movement spaces to address harm caused by funding, promote accountability, and advance trust- and solidarity-based approaches that return power to communities and support infrastructure for independence in Palestinian community work. Soheir is also the co-director of the “Funding Freedom” project and serves as an advisory board member of the Adalah Justice Project. She earned a Master’s degree in international human rights law from the University of Notre Dame (US). She is a human rights lawyer who has previously worked extensively in legal research, international human rights advocacy for Palestinian rights, and legal defense against political arrests. Throughout her years of organizing, she has co-founded several feminist and political movements and initiatives in Palestine.
John Bowers in conversation with Amelia Gentleman, journalist who will discuss her work on the Windrush scandal.
Measuring and combatting bias has been a central focus of policy and research in domains including employment, courts, news, medicine, college admissions, and AI. Yet notions of a what it means for a decision to be unbiased remain contested and often contradictory. I present a unified framework to define notions of bias and lack of bias across these and other domains, consider when "unbiased" is (or often isn't) a helpful concept, relate these definitions to empirical evidence, and draw lessons for those seeking to combat harmful biases in society.
COURSE DETAILS This highly interactive workshop will be based around an example of writing an explainer or news article for the wider, non-specialist public website (though the lessons can be applied to any communication context). It is highly recommended that you will have already attended the introductory workshop (Telling Stories That Matter), or equivalent introductory workshops on storytelling. Brief reading material will be provided to ensure you are up to date with the fundamentals of storytelling that are the basis of this workshop. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the course participants will be able to: Apply storytelling elements to their research story. Increase understanding of effective storytelling elements including summary and clarity.
Using evidence from the Sphakia Survey, a multiperiod archaeological project in south-west Crete, this article has two goals. The first is to contribute to a newly emerging field, the archaeology of sustainability. The investigation of sustainability in Sphakia uses five main kinds of evidence: environmental, archaeological/material, textual, oral, and patterns of activity that seem ‘difficult’ or ‘inconvenient’. Sphakia is a large area of highly dissected terrain with a wide altitudinal range – in many ways, a ‘tough’ landscape, where agropastoralism has been its main economy. The second goal is to introduce the concept of a Resource Package (RP), a combination of perceived resources in an area, as an analytical tool for landscape study. Evidence for identifying agropastoral RPs of various scales, used at a particular time, includes imports, such as pottery and obsidian, which can suggest exchange for a local resource or product; sacred sites; coins; texts and inscriptions; place-names and other toponyms; and maps. The concept of RPs can usefully be applied synchronically and diachronically to multiperiod projects like this, as well as more generally to other landscapes, ‘tough’ or not. Sustainable strategies (that is, maximising resources and RPs without exhausting them) were used in the Prehistoric, Graeco-Roman and Byzantine– Venetian–Turkish epochs in Sphakia; some may be relevant for the future.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
For our next talk, in Machine Learning, we will be hearing from Dr Shishir Rao, Senior Research Scientist, Deep Medicine research group, NDWRH, University of Oxford. We’re delighted to host Shishir in what promises to be a great talk! Date: Thursday 29 May Time: 14:00 – 15:00 Talk title: Artificial intelligence for electronic health records Location: Seminar room 1 Abstract: This talk by Dr. Shishir Rao explores how artificial intelligence (AI) on routinely collected electronic health records (EHR) data can transform healthcare research. The talk will focus on development and application of Transformer-based models for handling rich, multitype EHR, leveraging AI for prediction for early intervention, accelerating disease understanding, and conducting well-adjusted causal inference on large-scale EHR. Furthermore, the presentation will address critical challenges in the space of AI and healthcare: determining appropriate AI applications, ensuring trustworthiness, mitigating algorithmic bias, and validating clinical utility. Bio: Dr Shishir Rao is a senior research scientist in the Deep Medicine research group led by Professor Kazem Rahimi focusing on developing and applying AI tools for understanding chronic diseases using multimodal healthcare data. Rao co-leads multiple AI projects in the research group focusing on perinatal risk assessment, musculoskeletal conditions, and heart failure. His research emphasises Transformer-based architectures for electronic health records (EHR) analysis, having pioneered the BEHRT model—the first Transformer for multimodal EHR. He also develops frameworks for causal inference with a focus on bridging advanced computational methods with practical clinical applications. He currently serves as AI methodological advisor for Heart, the BMJ family cardiology journal. ———————————————————————————————————————— All members of the University are welcome to join, please let reception at BDI know you’re here for the seminar and sign-in. We hope you can join us! As a reminder, the Machine Learning seminar is intended to increase interaction between individuals working in ML across Oxford. We encourage in-person attendance where possible. There is time for discussion over, tea, coffee and pastries after the talks. Hybrid Option: Please note that these meetings are closed meetings and only open to members of the University of Oxford to encourage sharing of new and unpublished data. Please respect our speakers and do not share the link with anyone outside of the university. MS Teams: Meeting ID: 366 526 840 766 Passcode: ih6Mt6VK ——————————————————————————————————— If you wish to know more or receive information related to trainings and events at BDI, please subscribe by emailing bdi-announce-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. You’ll then receive an email from SYMPA and once you reply you’ll be on the list!
In this 60-minute online workshop you will be introduced to the methodologies and principles underpinning the conduct of literature searches for systematic reviews, scoping reviews and other evidence reviews. The session will cover: formulating a focused research question; preparing a protocol; developing a search strategy to address that research question; choosing appropriate databases and search engines; searching for grey literature and ongoing studies; storing and managing references; and documenting and reporting your search. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
An online introduction to primary sources for the study of American history, from the colonial period to the 20th century. The session will provide an overview of the different kinds of information sources (early printed books, newspapers, databases and official records), and guidance on locating material for research. Collections highlighted include physical materials available in Oxford, Bodleian databases and other online resources. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers, and other staff.
Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Elisabeth Siegel at elisabeth.siegel@politics.ox.ac.uk or Brian Kot at brian.kot@politics.ox.ac.uk in advance to participate or with any questions. Remote attendance is possible, but in-person attendance is prioritized (and provided refreshment). About the speaker: Dr Margarita Amaxopoulou is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Digital Policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS), Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. She has a background in socio-legal and regulation studies and is interested in the ethical, legal and societal aspects of new and emerging technologies and particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI). She has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to pursue a 3-year independent research project on emerging credibility contests between different professional communities (like legal and computer science experts) in the AI regulation space and the implications of shifts of influence in AI policy-making processes (starting: May 2025). Prior to joining the CSLS, she worked as a Researcher in the Cloud Legal Project, at Queen Mary University of London, where she studied legal and regulatory issues triggered by generative AI. Her PhD, which she obtained from the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College, London (KCL), examined how AI regulation efforts trigger institutional changes in the UK and the EU, involving interviews with AI regulation participants (viva: no revisions). Her doctoral work was supported by the ‘Anthony Guest PhD Scholarship’, the only 3-year generic scholarship offered to prospective PhD students by KCL Law School in 2018, on the basis of the best research proposal in the year's cohort. Her writing-up year was supported by two competitive scholarships from Onassis Foundation and A.G. Leventis Foundation. During her PhD studies, she was a Visiting Lecturer at KCL Law School, a summer research fellow in the 'Legal Priorities Project' (now 'Institute for Law and AI'). In addition, she also held a Research Associate position at the University of Surrey, where she conducted research in collaboration with the UK House of Commons Library on hate speech against MPs. She has published on the legal challenges that online crowdfunding platforms pose for consumer protection, on different regulatory approaches that local transport regulators in the UK take towards platform companies like Uber and on hate speech in political discourse. She has taught cloud computing law at Queen Mary University of London, consumer protection law at KCL, and business law at Keele Law School, and she has offered various guest lectures in technology law subjects in these universities. She has obtained an LLM in Transnational Law from KCL (Distinction), with the support of a Yeoh Tiong Lay Scholarship, and an LLB from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (Valedictorian).
Dr. Carolina Tropini is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the School of Biomedical Engineering, and a Canada Tier 2 Research Chair in Quantitative Microbiota Biology for Health Applications. In 2020 she was nominated a Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator, and she was the first Canadian to be awarded the Johnson & Johnson Women in STEM2D Scholar in the field of Engineering. She is the inaugural Alan Bernstein Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Fellow in the Humans & the Microbiome Program and a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar. In 2019, she was nominated as a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar. The Tropini lab is investigating how a disrupted physical environment due to altered nutrition or concurrent with intestinal diseases affects the microbiota and host at a multi-scale level. They are a cross-disciplinary group that incorporates techniques from microbiology, bioengineering and biophysics to create highly parallel assays and study how bacteria and microbial communities function, with the goal of translating the knowledge gained to improve human health. Dr. Tropini conducted her Ph.D. in Biophysics at Stanford University. Her studies in the laboratory of Dr. KC Huang combined computational and experimental techniques to investigate bacterial mechanics and morphogenesis. In 2014 she received the James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, and she joined the laboratory of Dr. Justin Sonnenburg at Stanford. During her post-doc, Dr. Tropini applied her background in biophysics to study the impact of physical perturbations on host-associated microbial communities living in the gut.
We present a noisy composite gradient descent algorithm for differentially private statistical estimation in high dimensions. We begin by providing general rates of convergence for the parameter error of successive iterates under assumptions of local restricted strong convexity and local restricted smoothness. Our analysis is local, in that it ensures a linear rate of convergence when the initial iterate lies within a constant-radius region of the true parameter. At each iterate, multivariate Gaussian noise is added to the gradient in order to guarantee that the output satisfies Gaussian differential privacy. We then derive consequences of our theory for linear regression and mean estimation. Motivated by M-estimators used in robust statistics, we study loss functions which downweight the contribution of individual data points in such a way that the sensitivity of function gradients is guaranteed to be bounded, even without the usual assumption that our data lie in a bounded domain. We prove that the objective functions thus obtained indeed satisfy the restricted convexity and restricted smoothness conditions required for our general theory. We will also discuss the benefits of acceleration in optimization procedures, specifically a private version of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, and its consequences for statistical estimation. This is based on joint work with Marco Avella-Medina, Casey Bradshaw, Zheng Liu, and Laurentiu Marchis.
Join via: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/tosca
Analysts and critics of Chinese nationalism have long noted nationalists commitment to various 'truths' of the nation- its unity, its 5000 year history, its cultural superiority, for instance. Generations of scholars of 'Chinese religion', on the other hand, have argued that 'truth' is rarely relevant to Chinese religionists. Chinese religion cares not for declarative truths but rather for ritual efficacy, they have argued. Despite this difference in the way scholars of nationalism and religion in China have depicted the two phenomena, other scholars have argued that their modern histories are inseparable. Combing ethnographic description and textual analysis, this talk argues that the rise of 'spiritual nationalism' within so called Confucian Academies (shuyuan) in recent years is an attempt to bridge this gap between nationalism centred upon discursive claims to truth and religion centred upon ritual efficacy. Gareth Breen is a Fellow in the Anthropology of China at the LSE, where he received his PhD in Social Anthropology. He has also taught Medical Anthropology as an Associate Lecturer at UCL. He has written about Christianity in China and Taiwan for Social Analysis, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, Transcultural Psychiatry, and Gender Place, and Culture. His most recent research is with networks of spiritual nationalists in Northeast China. His forthcoming monograph, Sublime Sociality: An Ethnographic Theory of Chinese Christianity, won LSE Press' First Book Award.
Please contact "$":mailto:sarah.apetrei@campion.ox.ac.uk for the Teams link to join remotely.
Green Templeton’s Barclay Lecture welcomes high-profile guest speakers to talk about subjects related to management and business. The Barclay Lecture is generously supported by the Barclay family in memory of Clifford and Evelyne Barclay. This event is primarily designed as an in-person event but a livestream of the lecture will be available for accessibility purposes. Please note that the quality of the livestream may be limited. Chair: Professor Trish Greenhalgh
The Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that attendance at the Surgical Grand Rounds can count toward internal CPD, with 1 point awarded per hour. Please note that in-person attendance is required, and you will need to sign the attendance register. Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend online.
The rheological (deformation and flow) properties of biological tissues are important in processes such as embryo development, wound healing and tumour invasion. Indeed, processes such as these spontaneously generate stresses within living tissue via active process at the single cell level. Tissues are also continually subject to external stresses and deformations from surrounding tissues and organs. The success of numerous physiological functions relies on the ability of cells to withstand stress under some conditions, yet to flow collectively under others. Biological tissue is furthermore inherently viscoelastic, with a slow time-dependent mechanics. Despite this rich phenomenology, the mechanisms that govern the transmission of stress within biological tissue, and its response to bulk deformation, remain poorly understood to date. This talk will describe three recent research projects in modelling the rheology of biological tissue. The first predicts a strain-induced stiffening transition in a sheared tissue [1]. The second elucidates the interplay of external deformations applied to a tissue as a whole with internal active stresses that arise locally at the cellular level, and shows how this interplay leads to a host of fascinating rheological phenomena such as yielding, shear thinning, and continuous or discontinuous shear thickening [2]. The third concerns the formulation of a continuum constitutive model that captures several of these linear and nonlinear rheological phenomena [3]. [1] J. Huang, J. O. Cochran, S. M. Fielding, M. C. Marchetti and D. Bi, Physical Review Letters 128 (2022) 178001 [2] M. J. Hertaeg, S. M. Fielding and D. Bi, Physical Review X 14 (2024) 011017. [3] S. M. Fielding, J. O. Cochran, J. Huang, D. Bi, M. C. Marchetti, Physical Review E (Letter) 108 (2023) L042602.
Chromite is a ubiquitous early crystallising phase in mafic and ultramafic magmas. It has long been used as a ‘petrogenetic indicator’ in igneous and metamorphic rocks, as its wide range of solid solutions reflect the composition of the magmas that chromite crystallised from. Unusually for a mafic mineral, chromite is robust both during metamorphism and sedimentary transport, and can retain primary information about its source rocks where no other primary mafic minerals are preserved. Chromite also strongly partitions platinum-group elements, including osmium, making it suitable for study using the Re-Pt-Os isotope systems. In this presentation, I document my descent into chromite research, from a naïve interest in ultramafic lavas, through investigations into the age and origin of ultramafic bodies in Greenland, to the broad scale evolution of the Earth’s mantle and continental crust. I outline how the composition of chromite varies during crystallisation of mafic and ultramafic melts, and how chromite trace elements can help us narrow down the parental melt composition of intrusions. I discuss the use and abuse of the Re-Pt-Os systems to place ages on the formation of chromite and its host rocks. Finally, I introduce fuchsitic quartzites; rare, predominantly Archaean metasedimentary rocks that contain abundant detrital chromite. I present ongoing work to develop the use of detrital chromite grains as a tool to understand the growth of continental crust, and address the problem of Earth’s ‘missing’ mafic crustal record.
Join us as we welcome back pioneering historian and writer, Paula Akpan, for a special presentation of her new book, When We Ruled: The Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors. Paula will transport you across the African continent, from pre-colonial Nigeria to apartheid South Africa, sharing these powerful women’s stories of triumph, struggle, and lasting legacies. This event offers a unique opportunity to connect with these powerful historical figures, ending with an interactive Q&A and post-session signing. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at £22. Paula Akpan (she/her) is a Black British historian and writer who gained a distinction in her fully funded MA in Black British History and who has credits in Vogue, Teen Vogue, The Independent, Stylist, VICE, i-D, Bustle, Time Out London and more. This is her much-anticipated debut book. ---- Bluesky: raceresistance.bsky.social Subscribe to our mailing list by sending a blank email to: race-and-resistance-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Stefano Vanni studied Physics at the University of Bologna, Italy, where he received his B.Sc and M.Sc in Theoretical Physics. Later, he obtained his Ph.D. in the field of Computational Chemistry and Biochemistry at EPF, Lausanne, before joining the Institut de Pharmacologie Cellulaire et Moleculaire at CNRS in Sophia Antipolis, France, as a postdoctoral fellow. Since 2015, he is tenured researcher at CNRS, and since 2017, he is Associate Professor in Membrane Biochemistry in the Department of Biology at the University of Fribourg. Since 2018 he is affiliated to the NCCR in Bio-Inspired Materials and ERC Investigator. His main research focus is the molecular understanding of the role of membrane and lipid physicochemical properties in intracellular trafficking processes and lipid metabolism
Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 17-18 Supplementary: E.P. Thompson, ‘William Morris’ (1959)
Seminar followed by Q&A and drinks - all welcome Humans have historically extirpated large animals, or megafauna, on a global scale, a trend that has only intensified with the Anthropocene. Contrary to this pattern, some megafauna species are demonstrating a remarkable comeback, even amidst the densely populated landscapes of Earth. This talk demonstrates rare cases from India, where the decline in some megafauna populations has been effectively halted and examines factors contributing to megafauna recovery. Utilizing large-scale, long-term population assessments, our investigation focuses on the sustenance and recoveries of tigers, megaherbivores, and snow leopards. Beyond ecological factors such as habitat and food resources, we show how the economics of coexistence, political stability, and landscape sustainability have shaped megafauna trajectories. In an era of unprecedented novelty, these species are not just surviving but are potentially becoming central to promoting biodiversity and ecosystem resilience. India’s ecosystems, at crossroads of rapid global change and deep cultural ties to nature, offer valuable insights into the evolving model of megafauna conservation. It rekindles hope for a biodiverse Anthropocene. Ninad Mungi is an ecologist with a research focus on conservation biology, functional ecology, and biogeography. His collaborative work includes development of methodologies for monitoring megafauna populations and contributing to their effective conservation plans. His PhD research at the Wildlife Institute of India examined the ecology and adaptive potential of invasive plants, aiding policies and management of invasive species. He currently leads multiple experiments on ecosystem restoration designed to understand the role of trophic control, trait space, and nutrient dynamics in emerging ecosystems. His research employs integrative and quantitative frameworks to understand metacommunity dynamics, while aiming to promote socioecological resilience notably in the Global South. He is presently an Assistant Professor at the Center for Ecological Dynamics in a Novel Biosphere at Aarhus University in Denmark.
*Irene Van Eldere* (Leiden University) Designing Devotion: Characteristics of Early Middle Dutch Books of Hours *Elvira Miceli* (Wolfson College, Oxford) Kingship and the Question of Iconography in the Liber ad honorem Augusti: Bern, Burgerbiliothek, Cod. 120 II
TBC
Over the last several decades, the tractable response properties of parahippocampal neurons have provided a new access key to understanding the cognitive process of self-localization: the ability to know where you are currently located in space. Defined by functionally discrete response properties, neurons across multiple brain regions are proposed to provide the basis for an internal neural map of space, which enables animals to perform path-integration based spatial navigation and supports the formation of spatial memories. My lab focuses on understanding the mechanisms that generate this neural map of space and how this map is used to support behavior. In this talk, I’ll discuss how our internal neural maps of space adapt and exhibit plasticity in novel environments.
Curious about using AI to find research papers? Not sure how to properly reference GenAI and avoid plagiarism? This beginner-friendly workshop introduces three GenAI tools (ChatGPT, Elicit, and Perplexity), showing how they can support information discovery and analysis. Designed for those new to AI, this practical session will allow you to independently experiment with these tools and participate in group discussions to explore their strengths, limitations, and suitability for different tasks. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers, and other staff who are new to AI.
Are you planning to present a poster at an upcoming conference, meeting or symposium? This introductory session will provide you with some top tips on how to create a poster presentation which will help you to communicate your research project and data effectively. There will be guidance on formatting, layout, content, use of text, references and images, as well as advice on printing and presenting your poster. This session will also provide help with locating resources such as templates, free-to-use images and poster guidelines. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
This 90-minute session will cover some more advanced techniques for finding medical literature to answer a research question. We will recap some basics, then demonstrate searching in several medical databases, including using subject headings (MeSH) and the differences between different platforms. By the end of this session, you will be able to: explain what subject headings are, and how to use them; search for words that appear near to other words; take a search from one database into another; and save a search and document it. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
For online access, Microsoft Teams links will be sent to the mailing list in advance or email "$":mailto:sian.pooley@magd.ox.ac.uk for a link.
Can competition or cooperation for economic gain affect people's social perceptions of others? This paper experimentally examines this possible link from the economic to the social realm. Subjects engage in a task facing either a tournament or a cooperative pay scheme, after which subjects are asked their social perceptions of their counterparts in the task -- how similar they are and how much they have in common. The pay schemes do not affect answers to the subjective similarity measure but significantly influence subjects' reports of commonality. Subjects who compete with counterparts for pay report fewer traits in common with their counterparts than do subjects facing the cooperative scheme. This treatment effect emerges even though our novel measure of commonality provides incentives to report accurately the number of common traits.
TBC
Join on Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OTNiZGM1MzItOTcwOS00YThjLWJmYTAtZGFjZGM1YzkyNjQw%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2275f39f15-fefd-45cf-b904-2e2174db4aa1%22%7d
A practical session 180-minute workshop where participants will work on searches for their review across multiple databases. Librarians from the Bodleian Health Care Libraries will be on hand to demonstrate online tools for facilitating the process and give practical advice on refining individual search strategies. By the end of this classroom-based session you will be able to: improve a search strategy that you are working on; adapt the search across multiple databases; use tools such as Yale MeSH Analyzer, Polyglot and the SR Accelerator to improve your searches; describe alternative methods for identifying references, including citation tracking; de-duplicate results from multiple database searches; start screening results for inclusion in your review; and report your search methods according to PRISMA-Search. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
The relationship between the United States and China is one of the most consequential for global stability and prosperity. As tensions continue to shape international politics, questions remain about whether the two great powers can find a path toward sustainable and cooperative relations. Join the Oxford University International Relations Society for a fireside chat with Professor Jeffrey Sachs as he explores the future of US-China relations, the economic and geopolitical forces at play, and the possibilities for peaceful coexistence in an era of great-power competition. This event is open to all members of the University of Oxford. Speaker Bio: Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned economist, professor, and global leader in sustainable development. He is a University Professor at Columbia University, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development. Sachs has advised multiple UN Secretaries-General on sustainable development and has authored numerous influential books on economics, global cooperation, and development, including The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011).
The movement of organisms—whether invasive species colonizing new habitats or pathogens spreading through host populations—is governed by spatial processes that shape patterns of emergence, persistence, and control. In this talk, I will introduce spatial interaction models that describe how species and diseases spread across landscapes. These models incorporate dispersal, environmental heterogeneity, and host or vector dynamics to capture key mechanisms driving spatial spread. Special attention will be given to the role of long-distance dispersal, heterogeneous connectivity, and stochasticity in shaping invasion fronts and outbreak dynamics. Through case studies, I will illustrate how spatial interaction models provide insights into species invasions, emerging infectious diseases, and strategies for containment and mitigation. Bio-Sketch of speaker: John Drake is a Regents Professor of Ecology at the Odum School of Ecology and Director of the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases (CEID) at the University of Georgia. His research combines mathematical modeling and data analysis to study the dynamics of zoonotic diseases, the macroecology of emerging infections, and the interdisciplinary integration of social, natural, and mathematical sciences. He has applied spatial interaction and compartmental models to a wide range of systems, including the spread of White-nose syndrome in North American bats, the 2013–2015 West African Ebola epidemic, the evolutionary dynamics of influenza, and the early transmission patterns of COVID-19. His current research focuses on understanding the global forces driving disease emergence and advancing infectious disease intelligence—leveraging real-time data to inform decision-making for individuals, institutions, and policymakers during outbreaks of emerging pathogens.
This paper maps the political trajectories of U Ottama (1879-1939), an anti-colonial revolutionary and Buddhist monk who mobilized the sangha and laymen in Burma into political action in the early 20th century. U Ottama’s politics was shaped by his travels across Buddhist Asia, especially India where he spent two decades intimately involved in the project of Buddhist revival, and Japan, the Asian exemplar of political and religious sovereignty. In his quest for spiritual and temporal freedom, U Ottama invoked the sacred geography of India – the birthplace of Buddhism – and its political destiny with which he believed Burma’s was inextricably entangled. At the same time, Hindu reformers within the Arya Samaj and All India Mahasabha aligned themselves with the movement for Buddhist revival in their projections of Greater India. U Ottama served as the “living link” between the spiritual and temporal manifestations of Hindu-Buddhist proximity in the 1920s and 30s, becoming the president of the All India Hindu Mahasabha in 1935. Shifting focus away from the territorial nationalisms of anticolonial politics in the inter-war years, this paper argues that the Pan-Asian projects of Buddhist revival and Greater India coalesced around the imagined existential threat posed by Muslims in India and Burma that produced a shared politics of Hindu-Buddhist religious majoritarianism that continues to reverberate across South Asia till today. Bio: Sana Aiyar is Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her broad research interests lie in the regional and transnational history of South Asia and South Asian diasporas, with a particular focus on colonial and nationalist politics and society across the Indian Ocean. She is author of Indians in Kenya: Politics of Diaspora (HUP, 2015) and is currently completing a book manuscript on India and Burma in the 1920s and 30s. She is also Research Director and Co-curator of South Asia and the Institute: Transformative Connections.
This lecture explores the transmission and transformation of nirargaḍamedha and pañcavārṣika from India to China. Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty, inspired by the legend of Aśoka, adopted the Buddhist-oriented nirargaḍamedha (unlimited sacrifice)—likely derived from the Brahmanical sarvamedha (all sacrifice)—emphasizing large-scale charitable giving. The pañcavārṣika (Five-Year Assembly), encountered by Faxian during his pilgrimage, also stemmed from Aśokan tradition but focused on almsgiving. In India, nirargaḍamedha evolved under King Harṣa to engage various social groups, merging royal authority with Buddhist charity, as witnessed by the pilgrim Xuanzang. Over time, the two rituals converged in name and function. This study emphasizes the role of multilingual sources in understanding how religious rituals were adapted and reinterpreted across cultural contexts.
The Europeanist Society and the Austrian Society are delighted to host Member of the European Parliament Lukas Mandl for a talk on European geopolitics, the urgent need for courage, and the dire consequences of inaction. Lukas Mandl served as Vice Chair of the Subcommittee on Security and Defence, and currently chairs the European Parliament’s Delegation to the Korean Peninsula. He is also President of the Altiero Spinelli Group and the European Federalist Movement Austria. In light of the evolving global security landscape, MEP Mandl’s extensive background in European foreign and defence policy, as well as his advocacy for a stronger European Union, make his insights particularly timely. His address will not only provide an analysis of Europe’s current geopolitical challenges but also propose a constructive path forward. The talk will be followed by an interactive Q&A session.
The scientific meeting is open to all Oxford Parkinson’s researchers and will provide the opportunity for everyone to network and meet with colleagues. The day will consist of talks by Oxford researchers on a wide range of topics on Parkinson’s translational work. The event will showcase the breadth of clinical and discovery science underway in Oxford across our translational program (clinical cohort studies, biomarkers, genetics, stem cell models and animal models). Also included in the day’s programme:- • Clinical debate hosted by Prof. Michele Hu & Dr Chris Kobylecki • We are delighted to have secured four exciting keynote speakers; 1. Prof. Günter Höglinger, University of Munich; 2. Prof. Michael Johnson, Imperial College, London; 3. Prof. David Rubinsztein, UK DRI Cambridge; 4. Prof. Stephanie Cragg, University of Oxford. We will be seeking abstract submissions and poster presentations will be on display throughout the day with prizes awarded at the close of the event.
Schizophrenia is a leading cause of global disability, affecting approximately 1% of the population. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that there are alterations in the glutamate system and the glutamate receptor, N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA), in individuals with schizophrenia. Post-mortem investigations reveal changes in NMDA receptors across different brain regions. More recently, studies utilising Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging have identified lower NMDA receptor levels in the hippocampus relative to other brain regions in people with schizophrenia compared to healthy individuals. Studies using proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) have enabled the in vivo examination of glutamate and its metabolic, glutamine. They have found region-specific alterations in people with schizophrenia. This talk will explore the latest findings from these studies and the implications for drug development. This will include the review of glycine type 1 transporter inhibitors and drugs targeting brain glutamate such as riluzole as potential treatments for schizophrenia. This talk will also critically review the success and setbacks in drug discovery for these targets, discussing the underlying reasons. Additionally, the potential utility of neuroimaging in guiding future drug development in this area will be explored. This seminar is hosted in person at the Department of Psychiatry, Seminar Room & online. To join online, please use the Zoom details below: zoom.us/j/92620728590?pwd=s1JefrGff6bN0nZZcHSTBkCw8Z1RlT.1 Meeting ID: 926 2072 8590 Passcode: 196542
COURSE DETAILS You will learn how to choose the best journal for your work, negotiate the peer review process and deal with reviewer comments. The course will cover: Why publish and how that affects how you publish. The structure of a paper. What to include in the title and abstract. Open access. Impact metrics and citations. Ways to get published more quickly. Publicising your paper once it is published. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the session participants will be able to: Develop and understanding of the peer review process. Construct an effective title and abstract. Be equipped to choose journals for future papers. Be equipped to publicise future papers. PREVIOUS PARTICIPANTS HAVE SAID "Nice to have a professional with an in-depth industry knowledge offer training and advice.'" "The course was excellent and very well delivered. there was a real sense of professionalism.'" "Now it doesn't feel so scary to try to publish a paper.'" INTENDED FOR DPhil students and research staff. The course is suitable for DPhil students and postdocs who want to understand the publishing process better, whether or not they have already submitted a paper.
Abstract to follow at https://www.ethox.ox.ac.uk/events
So, you’ve got a great idea for a research study – but what approvals do you need before you can start? Who do you apply to? And how do you go about doing this? Join an online presentation through Microsoft Teams for an overview of: • how research is governed in the UK • which approval bodies are involved • a step-by-step guide on how to apply for approval • handling amendments to your study
Join us for a digital scholarship coffee gathering - tea and coffee will be provided. If you'd like to get an email reminder of these coffee mornings please sign up for that here: https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/oxford/digital-scholarship-coffee-morning-keep-in-touch
Seminars followed by a sandwich lunch. All welcome!
We isolate the main driver of equity risk premium fluctuations in the data, and show that this same shock also explains a large fraction of the business-cycle comovements of output, consumption, employment, and investment. Recessions associated with this shock are characterized by a reallocation away from full-time labor positions, and towards part-time and flexible contract workers. We explain the data using a novel real model where fluctuations in risk appetite lead to a shift from riskier to safer factors of production. Since safer factors carry lower marginal products – a form of real risk premium – this “flight-to-safety” in production input demand precipitates a broad macroeconomic contraction.
Landfills in Delhi are often in the public eye, either because of raging fires, oozing leachate in the ground water or their mismanagement in terms of increasing heights, landslides of waste mounds, followed by subsequent mishaps and accidents. These landfills are often seen as sight of ‘disgust’, dangerous discards, and are today at the centre of policy and public deliberation. Representing sites and the epitome of unchecked production and consumerism, landfills today have become living and animated monuments of the Anthropocene. Despite this increasing visibility of landfills in Delhi, precious little is known about the lives of waste pickers and other residents involved in ancillary activities and making a living. In this article I examine how the most marginalised individuals from various lower-caste communities are relegated to the city's periphery and experience their immediate ‘toxic’ environment, and simultaneously, revalue the discarded sites and materials through their labour by recreating liveable
In this seminar, Marianne Hirsch and Sara Davidmann will reflect on the very different ways the family photographs they inherited have shaped their work on family and cultural memory. What do photographs from the European Jewish world before the Holocaust tell us about Jewish life and how the legacies of its destruction have shaped subsequent generations? How do photographs carry memory? How do they prompt our own postmemories? The discussion will be based on Hirsch’s autobiographical and theoretical writing and Davidmann’s artistic practice. The conversation will be followed by a coffee break and an optional workshop on Memory and Photography facilitated by the two speakers. Attendees are invited to bring one photograph and think about the stories it has enabled. Speaker Details: Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Combining memoir, literature and photography, she writes about the transmission of memories of violent histories across generations, a process she has termed “postmemory.” Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, both co-authored with Leo Spitzer, as well as the co-edited volume Women Mobilizing Memory. She is currently working on a book about reparative memory. Sara Davidmann is a multi-award-winning artist living and working in London. For over a decade (2011- ), Sara’s work has focused on her family history. Sara’s work has been exhibited in Canada, Australia, Germany, France, India and the United Kingdom and was the focus of three events at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Publications include three photography monographs. Sara has also published book chapters and journal articles contextualising her artwork, and she regularly gives artist’s talks. She has received numerous awards for her work, including a Philip Leverhulme Prize, a Fulbright Hays Scholarship, four Arts and Humanities Research Council awards and an Association of Commonwealth Universities Fellowship. Sara has a PhD in Photography (practice-based) from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. About the Programme: Jewish Women's Voices is a collaborative initiative by Dr Kate Kennedy, Director of the ‘Oxford Centre for Life-Writing’, and Dr Vera Fine-Grodzinski, a scholar of Jewish social and cultural history. The Programme is the first of its kind at any UK academic institution. Launched in October 2023, the Programme celebrates the life-writing of Jewish women often underrepresented in mainstream history accounts. The Programme is a three-term seminar series dedicated to exploring the diverse experiences of Jewish women across centuries, countries, and cultures. Further information about the Programme can be found here. Further Details and Contacts: This hybrid event is free and open to all; however, registration is required. This event will be recorded and made available soon after on the OCLW website. Registration will close at 10:30 on 3 June 2025. Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
Student Presentations
Good research data management is a vital component of academic practice. Part of this is the principle that the data used to develop the arguments and outcomes of your research should be effectively stored and managed during a project, preserved for the future and - where possible - shared with other academics. This session introduces the University’s research data policy and outlines the practical impact this will have on your work. The services available at Oxford to assist you will be outlined. This session is not only essential during your current studies but will be invaluable if you plan to continue in research as a career. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Oxford DPhil students are required to deposit a copy of their thesis in the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA). This online session will focus on what ORA is and how to deposit one's thesis in ORA, and how to access help with this process. It will also cover the relevant rights and permissions required and other issues that DPhil students need to take into account when preparing their thesis for upload to ORA. Topics include: what ORA is and what you need to deposit; how to deposit your thesis in ORA; observing relevant rights and permissions; and accessing help with depositing your thesis in ORA. Intended audience: All doctoral research students.
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are transforming cell biology, yet the inherent variability among iPSC lines and challenges in accurately characterizing iPSC-derived cell types have limited their broader use in preclinical screening. In this seminar, an innovative imaging assay is presented that combines cell painting with convolutional neural networks to reliably identify cell types even in dense, mixed cultures. The method is benchmarked using pure and mixed cultures of neuroblastoma and astrocytoma cell lines, achieving classification accuracies exceeding 96%. Furthermore, the approach is refined by focusing on the nuclear region and its immediate environment, which maintains high accuracy even under challenging, high-density conditions. The targeted profiling strategy is further applied to iPSC-derived neural cultures to assess differentiation status by quantifying the ratio of postmitotic neurons to neural progenitors, with cell-based predictions outperforming traditional time-in-culture metrics (96% vs. 86%). In mixed iPSC-derived neuronal cultures, microglia are unequivocally discriminated from neurons, and a tiered analysis allows for further distinction between activated and non-activated microglial states, albeit with lower accuracy. Thus, morphological single-cell profiling is demonstrated as an effective means to monitor cell composition in complex neural cultures, holding great promise for enhancing quality control in iPSC-derived cell models for preclinical applications.
In this 60-minute online workshop you will be introduced to the methodologies and principles underpinning the conduct of literature searches for systematic reviews, scoping reviews and other evidence reviews. The session will cover: formulating a focused research question; preparing a protocol; developing a search strategy to address that research question; choosing appropriate databases and search engines; searching for grey literature and ongoing studies; storing and managing references; and documenting and reporting your search. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Seminar 3-4pm (talk titles TBC) Networking drinks 4-5pm
President Trump vowed to upend longstanding governance norms in the United States, and he has moved aggressively to do so early in his second term. Former White House Counsel, Stuart Delery, will reflect on how the courts and Congress are reacting to the unprecedented actions of the Executive Branch in the Trump Administration, and what these events mean for the constitutional checks and balances. Stuart Delery served as White House Counsel for President Biden and as a senior Department of Justice official in the Obama Administration, including as Acting Associate Attorney General of the United States (the third-ranking position at the Department) and as the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division. He is a lawyer in private practice, a Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College.
Description: The seminar will explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, AI, and technological innovation, co-taught by a philosopher and a technologist. The seminar will welcome a variety of visiting discussants from philosophy, computer science, and the technology industry throughout term. The focus will be on how a concern for human flourishing can be embedded in the global technology development pipeline, and on exploring how broader bridges can be built between philosophy and technology. The seminar is primarily aimed at philosophy graduate students and computer science graduate students but participants from other levels and areas are welcome. Topics include: truth-seeking AI, privacy, collective intelligence, decentralization in science and AI, and approaches to human autonomy. The seminar culminates in a clinic to facilitate grant applications for independent summer projects on the themes of the seminar. Fast grants: New for this year, Cosmos Ventures has established a dedicated funding pool that seminar participants can apply to for independent summer building projects on related themes. Prerequisites: please email HAI Lab philipp.koralus@philosophy.ox.ac.uk no later than April 27th with a (very) brief explanation of your interest in the seminar to reserve a spot, and the subject line “TT Seminar”. Space limited to maintain quality of discussion. Readings: ● Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (short excerpt) ● Summerfield, et al., “AI Can Help Humans Find Common Ground in Democratic Deliberation.” (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq2852) Optional: ● Summerfield, et al, “How Will Advanced AI Systems Impact Democracy?” (https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06729)
The OICSD is hosting a special evening as a part of the Khushwant Singh Literary Festival (KSLF). The KSLF began in the mountains of Kasauli, India 13 years ago, where the iconoclast Khushwant Singh (KS), had a home and did most of his writing. The festival was invited to London by the Indian High Commissioner, as Khushwant Singh had close links with the city where he studied and worked. KSLF has always been a festival with a purpose - celebrating the ideals and values of Khushwant Singh. Some of which are women’s access to formal education, promoting peace and closer ties between India and Pakistan, and the preservation of our ecology and heritage. It is an entirely volunteer led festival. The Oxford edition will feature two recent publications: Matt Ridley's “Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea" (Harper Collins UK, 2025). Matt will be in conversation with Prof. Sunetra Gupta, Department of Biology, University of Oxford. Keshava Guha's "The Tiger's Share" (John Murray, 2025). Keshava will be in conversation with Francesca Kay, author and Somerville alumna.
Writing the Taboo explores the complicated emotional responses that readers and writers can feel when encountering certain subjects in life-writing. Audiences can get "turned off" or "triggered" from reading deeply personal details, and authors can also get intimidated by writing highly emotional, violent or intimate life occurrences. Often, these feelings can keep both parties from connecting and communicating in literary and psychological ways. This work will focus on articulating "the ick" experience to engage and transcend social and personal taboos on the page (and in workshops) and to transform what we fear into compassion. Speaker Details: Professor Tonya Cherie Hegamin, MFA (she/her), is a queer and (dis)abled award-winning author and educator of Black and Native American (Lenape/Nanticoke) descent. Her honours include awards from the New York Public Library, The Christopher Foundation and more. Her books, Most Loved In All the World, M+O 4EVR, Pemba’s Song and Willow have received honorable mentions and starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and have been featured in USA Today, The Washington Post, Ebony and Essence. Tonya is a tenured Associate Professor in the English and World Languages Department at the City University of New York’s Medgar Evers College. She also serves as an Affiliate Faculty at CUNY’s School of Medicine in their Narrative Medicine program. Additionally, Tonya holds certificates in Diversity and Inclusion Education, as well as in Wellness Counselling from Cornell University. Tonya has published scholarly articles about creativity, praxis and pedagogy in The Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Can Creative Writing Really be Taught?, and Creative Writing Innovations. Her research interests focus on the intersections of narrative, creativity, cultural history, disability, gender/queer studies and healthcare. Tonya has been a patient and victim advocate since 1998, working as an educator and counsellor for organizations like Women Against Rape, Planned Parenthood, Police Athletic League, J. P. Morgan, and Johnson& Johnson/Janssen Pharmaceutical. Further Details and Contacts: This event is free and open to all; however, registration is required. Places are limited, with priority given to those who identify as members of the Global Majority or underrepresented writers (for further information and definitions, please see our ‘Global Majority and Underrepresented Writers’ Programme’ page). This event will be recorded and will be available soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording. Registration will close on 27 May 2025 at 10:30. Successful registrants will be informed soon after. Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
How does elite wealth persist? This paper studies the long-run distribution, transmission, and dynamics of elite wealth through micro and macro shocks. Collecting individual-level data on wealth and wealth transfers, we reconstruct the universe of manorial wealth in Estonia and Latvia from the 13th century until 1919. We document extreme levels of wealth inequality concentrated in the local Baltic German elite. By contrast, inequality within this elite is rather low. Focusing on wealth dynamics, we first consider micro shocks to family networks (premature deaths or the lack of a male heir) that we capture in genealogical data. We show how these micro shocks affect individual and family wealth. Next, we demonstrate that those micro shocks affect the resilience of family networks during macro shocks (plagues, expropriation). However, through several adaptation strategies, their wealth recovers. This paper adds to our understanding of the mechanisms of elite wealth persistence.
The way we produce and use energy is changing – from large-scale infrastructure and system changes (e.g. renewables, hydrogen) to new technologies in our homes (e.g. heat pumps, energy storage). A successful green energy transition therefore requires support from the public – developers need a social license to operate, and householders need to buy and adopt new technologies. This talk will cover what we know about public acceptance of energy technologies and future energy systems. Christina will also discuss why early and meaningful public engagement can be an effective way to ensure publics are involved in decision processes and lead to better and fairer energy transitions.
Lisa Blaydes is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018). She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.
‘Childing at the Piano’ Timothy Coombes ‘Playful Aesthetics in the Music of Benjamin Britten’ Marinu Leccia ‘Heterotopias of Juxtaposition: Spaces for Creative Play within a “Knowledge-Rich” Music Theory Curriculum’ Elizabeth MacGregor ‘Some Notes on Literacy, Aurality, and Social Justice in Community Music and Outreach’ Javier Rivas
Drawing on decades of experience in academia and the activist world, 'Beyond our Current Boundaries: Peace Studies from Africa and the Global South' (Africa World Press, 2025, premiere book in the Africa World Peace Book Series) initiates a new Africa World Press/Red Sea Press series championing the distinct and growing field of African and Global South Peace Research and Studies. This intentionally interdisciplinary field, bringing together grassroots organizers, scholars, and students, is laid out by Matt Meyer - one of its pioneering thinkers. With a robust review of past Pan-Africanist ideals and contemporary challenges to intersectional systems of oppression, Meyer charts a context for future work building on the dreams of Archbishop Tutu, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Mawina Kouyate, Elise Boulding, the Zapatistas, and more.
How does elite wealth persist? This paper studies the long-run distribution, transmission, and dynamics of elite wealth through micro and macro shocks. Collecting individual-level data on wealth and wealth transfers, we reconstruct the universe of manorial wealth in Estonia and Latvia from the 13th century until 1919. We document extreme levels of wealth inequality concentrated in the local Baltic German elite. By contrast, inequality within this elite is rather low. Focusing on wealth dynamics, we first consider micro shocks to family networks (premature deaths or the lack of a male heir) that we capture in genealogical data. We show how these micro shocks affect individual and family wealth. Next, we demonstrate that those micro shocks affect the resilience of family networks during macro shocks (plagues, expropriation). However, through several adaptation strategies, their wealth recovers. This paper adds to our understanding of the mechanisms of elite wealth persistence. *If you would like to meet the speaker before the seminar, please sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/23druvdp*
Visiting speakers, workshops, and in-house talks open to all researchers (graduate, postdoctoral, academics) and those with research interests in literature of the long eighteenth century 1660-1830
3MT is a competition which challenges doctoral students to explain their research in just 180 seconds. Come and hear about some of the incredible research that oxford doctoral students are pursuing. All are welcome to watch our finalists present. Audience seats are available on a first come, first served basis.
For online access, Microsoft Teams links will be sent to the mailing list in advance or email "$":mailto:christina.debellaigue@exeter.ox.ac.uk for a link.
Few of us like the idea of ‘networking’. But we know that forging good relationships helps us understand how things work in new spheres of research or employment, and can open doors. Come along for an hour of myth-busting insights and tips on effective networking through various mechanisms including social media.
Richard Doll Lecture Theatre Sandwich lunch at 12-1pm in the atrium Talk begins at 1pm in the lecture theatre Dr Hayleah Pickford Hayleah is a Senior Editor within the Microbiology and Infectious Diseases team at Nature Communications, where she handles manuscripts on clinical and translational microbiology, focusing on vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics. She also works closely with the Early Career Researchers (ECR) working group at the journal, which works on initiatives to involve ECRs in the peer-review process. Hayleah joined Nature Communications in 2021, after working in a medical microbiology research group at the University of Oxford for two years. Through the MIBTP Doctoral Training Partnership, she holds a PhD from University of Birmingham in molecular microbiology, focusing on mycobacterial cell growth and division. Prior to this, she completed a BSc in biomedical science at Aston University. Hayleah will be visiting Oxford on the 4th June to host a seminar on ‘how and why to publish with Nature Communications’ and ‘editorial careers’
Writing in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt questioned the basic premise of human rights, arguing that without state protection there was ‘nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human’. For Arendt, humans were not born with inalienable rights, as the newly formed United Nations proclaimed. Rather, ‘we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights’. In other words, it was the state and embedded social and political relationships that guaranteed ‘the right to have rights’. One effective line of attack on both these guarantors has been to conceal the nature of the threats and induce a state of confusion around every point of certainty. Some deceptions would eventually be exposed, but only when it was too late to contain the disasters – the cancer, the poisoned air and earth, the crumbling shorelines, the landslides, the heatwaves, the wild storms, the faltering ecosystems, the dead forests, the despair, the disengagement. In any case, the deceptions’ exposure would only add to the confusion, to the wilderness of fearful anger. Now the right to have rights seems to be in the process of vanishing even for the most privileged parts of the world. This means that the possibility of its loss is finally visible to everyone – if only through the triumphalism of those who viciously celebrate the moment. It seems that guarantors of rights have not after all been defended, nor re-imagined with new capabilities to suit the times, nor emboldened by urgency. They have atrophied through neglect and by design. It is a clarifying moment. If now is not a time to reassert and reimagine the rights of all the mutually dependent communities of earth’s narrow biosphere – it can only be a time for surrender. And so the speakers on this roundtable offer ways to think in the context of today’s emergencies. Given a warming world, a contracting public sphere, and rapidly shifting geopolitical alignments, where are we to locate – and how are we to imagine – the rights of humans and non-humans? Who might act as their guarantors? And what is the role of the humanities in these tasks of the committed imagination?
Join us for an insightful discussion on the future of AI in industry, featuring real-world perspectives from business leaders and AI practitioners. Key Themes to be Explored: How AI is influencing business strategies and operations. The evolving role of AI in different industries. Real-world experiences of implementing AI-driven solutions. Emerging trends in AI adoption and development. AI safety: ensuring responsible and ethical AI use, preventing unintended consequences.
We estimate the intergenerational health impacts of large-scale unconditional cash transfers. One-time transfers of USD 1000 were provided to over 10,500 poor households across 653 randomized villages in Kenya. We collected regional census data on over 100,000 births, including on mortality and cause of death, and detailed data on household health behaviors. In the study’s main finding, the cash transfer treatment leads to a sharp reduction in infant deaths before age one and in child deaths before age five. Data on the location of health facilities, as well as the cause of death and transfer timing relative to birth, indicate that unconditional cash transfers and access to delivery services are complements in generating mortality reductions: the largest gains are estimated among households living close to health facilities who receive the transfer around the time of the birth, and treatment leads to a large overall increase in hospital deliveries. Infant and child mortality then largely revert to pre-program levels after cash transfers end. Despite not being the main aim of the original program, we show that unconditional cash transfers in this setting may be a cost-effective way to reduce infant and child deaths. Written with Michael Walker (University of California, Berkeley), Nick Shankar (University of California, Berkeley), Dennis Egger (University of Oxford), and Grady Killeen (University of California, Berkeley)
The Lunchtime Lab Talks aim to introduce and highlight the broad spectrum of research that is carried out at the Centre and encourage multidisciplinary interactions. Throughout the year, groups are invited to speak and present their work to our community. Lunch is available from 12:15 in Room A&B and talks run from 12:30–13:30. Speaker: Dr Ludo van Hillegondsberg Title: 'Exploring the Proteomic Landscape of Parkinson's Disease'
Create content for your teaching or research with greater confidence by attending our session on Creative Commons (CC) licences. Learn how they work, how they interact with copyright and how to use them to best effect. The session will make special reference to images but is applicable to all media, including written works. The workshop is classroom-based. In this playful, interactive face-to-face session we will cover: what Creative Commons Licences are; where to find Creative Commons material; how to apply Creative Commons to your own work; and how to reuse Creative Commons materials. We’ll finish the session with a Creative Commons card game. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
The thesis of this essay is that, in heterogeneous agent macroeconomics, the assumption of rational expectations about equilibrium prices is unrealistic, unnecessarily complicates computations, and should be replaced. This is because rational expectations imply that decision makers forecast equilibrium prices like interest rates by forecasting cross-sectional distributions. The result is an extreme version of the curse of dimensionality: dynamic programming problems in which the entire cross-sectional distribution is a state variable (“Master equation” a.k.a. “Monster equation”). This is not only unrealistic but also limits the applicability of the heterogeneous-agent approach to some of the biggest questions in macroeconomics, namely those in which aggregate risk and non-linearities are key, like financial crises. This troublesome feature of the rational expectations assumption poses a challenge: what should replace it? I outline three criteria that alternative approaches should satisfy: (1) simplification of the computational solution, (2) consistency with empirical evidence, and (3) (some) immunity to the Lucas critique. I then discuss some potentially promising directions, including temporary equilibrium approaches, incorporating survey expectations, least-squares learning, and reinforcement learning. About the speaker: Benjamin Moll is the Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. He is a macroeconomist studying how the enormous heterogeneity observed at the micro level, and in particular the large disparities in income and wealth, impact the macro economy and macroeconomic policy. Moll’s work analyzes the macroeconomic and distributional consequences of monetary and fiscal policy as well as disruptions like the Covid-19 pandemic or the European energy crisis. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Moll is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the recipient of the Bernácer Prize for best European economist under 40 working in macroeconomics and finance, the Calvó-Armengol International Prize in Economics, and a coeditor of the American Economic Review.
TBD
Join via Microsoft Teams here: https://tinyurl.com/5d5s7x5k
Convened by Dr Judith Townend as part of the work of the Courts and Tribunals Observers Network, supported by the Sheila Kitzinger Programme at Green Templeton College.
In Ruling Emancipated Slaves and Indigenous Subjects, Olukunle P. Owolabi explores the divergent developmental trajectories of Global South nations that were shaped by forced settlement, where European colonists imported enslaved Africans to establish large-scale agricultural plantations, or by colonial occupation, which resulted in the exploitation of indigenous non-white populations. Owolabi shows that most forced settlement colonies emerged from European domination with higher levels of educational attainment, greater postcolonial democratization, and favorable human development outcomes relative to Global South countries that emerged from colonial occupation after 1945. To explain this paradox, he examines the distinctive legal-administrative institutions that were used to control indigenous colonial subjects and highlights the impact of liberal reforms that expanded the legal rights and political agency of former slaves following abolition. Spanning three decades of colonial history and postcolonial development across multiple colonial empires, this is the first book to systematically examine the distinctive patterns of state-building that resulted from forced settlement and colonial occupation in the Black Atlantic world.
How is global financial governance changing over time in relation to climate change? While carbon border adjustments or tariffs are increasingly well-known as a disruption to international trade, scholars have taken a less comprehensive view of how heterogeneous climate actions affect global financial governance. We argue that both asset differentiation (varying financial terms based on environmental effects) and cross-national friction have increased over time and seek explanations for how this change has taken place. We find, descriptively, that state and non-state actors respond in different ways to the rising salience of climate change through four types of activities: national economic policies, intergovernmental coordination, carbon accounting, and climate-conscious financing. A conventional explanation of resultant changes is a vertical, top-down model in which policymakers first set policies and then market participants react accordingly. Our key theoretical claim is that the vertical model is not sufficient on its own; instead, a horizontal model (or transnational model) involving heterogeneous action by actors at all levels is also required to explain the contestation and oscillation of practices. Together, the vertical and horizontal models of change can best account for the observed shift in financial governance.
Circumscribing cities like Venice and Ravenna, the area around the Mediterranean provides a continuous source of research material for academics working on Byzantine and medieval art. My lecture focuses on mosaics and frescoes produced along the coastline of this sea.
The Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Graduate Conference will take place on Thursday 5 June 2025. The conference will be run as a hybrid event, with the opportunity for all attendees to join us online or in person at Keble College, University of Oxford. This year's theme is Anachronism and History. We are interested in receiving papers from current graduate students relating to contemporary discussions of anachronism and history in intellectual history and related disciplines. This event is an opportunity for graduate students to present their research and network with similar researchers at Oxford and other institutions. See below for more details What is anachronism in history, and how is history being used anachronistically today? These questions are particularly pressing at a moment when historians are more frequently consulted on public issues than scholars from any other discipline. Anachronism in history raises complex questions about how people in the past thought, felt, and acted according to categories that—within their own contexts—may have seemed outdated or misplaced. The anachronistic use of history, however, is something different: it concerns how historical narratives are used in the present to legitimate or challenge authority, shape contemporary political life, and link societies to the past. What challenges does anachronism pose for intellectual historians? How should we approach these tensions methodologically? What are its ethical and epistemological implications? The 2025 Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Graduate Conference invites you to explore these questions. We welcome your own interpretation of anachronism—whether theoretical, methodological, or grounded in a specific historical case study—according to your research and perspective. Our keynote address will be delivered by Dr Tania Shew the Isaiah Berlin Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. The Call for Papers is open until Sunday 20 April 2025: Submit an abstract: https://forms.office.com/e/1mU8t2r4EV If you wish to attend the conference please express interest here: https://forms.office.com/e/6V3VKtmXzR
COURSE DETAILS The session will cover preparing for interviews, creating a question line, finding your authentic voice and active listening. Participants will be paired up and asked to conduct short interviews with a fellow participant which will be recorded over Zoom. As a group we'll listen back to them and workshop the interviews for constructive feedback. This course is aimed at anyone looking at working on interviewing skills as a presenter but is also useful to those asked to be a guest on a podcast. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will have: Increased your awareness of strategies for effectively planning an interview. Explored principles of good practice for interview hosts. Explored the components of a good interview question.
Do you need help managing your references? Do you need help citing references in your documents? This online session will introduce you to EndNote, a subscription software programme which can help you to store, organise and retrieve your references and PDFs, as well as cite references in documents and create bibliographies quickly and easily. On completing the workshop you will be able to: understand the main features and benefits of EndNote; set up an EndNote account; import references from different sources into EndNote; organise your references in EndNote; insert citations into documents; and create a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
From postcolonial Angola to a Tudor estuary via a French riverbank, come and hear three scholars of rivers talk about the stories rivers tell and the methodological challenges they trace. Dorothée Boulanger (Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) 'Rivers as sources of Angola’s postcolonial identity' Katherine Ibbett (Modern Languages) 'Riverain: the French early modern river' Tom Johnson (History) 'Downward with the stream: flows of testimony on a Tudor river' Chaired by Joe da Costa (Modern Languages)
Björn Schumacher1 1 Institute for Genome Stability in Aging and Disease, Medical Faculty, Cologne Excellence Cluster for Cellular Stress Responses in Ageing-Associated Diseases (CECAD) Research Centre and Centre for Molecular Medicine (CMMC), University of Cologne, Joseph-Stelzmann-Str. 26, 50931 Cologne, Germany Aging is the biggest risk factor for chronic diseases ranging from dementia to cancer. Prevention of age-related diseases is a prerequisite for healthy aging and requires an understanding of the mechanisms of the aging process. The nuclear DNA cannot be replaced and is hence critically dependent on constant DNA repair. Defects in DNA repair such as nucleotide excision repair can accelerate aging in humans and give rise to a wide spectrum of age-related pathologies during childhood. To better understand the intricate role of genome stability in the aging process, we investigated the consequences of chronic DNA damage in the nematode C. elegans. This in vivo model enabled us to investigate the distinct genome stability mechanisms in terminally differentiated and thus irreplaceable somatic cell such as neurons and immortal germ cells that indefinitely perpetuate the genetic information. In addition, we identified systemic DNA damage response mechanisms that operate between the germline and somatic tissues. We found that the genome quality control in germ cells is influenced by somatic stress responses, which could integrate germline signals with environmental influences. We employed the nematode as discovery tool to identify the first master regulator of somatic DNA repair, which might provide novel geroprotective therapeutic strategies for human longevity. Longevity itself might be determined by the accumulation of stochastically occurring damage as indicated by our ability to predict biological age purely based on the amount of accumulated stochastic variation in biological parameters. Deeper insight into the mechanisms of genome maintenance will provide the basis for a better mechanistic understanding of the organism’s aging process and new perspectives for healthy human aging.
Narrative CVs are being adopted by many funders, nationally and internationally, to give researchers the opportunity to showcase a wider range of skills and experience than is possible in a traditional academic CV; an example is the UKRI Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI). Writing a narrative CV requires a different way of thinking about and describing your skills, experience and contributions to research and innovation compared to a traditional CV. Writing your first narrative CV will take some time and effort; you might not be sure about what activities to include, and how to describe their quality, relevance, and your involvement in them. This presentation will try to demystify and simplify narrative CVs by providing advice, prompts and suggestions for how to write one. Speakers Tanita Casci Director, Research Strategy & Policy Unit Mary Muers Research Culture Facilitator, MSD Kanza Basit Senior Research Facilitator, SSD Gavin Bird Head of Research Facilitation and Support, SOGE, SSD Susan Black, Careers Adviser, Oxford Careers Service Everyone welcome, please register to receive the TEAMS link for this event If you are a student or researcher with a CareerConnect account, please register "here":https://oxford.targetconnect.net/leap/event.html?id=22404&service=Careers%20Service All other staff register "here":https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=G96VzPWXk0-0uv5ouFLPke7xLB0LNIFKuA055EWF9ZtUNEZKNUxEUUk2Qjk4SEZHT1oyMVRaMTFUMC4u the joining link will be in the registration confirmation email
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Elisabeth Siegel at elisabeth.siegel@politics.ox.ac.uk or Brian Kot at brian.kot@politics.ox.ac.uk in advance to participate or with any questions. Remote attendance is possible, but in-person attendance is prioritized (and provided refreshment). About the speaker: Renan Araujo is a Research Manager at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS), where he leads the research workstream on international AI governance and the IAPS AI Policy Fellowship. His work focuses on the implications of advanced AI on international relations, with a focus on US-China, and what institutional models might be conducive to international cooperation on AI, such as AI Safety Institutes. Previously, Renan was a researcher on AI governance and emergent technologies at Rethink Priorities and the Institute for Law and AI. He has experience leading global capacity-building programs, especially in LMIC, and conducting comparative policy research. He is also a co-founder and adviser of the Condor Initiative, an educational nonprofit that supports Brazilian students in shaping AI research and policy globally. He also advises the Vista Institute for AI Policy. In a previous life, he was the youngest chief of staff of a Justice of Appeal at the State Court of Pernambuco, Brazil, where he worked for five years. He’s a lawyer by training with an MSc from the London School of Economics.
In this online workshop you will be shown the functionality of Zotero, which is a free-to-use software programme used to manage references and create bibliographies. Zotero will be demonstrated on a Windows PC but users of MacOS or Linux computers will be able to follow the demonstration. The workshop will cover: understanding the main features and benefits of Zotero; setting up a Zotero account; importing references from different sources into Zotero; organising your references in Zotero; inserting citations into documents; and creating a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
This panel-symposium brings together four eminent scholars who will use their expertise to illuminate the recent political and moral economy of the United States and the rise of what some have called a new American oligarchy; and others have termed populist authoritarianism. The event will not only discuss how the United States arrived at its current state of politics, but pathways toward an alternative political-economic order. Speakers are Melinda Cooper (Australian National University), author of Counter-Revolution and Family Values; Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Calvin University), author of Jesus and John Wayne; Joel Suarez (Harvard University), author of Labor of Liberty, forthcoming; and Noam Maggor (Queen Mary University of London), author of Brahmin Capitalism. Topics include economic elites and governance, labor and the working class, and evangelicals and white Christian nationalism.
More information will be available shortly. Booking is required for people outside of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI). A booking link will be available shortly. DSPI Members do not need to register.
This session has been organised in collaboration with DECIDE (Digitally Enabled Care in Diverse Environments), an NIHR-funded centre for rapid evaluation of technology-enabled remote monitoring in health and care settings. The panel will outline the current policy landscape underpinning the digital shift in care services, describing a remote monitoring initiative in care homes by the local authority and Integrated Care Board for falls prevention, and the development of remote monitoring services to support independent living that DECIDE is evaluating nationally. We will then discuss the framing of these technologies in relation to how people define ‘good care’, relating to previous work undertaken within the Care Initiative. This hybrid event is run by Green Templeton’s long-running Care Initiative, led by Professor Mary Daly. The talk will be followed by drinks in the Stables Bar.
Handle with Care: The Oldest Translations of the Bible in English - 4.30 pm on Thursday 5th June 2025 in the Lecture Theatre with Professor Francis Leneghan The translation of the Bible into English did not begin, as is often thought, with the King James Bible. In fact, parts of the Bible were translated into English as early as the eighth century when the Venerable Bede began a translation of the Gospel of John. During the ninth and tenth centuries, the translation of scripture into English gathered pace as vernacular versions of the Gospels and the first seven books of the Old Testament (the Heptateuch) were produced, as well as a multitude of English glosses on Latin Bibles and homilies and biblical paraphrases. With these translations, the Bible was becoming increasingly available for the first time to readers outside of the walls of the monastery: noble laymen and women could now read parts of the Bible in their own homes. At the same time Benedictine monks such as Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham were pushing back against this widening access to scripture, fearing that lay readers might be confused and led into sin by unsupervised exposure to some of the Bible’s more contradictory and complex elements, especially the Old Testament. This talk will tell the story of the earliest translations of the Bible in the English language, demonstrating how the Bible played a central role in the emergence of English national identity during this transformational period. If you'd like to attend, please register at: https://www.stx.ox.ac.uk/event/handle-with-care
In October 1962, the Library of Congress, with the support of the Bollingen Foundation and Poetry magazine, convened a three-day event called “The National Poetry Festival,” which aimed to be the largest-ever gathering of poets in the history of the United States. As fate would have it, the Festival happened to coincide with the Cuban Missile Crisis. My talk, drawn from the conclusion to my forthcoming monograph, Institutionalized Lyric: American Poetry at Midcentury, will briefly summarize my book’s argument and then examine the confluence of these events, poetry festival and international crisis, in order to pose a series of questions about that argument’s stakes: How did the Festival demonstrate the consequences of poetry’s institutional position, of its sense of its own audience and power, especially as its institutional commemoration was abruptly forced to accommodate an international crisis that was being managed within neighboring halls of state? How did the Festival’s theme, “Fifty Years of American Poetry,” imagine a relationship between the modernism of the century’s first half and the poetry of midcentury? Just two years earlier, Robert Lowell, while accepting the National Book Award for Life Studies, had described the legacy of modernism as a crisis for midcentury poetry. What shape did that crisis take as the representative poets of the century’s first and second halves shared a stage, and how did the pressure applied by the sudden emergence of an existential, global threat reveal the stakes of midcentury poetry’s investment in the institutionalized lyric? Finally, if, as I will argue, the gathering at the National Poetry Festival ultimately failed to imagine a kind of poetry that could take measure of the prospect of nuclear war, what would be immediate legacy of the period’s characteristic poetics?
Please contact "$":mailto:sarah.apetrei@campion.ox.ac.uk for the Teams link to join remotely.
President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi is remaking the Egyptian republic. This involves a double rupture with the First Republic: radical redefinition of the social contract that was established in the decade following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 into an ethos of “nothing for free,” and transformation of the presidential system to concentrate Sisi’s powers to normalize a juridical state of exception and recast the republic in the mould of permanent military guardianship. The Second Republic is further characterized by a constant striving to eliminate public politics, and by reliance on an ersatz ideology and the blurring of boundaries between public and private capital to compensate for the deliberate avoidance of organic class alliances. This is why, arguably, Sisi’s new republic cannot achieve social hegemony, setting in contrast with otherwise analogous experiences spanning the 20th century, from fascism in Italy and Spain to the Latin American “bureaucratic authoritarian” states.
The conference 'Christian Humanism and the Black Atlantic' (June 6-7) will open with the annual McDonald Public Lecture being given by Paul Gilroy. Winner of the highly prestigious Holberg Prize in 2019, Gilroy is an eminent public intellectual and one of the world’s leading scholars of race and racism. Professor Gilroy will reflect on the need to recover a notion of shared humanity and what he calls “reparative humanism.” A reception at St Cross, adjacent to Pusey House, follows the lecture. Given space limitations, attendance at this free, public lecture requires registration.
The last few decades have seen East Asian governments provide increasing support for startups—new, high-growth, technologically oriented firms. This “startup capitalism”—an economic and political system in which startups contribute to employment, innovation, and growth—can take multiple forms. Startups can be envisaged as disruptors, as engines for catalysing new industries and technologies, or as resources for large incumbent firms. In Schumpeterian logic, startups can foster creative destruction, or they can fuel oligopolistic competition. This talk explores how and why startup policies vary across China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. It emphasizes how the Taiwanese government approach has tended to conceive of startups for their ability to foster new technologies, such as biotech and greentech, rather than as boosters for established sectors. This is distinct from the Japanese and Korean approach, which has often worked to embed startups in open innovation systems led by big business. The talk will explore the ways in which the different approaches to startup capitalism reflect each locale’s institutional logics. About the Speakers Dr Robyn Klingler-Vidra is Vice Dean, Global Engagement, and Reader in Political Economy & Entrepreneurship at King’s Business School, King's College London. She is the author of The Venture Capital State: The Silicon Valley Model in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018), Inclusive Innovation (with Alex Glennie and Courtney Savie Lawrence, Routledge, 2022), and Startup Capitalism: New Approaches to Innovation Strategies in East Asia (with Ramon Pacheco Pardo, Cornell University Press, 2025). Her research focuses on entrepreneurship, innovation, and venture capital and has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including International Affairs, International Studies Quarterly, New Political Economy, Regulation & Governance, Socio-Economic Review, and World Development. Robyn obtained her BA in Political Science at the University of Michigan and her MSc and PhD in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Professor Ramon Pacheco Pardo is Professor of International Relations at King’s College London and the KF-VUB Korea Chair at the Brussels School of Governance. He also serves as Adjunct Fellow with the Korea Chair at CSIS and on advisory committees for organisations including the Jeju Forum and the Reset Korea Campaign. His publications include North Korea: Survival of a Political Dynasty (Agenda Publishing, 2024), Korea: A New History of South & North (Yale University Press, 2023; with Victor Cha), South Korea's Grand Strategy: Making Its Own Destiny (Columbia University Press, 2023), Shrimp to Whale: South Korea from the Forgotten War to K-Pop (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2022), and North Korea-US Relations from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un (Routledge, 2019). Prof Pacheco Pardo has participated in international dialogues, testified before the European Parliament, and advised NATO, the OECD, and several governments. He is also a columnist for JoongAng Ilbo and a media commentator on East Asia and Europe-Indo-Pacific relations. Dr Bo-jiun Jing, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, will be hosting the event.
This lecture offers attendees the opportunity to hear Professor Graham Ward examine the work of the Holy Spirit in the operation of salvation. It treats the formation and salvation of persons, and how the Latin persona becomes important. It treats the difference, though not in a derogatory way, between spiritual formation and well-being, building upon the Pauline distinctions between the body (soma), the mind (psychê) and the spirit (pneuma). Drawing upon Scripture and evolutionary biology, Professor Graham Ward describes the educational process involved in being formed, showing that form is an emergent property as it is in evolutionary biology. It is not something that can either be predicted or prescribed. The Spirit works upon us at profound emotional and dispositional levels, beneath cognition and language so we have to come to terms with all that is hidden (mystêrion). Suffering plays an important pedagogical role in that. Biographies play a role in that. They are the means by which we are “sounded through”, and in being “sounded through” we come into our distinctive personhood in Christ.
Coming soon
The Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that attendance at the Surgical Grand Rounds can count toward internal CPD, with 1 point awarded per hour. Please note that in-person attendance is required, and you will need to sign the attendance register. Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend online.
'Christian Humanism and the Black Atlantic' explores Christian humanism, its theological and moral roots, and its articulation in the context of what Paul Gilroy calls the ‘Black Atlantic’. It examines the shape and focus of Christian humanism as it emerges from the history that connects Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Americas in a tangled web of material, cultural, and religious ties from the 15th century onwards. Whether it is the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Atlantic slave trade, modern imperialism, industrialisation, the Westphalian order of nation-states, or the creation of modern banking and monetary systems, the afterlife of this world lives on in our world, and indeed as our world. The conference challenges reductive narratives of Christianity's history, exploring its emergence as a ‘creolized’ faith, one formed through varied often brutal interactions in the Atlantic basin. It addresses the complex, contested interpretations of Christianity's past, and aims for nuanced theological reflection on its impacts. An ongoing question the conference will explore is whether Christian humanism represents a constructive alternative to the use of Christianity to support forms of ethno-religious nationalism in the contemporary Atlantic context.
The J H Elliott History Forum has the objects to preserve, promote and disseminate the intellectual legacy of Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford between 1991 and 1997, by means of supporting individuals and institutions engaged in the fields of his research, and encouraging future generations to share an interest in history and an awareness of its role in shaping global events. The Inaugural Symposium of the J H Elliott History Forum will focus on some of the main directions in current research that intersect with the contribution of Sir John Elliott to the field of early modern history. It will provide a unique opportunity to engage with cutting-edge scholarship with special reference to Atlantic and Mediterranean history. Participants will include leading early modern historians as well as early career researchers, including some of the past and present Sir John Elliott Fellows in Oxford and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The Symposium is sponsored by the J H Elliott History Forum, the Faculty of History of the University of Oxford, and Exeter College, Oxford. *_Please see website for programme and FAQs_*: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/event/early-modern-history-in-the-making-the-j-h-elliott-history-forum-inaugural-symposium
Can life-writing, centred on human experience as it is, be ecological? Or is the genre fundamentally (even deleteriously) ‘egocentric’? Do we pay enough attention to representations of the more-than-human when we write and read life-writing, especially in the searing light of climate catastrophe? And how does a conception of ‘life-writing’ shift from the standpoint of philosophical systems or Indigenous cultures whose definitions of ‘life’ may be more capacious than ours? In this seminar, we’ll consider life-writing from various ecocritical angles, to interrogate these questions and more. Debates around the anthropocentrism or otherwise of nature writing, an enduringly popular genre, will frame our discussions as we weigh the importance of appraising ecology in our encounters with life-writing. Speaker Details: Riley Faulds is a writer who grew up in unceded Whadjuk, Bindjareb and Wadandi Noongar Country. His undergraduate degree was in Agricultural Science and English, and he worked as an environmental scientist before starting his MSt (and now DPhil) in World Literatures at Oxford. His poems have been published in various of Australia's best journals and have won prizes both at home and in the UK—but he saves his best work for birthday cards. He misses eucalypts on the daily. Preparation: Participants are encouraged to come with some thoughts about representations of the environment in their favourite works of life-writing. Further Details and Contacts: This is an in-person event and will not be recorded. Registration is required and will close one week before the event (5:30 pm on 30 May). Confirmations of successful registration will be sent out one week before the event. Please note that this event is exclusively open to current members of the University of Oxford. Workshop places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to members of the English Faculty. Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
Our visual perception of the world heavily relies on sophisticated and delicate biological mechanisms, and any disruption to these mechanisms negatively impacts our lives. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affects the central field of vision and has become increasingly common in our society, thereby generating a surge of academic and clinical interest. I will present some recent developments in the mathematical modeling of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) in the retina in the context of AMD; the RPE cell layer supports photoreceptor survival by providing nutrients and participating in the visual cycle and “cellular maintenance". Our objectives include modeling the aging and degeneration of the RPE with a mechanistic approach, as well as predicting the progression of atrophic lesions in the epithelial tissue. This is a joint work with the research team of Prof. M. Paques at Hôpital National des Quinze-Vingts.
Keen to explore your personal career strategy and learn how to get the most of your tine at Oxford? Join us for the Postdoc* Power Hour (*=and other research staff) in-person special to mark the PoPoH 2-year anniversary. We will run a session on how to assess and maximise your career happiness and goals, followed by 'speed-dating' with several careers advisers who will share their expertise and answer specific questions you may have. To join the event, please click "here": https://oxford.targetconnect.net/leap/event.html?id=22590&service=Careers%20Service
This talk provides an overview of research that seeks to understand how water quantity and quality respond to climate and other drivers of change. Such hydrological knowledge is imperative to unravel interacting processes, to assess uncertainties in space-time projections, and to develop sustainable water policies and adaptation strategies for the betterment of ecosystems and society in a changing world.
Join us for a frank and honest discussion about what it means to be ‘brave’ as academics and activists. This discussion has been inspired by a message sent into Race & Resistance by BAF scholar, Cerise Jackson, who is now reaching the end of their PhD journey and is exploring what bravery means for them, as a Black(ish) person in academia, as well as questioning what there is to gain from it. We also want to hear your personal experiences and opinions on the matter. Cerise Jackson (she/they) is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Their current ‘Black Anime’ project uses multi- and transdisciplinary methods, combining translation studies, critical race theory, and Japanese studies to explore the relationship between Japanese and Black identities in popular culture. Her doctorate specifically examines ‘Black Anime’ as a genre form emerging from digital and physical, fan and creator networks of solidarity and resistance. ---- Bluesky: raceresistance.bsky.social Subscribe to our mailing list by sending a blank email to: race-and-resistance-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Oxygen homeostasis has been a constant challenge to life on earth for at least the last ~600 million years, for which a number of distinct solutions have likely separately evolved. In mammals, the current repertoire of oxygen sensing mechanisms appears insufficient to explain the complexity of responses observed, which vary enormously in timing, magnitude and sensitivity. Our group is interested in defining new molecular mechanisms of oxygen sensing and matching these with unresolved physiological responses to hypoxia. In this talk I will cover our discovery of a new oxygen sensing pathway transduced through enzymatic N-terminal cysteine dioxygenation, and our efforts to better understand its role in integrated mammalian physiology, focusing on the regulation of cardiovascular system in response to hypoxia. SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY I received a B.Sc. in Physiology from King’s College London, where I then undertook a Ph.D. in vascular physiology with Giovanni Mann, exploring responses to low oxygen conditions in endothelial cells. I then joined Peter Ratcliffe’s lab in the Nuffield Department of Medicine in Oxford in 2018 to work on novel hypoxia signalling pathways. In 2020, I took up a Junior Research Fellowship in medical sciences at St. Catherine’s College, and in 2025 I moved to DPAG to start my own lab, funded by a BHF Intermediate Basic Sciences Research Fellowship and Wellcome Discovery Award.
A talk that looks at how political and social forces have contributed and reinforced gender roles, inequalities and power dynamics down the years for Myanmar. It will travel back to the past to explore the structures of patriarchy and socialization which restricted women from attaining centralized leadership roles in the twin public domains of politics and religion, assess the messages of both female-empowerment and disempowerment that was represented by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as focus on the present - how women are taking the current political crisis as an opportunity to reshape the narrative of women’s role in society in addition to opposing the military takeover. Trends and pitfalls of the new era of female activism will be discussed and important insights into the debate on gender and political change in societies affected by conflict will be offered.
This paper proposes econometric methods for studying how economic variables respond to function-valued shocks. Our methods are developed based on linear projection estimation of predictive regression models with a function-valued predictor and other control variables. We show that the linear projection coefficient associated with the functional variable allows for the impulse response interpretation in a functional structural vector autoregressive model under a certain identification scheme, similar to well-known Sims' (1972) causal chain, but with nontrivial complications in our functional setup. A novel estimator based on an operator Schur complement is proposed and its asymptotic properties are studied. We illustrate its empirical applicability with two examples involving functional variables: economy sentiment distributions and functional monetary policy shocks.
The lecture will provide an introduction to the book with the same title, co-authored with Michael Richter and published in 2024. The book is freely downable from Ariel's home page: https://arielrubinstein.org
See https://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/event/the-jowett-society-friday-week-6-tt25 for updates.
Dr Yun earned a BSc in Molecular Biology from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Genetics and Biochemistry from Cambridge University at the MRC-Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where she focused on the mechanisms underlying genome stability. During her doctoral studies she became interested in the control of cellular plasticity and thus joined Jeremy Brockes’ lab (University College London) where she begun to explore the mechanisms underlying regeneration of complex structures using salamanders as model organisms. Since September 2017 she is a group leader at CRTD-Center for Regenerative Therapies TU Dresden and Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Germany. Her current research leverages the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) and the Iberian ribbed newt (Pleurodeles waltl) systems to uncover fundamental principles of regeneration and ageing.
As we listen to speech, our brains actively compute the meaning (semantics) of individual words. Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs), we hypothesized that the brain employs vectorial coding principles for semantics. Just as LLMs represent meaning using patterns of numbers, we wondered if the brain might do something similar - using patterns of activity across many neurons to represent what words mean. To test this, we recorded from hundreds of individual neurons in the human hippocampus, a brain area known to support memory and meaning, while people listened to stories. We found that groups of neurons respond differently depending on a word’s meaning, especially when the meaning depends on the context of the sentence – just like how language models like BERT work. In contrast, models that ignore context, like Word2Vec, didn’t match brain patterns as well. Interestingly, we also saw that when two words are very similar in meaning, the brain sometimes makes their patterns more different, possibly to keep them from being confused. This kind of contrastive coding may help the brain sharpen subtle differences. We also found that words with more than one meaning (like “bank”) evoked a wider range of brain responses, highlighting the role of context even more. Overall, our results suggest that the human hippocampus encodes meaning using flexible, context-sensitive patterns similar to the vector-based systems used in modern AI.
TBC
Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 19-23 Supplementary: William Morris, ‘Makeshift’ (1894)
Designed for present and past medical students, doctors in training and other healthcare professionals, this seminar will focus on personal qualities and managing services. It will also include developing self-awareness, managing yourself, building and maintaining relationships, developing networks, working with teams and managing people.
IDEAL 2025 is an exciting event where experts in the field will come together to discuss the latest advancements in surgical research. Join us at the Houston Methodist Research Institute for a day filled with insightful presentations, interactive workshops, and networking opportunities. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a student interested in the field, this event is perfect for anyone looking to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in surgical research. Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity to learn from the best in the industry!
Are you looking to learn about the ways in which to transmit scientific ideas and make your research accessible to a non-specialist audience through a variety of mediums? This session will serve as an introduction to science communication and how it can be successfully incorporated into our roles. By the end of this session you will be able to: define science communication and provide a list of examples; explain why science communication is important for both our CPD and the public; and list ways in which we can all get involved in science communication. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
9th-11th June 2025 Registrations will open soon Queen Mary University of London The Erlangen AI Hub conference will bring together leading minds from across the UK’s mathematical, algorithmic and computational communities to advance the application of pure mathematics in AI. Join us at Queen Mary University of London from 9th-11th June and be a part of our exciting programme that aims to unite and revolutionise the field, to establish the mathematical foundations of AI and to then unlock new and improved AI systems. Registration includes access to a series of plenary and short talks across the three-day event. Lunch and refreshments will also be provided. We are inviting submissions for poster presentations for a limited number of posters. They will be presented on the 1st day of our conference, Monday 9th of June. Poster topics should be accessible to both academia and industry and ideally, will showcase unconventional mathematical techniques applied to problems in machine learning theory and AI practice. You will be required to print and bring your own poster (standard A0 size, in portrait layout). The organising team will set them up in the morning of the 10th of June (or earlier, if you plan to attend the whole conference) and they will be visible throughout the day (or whole conference). The poster session will take place from 4pm-5pm on the 9th of June where poster presenters will be expected to stand by and present their work. Please send a title and abstract of your poster to erlangenhub@cs.ox.ac.uk. Deadline for submissions: Monday 19 May 2025. The conference will take place in the Maths Building, Queen Mary University of London from 9-11 June 2025.
This paper studies the relationship between economic prosperity and religion through the lens of social norms. In a social equilibrium framework, where a society is one realization of many possible equilibria, we model how the Albanian government increased female participation in education and employment by changing the social equilibrium through credibly committing to communist ideals. This shift was accomplished by declaring Albania the First Atheist country in the world in 1967 and the de-sanctification of its religious buildings, excluding those deemed national cultural monuments 20 years prior. Exploiting this unique natural experiment, we use this variation in spared buildings to measure the credibility of the government’s commitment to female emancipation in each municipality. In doing so, our main focus is on citizens’ faith in the state’s commitment, rather than their faith in religion. Using forty years of hand-transcribed administrative data, we show that in the decades following the reform, municipalities in which all religious buildings were de-sanctified experienced higher growth in female schooling, labor market participation, and production. Supplementary analysis, exploiting the Demographic and Health Survey data on social norms, shows that the reform has had lasting improvement of female empowerment. We argue that the Albanian government changed social norms through the banning of religion to achieve their policy goals.
To optimise learning in education remains an ongoing challenge. This study aims to identify an indicator for learning from physiological data, developing a quantitative video data analysis to link sensory input and movement to learning through sympathetic activation. Such measures are believed to help improve teaching quality by enabling assessment of different instructional activities, even within one lesson, due to the high temporal resolution. More specifically, this is done by quantifying brightness, brightness change, loudness, and AI-estimated movement from video data and validating their predictive power for electrodermal activity (EDA). EDA is a well-known indicator of sympathetic activation, i.e., the system behind the ‘fight or flight’ response. To this end, pre/post-tests, video, and EDA data were collected from 12 students (17-18 y) taking part in a physics lesson where instructional activities were varied and in a laboratory experiment with 100 students (12-21 y) watching two different versions of one instructional video, which only differed in strength of sensory input. Findings indicate a causal relationship between sensory input and sympathetic activation. Moreover, an EDA variable correlating with learning was identified and found to vary according to different instructional activities and could be predicted by sensory input strength but not movement. These findings imply that video data can be used to assess sensory input and movement, whilst EDA measures can inform research on student learning. Both measures work on short timescales, making them appropriate for comparing different instructional activities within school lessons. Join on Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OTNiZGM1MzItOTcwOS00YThjLWJmYTAtZGFjZGM1YzkyNjQw%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2275f39f15-fefd-45cf-b904-2e2174db4aa1%22%7d
Curious about AI but don’t code? 🤔 Join us for a hands-on workshop exploring AI for Humanists – no programming required! Learn how no-code/ low-code tools can help transcribe manuscripts, analyse interviews, and unlock new research possibilities in the humanities. Discover how AI can power your next project – and help you pitch it too. 📍 Hosted by Digital Scholarship @ Oxford
Peter Ly received his B.A. in Biology from Baylor University and Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from UT Southwestern Medical Center. During graduate training with Jerry Shay and Woodring Wright, he studied how aneuploidy – an abnormal number of chromosomes – promotes malignant transformation. He conducted postdoctoral training at the University of California San Diego and Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research with Don Cleveland, where he developed chromosome-specific mis-segregation approaches to reconstruct the mechanisms leading to complex genomic rearrangements. In 2019, Dr. Ly joined the faculty of UT Southwestern Medical Center as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research. He holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Cell Biology and is a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center as part of the Cellular Networks in Cancer Program. He has been a member of the American Society for Cell Biology since 2013.
The overlapping incidence of poverty and climate damages globally raises the question of whether and how poverty makes people more vulnerable to worsening weather shocks. To study this question, we overlay high-resolution, satellite-based drought and flood measures on household survey panel data from the randomized evaluation of a flagship anti-poverty graduation program in Bangladesh. The comparison of households that were equally poor before a randomly chosen group of them were given the graduation program reveals that the poorest bear the brunt of negative consumption impacts from unpredictable weather shocks. Those lifted out of poverty by the program do not reduce consumption and this protection is sustainable because it is achieved by diversifying labor activities rather than divesting assets. Programs that diversify income generating activities are thus a promising means of enhancing the climate resilience of the extreme poor and avoiding adding to their numbers in the future.
Do you want to make sure your work is ‘REFable’ per the new REF open access requirements? In this focused online briefing, we will: step you through the changes and new requirements; provide links to further REF information and guidance; let you know where to find help at Oxford; and answer as many questions as we can. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers, other staff.
Understanding how brain activity is related to animal behavior requires measuring multi-area interactions on timescales ranging from milliseconds to months. However, methods to perform long-term, electrical recordings are not optimized to record from many brain areas simultaneously. Here, we introduce the indie (independent dovetail implants for electrophysiology), a novel approach for multi-probe chronic probe implantation that enables flexible, simultaneous interrogation of neural activity from many brain regions during head restrained or freely moving behavior. The approach enables repeated retrieval and reimplantation of probes and can be combined with other modalities such as skull clearing for cortex wide optical access and optic fibers for optogenetics. Using the indie, we implanted 6 probes chronically in one hemisphere of the mouse brain and obtained stable single-unit recordings for over 1 year. The implant is lightweight, allows flexible targeting with different implantation angles, and offers enhanced stability. We validate the approach by comparing longitudinal drift and unit yield with acute recordings and irretrievably cemented probes. In a freely moving preparation, we implant up to 4 probes in freely moving mice without impacting open-field exploratory behaviors. We then performed multi-region, chronic recordings as mice learned a visual decision-making task and characterized the evolution of choice information and inter-region interactions over learning. Thus, our approach broadens the applications of chronic recording while retaining its main advantages over acute recordings (superior stability, longitudinal monitoring of activity and freely moving interrogations) and provides an appealing venue to study processes not accessible by acute methods, such as the neural substrate of learning across multiple areas.
In medieval universities, astronomy and astrology were taught as part of the mathematical sciences (_quadrivium_) in the Faculty of Arts curriculum. As shown by the official statutes, there was a relative marginalization of the teaching of mathematics compared to natural philosophy at the University of Paris and Oxford. However, this does not accurately reflect the actual transmission of scientific knowledge within the university setting at that time. As will be demonstrated in this paper, a teaching did take place, but outside of the established framework and encompassed two types of learning. The first type was confined to introductory or elementary texts and was predominantly intended for the Faculty of Arts. Concurrent with this propaedeutic learning was the more expert practice of the science of the stars by masters experienced in the subject and pursuing studies in one of the three higher faculties, most often the faculties of theology and medicine. These medieval scholars collaborated with one another, transmitting their knowledge to disciples and producing astronomical and astrological texts of a high level of expertise. This paper will examine the ways in which astronomy and astrology were learned and practiced in these two different settings, with a special focus on groups of medieval scholars, experts in the _cientia stellarum_. *Dr Laure Miolo* is currently the Lyell Fellow in Latin Palaeography and Dilts Fellow at Lincoln College. She teaches Latin and French palaeography, diplomatic and manuscript studies at the University of Oxford. Her research concentrates on manuscript production and use, their scribes, scripts and contents, and the history of medieval libraries, with a particular focus on scientific books and practices. She is particularly interested in the production and circulation of scientific manuscripts in medieval universities. She has published a number of articles on the subject. Amongst her more recent publications is the co-edition of a special issue of the Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes dedicated to the relationship between astronomy and astrology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Her book on the scientific collection of the early collège de Sorbonne (1257–1500) will be published in 2026 by Brepols.
This talk challenges two myths about Indian liberalism. The first is that Indian liberalism is "a sensibility rather than a theory." The second is that Indian liberals "collaborated" with the British Raj. Both of these views are mistaken, as I will show by examining Letters to an Indian Raja (1891), the first work of political theory published in modern India. This long-lost work reveals that Indian liberalism was a form of liberal perfectionism—the view that political authority should be exercised paternalistically to promote a liberal vision of human flourishing. This vision sought to liberate individuals from various debilitating forces, including unthinking tradition, gross ignorance, and destructive greed. Furthermore, far from justifying British rule, Letters to an Indian Raja aimed to make the Native States less susceptible to both domineering Britons and despotic Maharajas. In sum, this talk suggests that the two myths surrounding Indian liberalism are the result of scholars focusing on the wrong people and the wrong place. By focusing on the grievances raised and compromises made by liberals in British India, they have overlooked what Indian liberals imagined and tried to do in Indian India. Rahul Sagar is a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor at Princeton University and Global Network Associate Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. His most recent books include The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and Science of Government (2022) and Krishna Kumari: The Tragedy of India (2024).
The departure of the UK from the European Union in January 2020 has had a profound effect on the UK’s higher education sector. This has been particularly marked in relation to the international mobilities of students – both into the UK, and from the UK to other nations. The UK left the European Union’s Erasmus+ mobility programme, replacing it with its own ‘Turing Scheme’, while EU students moving to the UK, to study for the whole of a degree, became liable for full international fees (rather than the much lower ‘domestic’ fees that they paid prior to Brexit). Drawing on various sources of empirical data, this lecture will explore the nature and impact of ‘post-Brexit’ student mobilities. It will consider changing patterns of inward and outward mobility – as part of short-term schemes as well as for the whole of a degree – and how these articulate with government policy and discourse. It will also document the rise of various new mobility infrastructures related to post-Brexit student mobilities. Register here for online attendance: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/f01a78e2-bff3-461e-8cd4-6bbb4ce4179f@cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91
Join Steve Crawshaw in conversation with David Isaac as he discusses his latest book on the pursuit of international justice. Steve Crawshaw studied Russian and German at Worcester College and went on to become Russia & East Europe Editor, Chief Foreign Correspondent and other roles at the newly formed Independent. In 2002 he joined Human Rights Watch as the organisation’s first UK director, and moved from there to join Amnesty International in 2010. He has written books on Russia, Germany and creative protest. His latest book is Prosecuting the Powerful: War Crimes and the Battle for Justice — including observations from his travels on the front lines of justice in Ukraine, Israel/Palestine and at The Hague in recent years. Baroness Helena Kennedy described Prosecuting the Powerful as “a brilliant call for justice”. BBC News World Affairs Editor John Simpson said the book had “all the force of a well crafted thriller”. Steve will be in conversation with David Isaac, Provost of Worcester College, on some of the extraordinary stories of how international justice has built up over recent years and beyond — despite the dramatic challenges posed by those who are determined to continue or deepen the double standards of the past. Can those dangerous double standards be confronted? If so, how?
This talk will provide an overview of the iCT-SAD programme for treating adults with social anxiety. It will outline a series of empirical studies conducted in the UK, Hong Kong, and Japan evaluating the efficacy, effectiveness, and cross-cultural suitability of the programme. It will offer reflections on using the programme as a therapist and supervisor, considering how this might contract with traditional in-person therapy approches. This seminar will be hosted as part of a two-part seminar in the Department of Psychiatry Seminar room and online. To join online, please use the Zoom link below: zoom.us/j/92620728590?pwd=s1JefrGff6bN0nZZcHSTBkCw8Z1RlT.1 Meeting ID: 926 2072 8590 Passcode: 196542
SHAPE is a brief, telephone-based coaching intervention which was developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to support healthcare workers experiencing PTSD and depression. Drawing on cognitive therapy for PTSD (CT-PTSD) and research into cognitive and behavioural risk factors in healthcare workers, the intervention was tailored to address the specific challenges of frontline healthcare roles. The session will summarise findings from the pilot study, including symptom outcomes across assessment points and recovery rates. it will also reflect on the practical application of CT-PTSD techniques in a coaching format, and consider the translation into an RCT. This seminar is part of a two-part talk hosted in the Department of Psychiatry Seminar Room and online. To join online, please use the joining link below: zoom.us/j/92620728590?pwd=s1JefrGff6bN0nZZcHSTBkCw8Z1RlT.1 Meeting ID: 926 2072 8590 Passcode: 196542
Chris Garcia is the Younger Family Professor and Professor of Structural Biology at the Departments of Molecular and Cellular Physiology and Structural Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a member of the National Academies of Science and Medicine. The Garcia Lab research integrates structural biology, biochemistry, and protein engineering approaches to understanding how cell surface receptors detect, integrate, and propagate signalling upon engagement of extracellular ligands. His Lab aims to elucidate the structural and mechanistic basis of receptor activation, including the T cell receptor. For more information: https://med.stanford.edu/garcialab.html
COURSE DETAILS Issues covered will include work-life balance, planning, prioritising, the need to differentiate between importance and urgency, and using a range of strategies and time-saving ideas. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will understand more about: A range of time saving techniques. Time wasting activities and learn how to deal with them. The difference between important and urgent. The importance of planning and setting time aside.
This session provides doctoral students in the third year and above with information about the viva, guidance on planning a proactive approach to it, and opportunities to practise. COURSE DETAILS The course will look at the rules and expectations of the viva exam and identify and practise practical ways to prepare. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the session participants will be able to: Develop their awareness and understanding of the rules and expectations of the viva exam. Use tools and strategies to prepare for the exam. Develop an awareness of the examiner's perspective. Know what to expect of the exam.
Our ability to pursue self-generated goals over extended timeframes is central to human cognition and behaviour. However, scientific studies of these higher-order action processes have traditionally fallen into two isolated research domains. On one hand, executive function research has uncovered a great deal about how our brain coordinates complex action sequences to solve multi-step problems. On the other hand, research on volition has begun to unravel the neural mechanisms that enable us to initiate actions independent of immediate external stimuli. However, to date both camps have neglected the intimate connections between these two processes: many complex problems can be solved in multiple ways, and thus choosing and generating our own path is central to reaching an effective solution. In this talk, I will present findings from behavioural, neuroimaging (fMRI), and EEG studies that examine how volition and problem solving are interconnected in the human brain. In combination, these results reveal new connections between the brain mechanisms underpinning problem solving and volitional action – and suggest that the ability to generate our own courses of action is more central to problem solving than we might usually appreciate.
COURSE DETAILS The supervisory relationship is key to the success of your DPhil and we know that positive and effective relationships contribute to the timely completion of the doctorate. As with many things, the more you put into the relationship with your supervisor, the more you will benefit from it. There is much you can do to be proactive and play and active role in the relationship. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the session participants will be able to: Find information about University, divisional and departmental regulations and the supervisory relationship. Be aware of the student's areas of responsibility in the relationship. Take appropriate responsibility within the relationship. Develop a range of skills and strategies to manage relationships effectively. Find and make appropriate use of additional sources of help and support.
Faculty Presentations
This workshop outlines some of the key principles to bear in mind when working with sensitive or restricted research; whether collected yourself or obtained from a third-party source such as a data archive. Issues of confidentiality, informed consent, cybersecurity and data management will be covered. Examples of scenarios or concerns drawn from the research of participants are particularly welcome. The role of support services at Oxford will also be outlined and in particular the role of the Bodleian Data Librarian who will lead the session. Follow up consultations with the Data librarian or other subject consultants are also offered. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
A recent review of Australian higher education advocated bold new targets for system growth and equity. Arguing that 90 per cent of future jobs would require postsecondary qualifications, the Australian Universities Accord sought parity of participation for groups such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and people from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds, by 2050. Widening participation in higher education relies on multiple policy reforms, including greater financial support and more effective outreach. However, university expansion also relies on school reform. While resourcing inequities between private and public schools have been well-documented, the practices of streaming, or tracking, students within schools have received less attention. Drawing on recent analysis of state and territory government data, I will highlight the extent of streaming within secondary schools, and the way that such streaming inhibits attempts to widen university participation. In some states, around half of senior secondary students are streamed into vocational pathways, and very few of those students subsequently transition directly to higher education. Students over-represented within vocational streams typically include low SES, Indigenous, Māori and Pasifika students, as well as those in out-of-home care. The high proportion of marginalised secondary students in vocational streams requires new university approaches to outreach and engagement. The session will highlight how universities can develop new pathways, dual enrolment offerings, and place-based approaches to increase the participation of marginalised students. I will also address the broader policy implications of the 2025 election result for widening participation.
Kadir Akdemir, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Neurosurgery at MD Anderson. Dr Akdemir has been part of the several international genomic efforts such as the International Cancer Genome Consortia’s pan-cancer whole-genome analyses initiative and NIH’s 4Dnucleome comprehensive chromatin profiling initiative. He holds multiple foundation grants. He is collaborating with the world-renowned brain cancer researchers by being a part of the MD Anderson’s SPORE in Brain Cancer Program, GBM Moonshot program and the Break Through Cancer’s GBM program. His lab has developed a large set of techniques to study mechanisms and patterns of chromatin folding and somatic rearrangements that occur in cancer genomes during neoplastic transformation.
Efforts to use genome-wide assays or brain scans to diagnose autism have seen diminishing returns. Yet the clinical intuition of healthcare professionals, based on longstanding first-hand experience, remains the gold standard for diagnosis of autism. We leveraged deep learning to deconstruct and interrogate the logic of expert clinician intuition from clinical reports to inform our understanding of autism. After pre-training on hundreds of millions of general sentences, we finessed large language models (LLMs) on >4,000 free-form health records from healthcare professionals to distinguish confirmed versus suspected autism cases. By introducing an explainability strategy, our extended language model architecture could pin down the most salient single sentences in what drives clinical thinking toward correct diagnoses. Our framework flagged the most autism-critical DSM-5 criteria to be stereotyped repetitive behaviors, special interests, and perception-based behaviors, which challenges today’s focus on deficits in social interplay, suggesting necessary revision of long-trusted diagnostic criteria in gold-standard instruments.
Suffering is strongly associated with war, but not with its aftermath. In spite of its ambiguity the post-war period represents a transformation from humanitarian crisis to development and peacebuilding. Consequently references to suffering are replaced by political, economic, social ‘challenges’ and ‘issues’ that fail to accurately and fully represent the experience of most war survivors, especially women who often make up a larger percentage of the population. Responding to this gap, this presentation conceptualises ‘compounded suffering’ as the complex amalgamation of multiple forms of suffering: mental, physical and emotional; grief, pain, agony, torture, hurt, trauma, anxiety, stress, difficulty, produced by the unique conditions of the post-war context, which in coming together, aggravates and intensifies. The post-war context produces a typology of suffering that is distinct in form and extent fundamentally because it is shaped through an acute, real and continuing threat to human life and security, preceded by the trauma and experience of extensive death, loss and destruction. Suffering is compounded by women’s ‘entanglement’ with power specific to the post-war context, where structural and other forms of violence are pervasive and ideologies and methods of war remain amidst the pretext of change and transformation. In conceptualising, the talk seeks to acknowledge and recognise compounded suffering and, through this, to contribute to a more genuine and accurate understanding, analysis and response to women’s post-war experience. Dr Farah Mihlar is a British-Sri Lankan activist scholar who specialises in transitional justice and minority rights. She is a senior lecturer in human rights at Oxford Brookes University (OBU) and is the lead investigator of a British Academy project on women's justice struggles in Lebanon and Sri Lanka. Before joining OBU she was a lecturer in conflict studies for the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter. Prior to academia, Farah had a longstanding career in human rights practice, working for international organisations including the United Nations, International Crisis Group and Minority Rights Group International.
Description: The seminar will explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, AI, and technological innovation, co-taught by a philosopher and a technologist. The seminar will welcome a variety of visiting discussants from philosophy, computer science, and the technology industry throughout term. The focus will be on how a concern for human flourishing can be embedded in the global technology development pipeline, and on exploring how broader bridges can be built between philosophy and technology. The seminar is primarily aimed at philosophy graduate students and computer science graduate students but participants from other levels and areas are welcome. Topics include: truth-seeking AI, privacy, collective intelligence, decentralization in science and AI, and approaches to human autonomy. The seminar culminates in a clinic to facilitate grant applications for independent summer projects on the themes of the seminar. Fast grants: New for this year, Cosmos Ventures has established a dedicated funding pool that seminar participants can apply to for independent summer building projects on related themes. Prerequisites: please email HAI Lab philipp.koralus@philosophy.ox.ac.uk no later than April 27th with a (very) brief explanation of your interest in the seminar to reserve a spot, and the subject line “TT Seminar”. Space limited to maintain quality of discussion. Readings: ● Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government, Ch. 2, “Of the Individual Man and the Highest Ends of his Existence” ● Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2, Part 4, Ch. 6, “What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear” ● Maples, “Designing for Human Autonomy in an Age of AI” (presentation of research and framework for design)
We study the impact of financial aid on upward mobility. An unprecedented financial aid reform in Colombia dramatically increased the enrollment of academically successful students of low socioeconomic status (SES) in high-quality universities. We leverage the policy's stringent eligibility criteria and population-wide administrative microdata, using regression discontinuity (RD) and difference-in-difference (DD) methodologies to estimate causal effects on later-life educational and labor-market outcomes. The program notably boosted attendance of low-SES high-achievers at colleges with high value-added, increasing their returns to ability. Low-SES students are more likely to obtain bachelor's degrees from these colleges, especially in STEM fields, and they achieve higher scores in the college graduation exam. Nine years later, their earnings are 18 log points higher, with a greater likelihood of being in the top 1%, reflecting increased upper-tail mobility. The policy successfully narrowed socioeconomic gaps in college quality, attainment, skill development, earnings, and the returns to ability.
This paper challenges the notion that the military revolution of the sixteenth century was the crucial determinant in the emergence of centralized fiscal-military states in central Europe. Instead, it argues that warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is best characterized by the notion of the ‘contractor state’ which relied on professional military enterprisers (“mercenaries”) to wage war. It does so by investigating the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) which was one of the largest and most destructive conflicts of pre-industrial Europe involving nearly all of its major powers. Based on novel, granular data the paper proves that urban financial contributions were extracted by military enterprisers and that these exceeded centrally-collected imperial contributions. In consequence, average household wealth declined by 37 percent during this period and urban debt crippled long-run investment.
With the impacts of climate change increasingly evident, actions by key institutions of society ebb and flow. Governments need to use carrots and sticks so that we internalize the harms we are doing to others and to future generations. But business needs to innovate and change its practices to lower our burden on the planet and to help us adapt to the hardships we will face coping with extreme weather, sea level rise, and more. The last decade has seen the emergence of business alliances devoted to addressing various aspects of climate change. They are denounced from the left as mere greenwashing and attacked from the right for being anti-competitive. Missing from this debate is evidence. In May's Balliol Online Lecture, Professor Peter Tufano will explain what business alliances seek to achieve and how they operate. With lawsuits mounting, especially in the US, he will ask: have they changed management practices, reduced emissions, violated antitrust laws, harmed shareholders, or been subterfuge for anti-climate lobbying? Peter Tufano is Special Supernumerary Fellow at Balliol and Emeritus Peter Moores Professor of Finance at Saïd Business School, which he also led as Dean from 2011 to 2021. He is a Baker Foundation Professor and Senior Advisor to the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard Business School. Between 1989 to 2011, he oversaw Harvard Business School’s tenure and promotion processes, campus planning, and university relations and was the founding co-chair of the Harvard i-lab. His research focuses on climate finance, climate alliances, and the financial impact of climate on households. His body of work also spans financial innovation, financial engineering, and household finance, which has been credited with influencing several major US policy initiatives, including the creation of a new class of savings products.
This paper challenges the notion that the military revolution of the sixteenth century was the crucial determinant in the emergence of centralized fiscal-military states in central Europe. Instead, it argues that warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is best characterized by the notion of the ‘contractor state’ which relied on professional military enterprisers (“mercenaries”) to wage war. It does so by investigating the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) which was one of the largest and most destructive conflicts of pre-industrial Europe involving nearly all of its major powers. Based on novel, granular data the paper proves that urban financial contributions were extracted by military enterprisers and that these exceeded centrally-collected imperial contributions. In consequence, average household wealth declined by 37 percent during this period and urban debt crippled long-run investment. *If you would like to meet the speaker before the seminar, please sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/23druvdp*
All welcome; refreshments provided
Join us for the third Massada Annual Lecture with Professor Mouna Maroun. Professor Maroun is a distinguished Arab-Israeli neurobiologist with a PhD in psychobiology from the University of Haifa and a postdoc from Paris XI Orsay, France. Since October 2024, she has served as the Rector of the University of Haifa – the first Arab to lead a higher education institution in Israel. She has been a faculty member for over 20 years and has held several official positions within and outside the university, including as Chair of the Neurobiology Department and Chair of the National Steering Committee for Expanding Access to Higher Education for Arabs, Druze, and Circassians. Registration is open to all members of the University of Oxford and is based on adherence to the principles of promoting freedom of speech as detailed in the terms and conditions of attendance. Please remember to bring your University Card or other form of photo ID to the event.
This colloquium contributes to current conversations on the potential for participatory music-making to promote sustainable human coexistence. We attend to the experiences and collaborative learning practices of teachers working in a community music school and outreach initiative known as the King’s Music Academy, based in Southwark, London. In order to interrogate how teachers make sense of their experience at the Academy, qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed through interpretative phenomenological analysis. Findings suggest that participation in the Academy facilitates processes of self-reflection, personal growth and cultural exchange among teachers. Teachers become part of an organic network where innovative pedagogical practices are discussed and adopted. We conclude that the development of certain ‘rhizomatic’ attitudes and structures in the context of the classroom can contribute to imagining alternative ways of thinking about the self, music-making and society at large.
COURSE DETAILS This introductory session, tailored to those new to policy engagement, is designed to support MPLS researchers, DPhil students, and professional services staff, in transforming their motivations for impact into a structured understanding of how to get started in academic-policy engagement. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will have: A better understanding of the differences between policy influence, impact, and engagement. An enhanced understanding of the policy process at different levels of government (local, regional, national and international). An increased awareness of practical tools and strategies to start creating a policy engagement plan.
COURSE DETAILS The session will cover: What makes a good DPhil Planning to write up your DPhil – structure, content and what makes good writing What the viva will explore What the examiners are asked to consider FAQs and Q&A LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the session participants will be able to: Engage productively with the final stages of the DPhil. Apply a range of time management techniques. Identify and apply the characteristics of effective writing. Apply effective structure to the thesis. Understand what is required in the viva. Take opportunities to raise and discuss concerns.
This talk addresses the concept of “Living Archives," which has evolved from my ongoing research as an ethnographer, filmmaker and archivist working with Palestinian refugee communities in Lebanon. It builds on the Nakba Archive––a grassroots testimonial initiative that has documented histories of forced expulsion of 1948––and is premised on the reimagining of archive as a creative, participatory practice that resists fixity and centers process. It draws inspiration from recent shifts in how Palestinian scholars, writers, and artists are rethinking mnemonic and documentary witness practices, and explores camp spaces as stateless archives, mnemonically embodied rather than institutionally housed.
Please join us for a hybrid book launch to celebrate the co-edited volume Japan in the Early Modern World. Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations. There will be a brief introduction to the book and a short panel discussion with the volume’s editors and authors. All are welcome.
Join via Microsoft Teams here: https://tinyurl.com/5d5s7x5k
COURSE DETAILS The session will introduce approaches to podcasting, present inspiration from a range of different podcast styles, and take you step-by-step through the basic technical skills of recording, editing and publishing audio files. You’ll have the chance to develop an idea and have a go recording it with support and feedback during the day. LEARNING OUTCOMES Upon completion of this course students will have an: Understanding of what podcasting is and its benefits in relation to communicating science to wider society. Ability to identify, develop and create narratives for the purposes of podcasting. Understanding of the skills required to record and edit audio, including making use of music and sound effects. Increased awareness of platforms for publishing podcast material.
In a big place like Oxford, it’s not always easy to find out about what’s available and how to make the most of your time here. This event is for new research staff to welcome you to our wonderful university and introduce you to the many opportunities and resources. People who attend are typically postdocs, research fellows and research assistants at Grades 6 to 8. Event objectives: Identify resources and support for your professional and career development. Know how to widen your social network through the Oxford Research Staff Society, Oxford University Newcomers Club. Start to effectively plan your coming months at Oxford. Pre-Requisites: No pre-requisites required.
This paper is part of the first chapter of my dissertation, which looks at the impact of nonhuman animals on the institution of slavery in the American South. It examines multispecies entanglements within the plantation complex and argues for the centrality of nonhuman animals to methods of control exerted by enslavers, as well as strategies of resistance developed by the enslaved. In particular, it will focus on how enslavers weaponized the threat of non-domesticated animals living beyond the plantation in creating a geography of containment while also using domesticated animals—especially dogs and horses—as living embodiments of surveillance and recapture in a calculated process to enforce spatial control and limit the movement of enslaved persons. In this way, the plantation is viewed as a highly manipulated social and environmental ecosystem that linked the exploitation of human and nonhuman animals to the broader framework of capitalism, monoculturalism, and the maintenance of power. Join online via Microsoft Teams: https://tinyurl.com/bdhmjvn7
Poetry, Delyricised: The Formal and Moral Stakes of Claudia Rankine’s Poetic Address (Sara L. Borga, University of Oxford): If the subtitle (An American Conversation) of Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (2020), the third volume in her American Lyric trilogy, signals a retreat from the lyric while still holding onto its vestiges, how does this shift redefine the stakes of Rankine’s poetic address? While the trilogy’s reception as formally innovative has largely focused on its intertextual effects or the wayward lyricism of Citizen (2014), it often sidesteps an in-depth engagement with how the volumes relate to one another, particularly Rankine’s distancing from the ‘lyric’ as a defining category. This talk will focus on how this transition aligns with Rankine’s deepening concern with the intersection of language, accountability, and ethics evident in her dialogic exploration of racial justice in Just Us as an intimate, everyday practice. The book’s title—echoing Richard Pryor’s pun on ‘justice’ as ‘just us’—captures this tension, exposing how historical failures of justice permeate, and segregate, intimate and systemic interactions. I will discuss my current research on how the aesthetic potential of Rankine’s poetics might be most fully realised by tracing her lyric’s journey away from itself. George R. Stewart and the Post-Apocalyptic American Eden (Maya Hollander, University of Oxford): This talk proposes a tradition of biblical reception in post-apocalyptic American fiction centred on the creation story of Genesis 1-3, focusing on George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949) as a representative example of this tradition. For Stewart, the apocalypse becomes a setting for Edenic regeneration and the emergence of a new American Adam, an agent of light, order, and civilisation. The tradition of the post-apocalyptic American Eden, which can be traced as far back as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The New Adam and Eve’ (1843), resurfaces across myriad speculative renderings of American landscapes, including novels by Walter M. Miller, Angela Carter, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy. Cruel Dualisms: Restraints, Resistance and the Limits of Bare Bottomhood (Andrie Morris, University of Oxford): My talk considers satire in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s speculative fiction. I suggest his treatment of spectacular blackness in ‘Zimmer Land’ and Chain-Gang All-Stars illustrates Christina Sharpe’s observation that ‘spectacle is a relation of power.’ The confluence of antiracist politics and neo-colonialist capitalist agendas produces a literary black body that, I argue, comments critically on that hegemony.
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the session, participants will be able to: Develop effective communication strategies for presenting complex research concepts to non-specialist audiences. Explore different learning and engagement theories and how they can inform effective public engagement strategies. Learn to adapt engagement techniques based on different audiences. Learn how to assess the effectiveness of engagement approaches and refine them accordingly.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
Dr Duc Le, Editor-in-Chief, Med and Dr Zoltan Fehervari, Senior Editor, Nature, will provide insights into scientific publishing. The talks will be follow by a Q&A for audience questions, and then some networking drinks.
Are you baffled by open, confused by embargoes? Does the mention of the colour gold or green catapult you into a realm of perplexed irritation? Come to this session, where we’ll break down open access and all its many jargon terms, confusing publishing structures and hint at the advantages you can reap by publishing open. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers, other staff.
Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Elisabeth Siegel at elisabeth.siegel@politics.ox.ac.uk or Brian Kot at brian.kot@politics.ox.ac.uk in advance to participate or with any questions. Remote attendance is possible, but in-person attendance is prioritized (and provided refreshment). About the speaker: Chloe is a digital government researcher and doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute, where she is researching the use of data-driven technologies and AI in public sector organisations. Chloe is also an Expert Affiliate for StateUp, where she has worked on projects focussed on government innovation, resilience, and digitalisation. Chloe has most recently worked as an Adviser with the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with previous roles including positions with the Cabinet Office, Universities Australia and within the science communication sector. Chloe holds an MPhil with distinction in Public Policy from the University of Cambridge.
Historic England has estimated that UK museums will run out of space by 2027, to the detriment of Archaeological research. The Government’s motivation to find solutions to the Curation Crisis is undermined by the absence of a research agenda that clearly articulates the critical value of archaeological assemblages. This talk represents a first step in providing that agenda. It will showcase how biocultural heritage can contextualise and mitigate modern Global Challenges, including nature renewal, food security and planetary health.
Join via: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/tosca
Please contact "$":mailto:sarah.apetrei@campion.ox.ac.uk for the Teams link to join remotely.
This talk explores the Antioch Bible’s Syriac-English edition of the Peshitta New Testament. As the first complete, scholarly translation of the Peshitta into contemporary English, the Antioch Bible bridges historical Syriac tradition with modern linguistic precision. This presentation will discuss the translation’s methodological approach, its balance between literal fidelity and accessible English, and its role in advancing Syriac studies. Special attention will be given to how the Antioch Bible engages with textual variants, historical context, and its contribution to both academic scholarship and ecclesiastical communities.
Mao Zedong famously defined the distinction between friends and enemies as the primary question of the revolution, and this divide remained one of the basic parameters of political and social life in China for three decades after the establishment of the PRC, with a minority of the Chinese population being formally designated as enemies and excluded from the community of the ‘People.’ Dr Czellér’s forthcoming monograph, Non-People in the People’s Republic, focuses on the two labels, ‘landlord地主’ and ‘rich peasant富农’, that were responsible for rendering the largest number of Chinese citizens ‘non-People’ during the Mao era. Why did these labels, which were supposed to be temporary and were assigned right as their material referents (i.e. renting out land and hiring labour) were being eliminated through land reform and collectivization, continue to form the basis for such exclusion until the late 1970s? To what extent did political exclusion produce social stigma within communities and across generations? And were there any channels through which those labelled class enemies could nevertheless preserve some of their pre-revolutionary advantages and pass them on to their descendants? Dr Czellér’s talk will address these questions, and consider how this case compares to other instances of enemy-making by modern states. Dr Mark Czellér is an IHR Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, where he was Past and Present Fellow (2022-2024) following the completion of his doctorate at the University of Oxford. His research interests are in the political and social history of Maoist China, with a particular focus on ideas, practices, and experiences of policing and repression.
Since late 2024, Westminster has debated whether and when English and Welsh patients may hasten their deaths. But what about the opposite situation? How should we handle situations when the patient wants to live but their clinicians determine that continuing life-sustaining treatment is inappropriate, non-beneficial, or therapeutically obstinate? These sorts of conflicts have long been common in NHS hospitals. Yet, they are increasingly prevalent as families dispute even long-settled medical concepts like brain death. Normally, clinicians defer to patients and families when the decision is value-laden and preference sensitive. But surely, clinicians need not comply with "any" demand that patients and families make. What are the proper limits to clinical deference? And how should those limits be adjudicated?
The Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that attendance at the Surgical Grand Rounds can count toward internal CPD, with 1 point awarded per hour. Please note that in-person attendance is required, and you will need to sign the attendance register. Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend online.
We investigate pattern formation for a 2D PDE-ODE bulk-cell model, where one or more bulk diffusing species are coupled to nonlinear intracellular reactions that are confined within a disjoint collection of small compartments. The bulk species are coupled to the spatially segregated intracellular reactions through Robin conditions across the cell boundaries. For this compartmental-reaction diffusion system, we show that symmetry-breaking bifurcations leading to stable asymmetric steady-state patterns, as regulated by a membrane binding rate ratio, occur even when two bulk species have equal bulk diffusivities. This result is in distinct contrast to the usual, and often biologically unrealistic, large differential diffusivity ratio requirement for Turing pattern formation from a spatially uniform state. Secondly, for the case of one-bulk diffusing species in R^2, we derive a new memory-dependent ODE integro-differential system that characterizes how intracellular oscillations in the collection of cells are coupled through the PDE bulk-diffusion field. By using a fast numerical approach relying on the ``sum-of-exponentials'' method to derive a time-marching scheme for this nonlocal system, diffusion induced synchrony is examined for various spatial arrangements of cells using the Kuramoto order parameter. This theoretical modeling framework, relevant when spatially localized nonlinear oscillators are coupled through a PDE diffusion field, is distinct from the traditional Kuramoto paradigm for studying oscillator synchronization on networks or graphs. (Joint work with Merlin Pelz, UBC and UMinnesota).
The magnitude of future warming is dependent upon carbon cycle feedbacks, which can either amplify or mitigate warming. The latest generation of CMIP6 models suggest that the combined effects of known climate feedback mechanisms is to amplify global warming. However, climate models are blind to the ‘unknown unknowns’ - these are the things we know little about and have potential to take future climate into unimagined directions. Transient warming events in the geological record (hyperthermals) capture the response of the Earth system to all the feedbacks in operation, including those that we are unaware of. In this talk, I will use coastal marine sediments deposited during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (56 million years ago) to reveal how the terrestrial carbon cycle operates in a warmer world. This talk will focus on two highly uncertain carbon cycle feedbacks: (1) the erosion and burial of terrestrial organic carbon (a potential CO2 sink), and (2) the oxidation of rock organic carbon (a potential CO2 source). I will show how organic geochemical techniques have the potential to illuminate these uncertain feedbacks during the PETM and other key climate events in Earth’s history.
Do you want to brush up on the practicalities of preparing for interviews and presentations? This online session is designed for University research staff and DPhil students applying for academic positions. We will discuss and practice the skills required for effective performance at interview; preparation, self-presentation and how to identify and deal with typical interview questions. Whilst focusing on early postdoctoral positions, we will also cover questions typically focused for 'the lectureship leap' and mid-level positions. The workshop will focus on academic interviews. Follow up one-to-one career discussions can then be used to review intended applications and to prepare for particular interviews, included conducting mock interviews. All DPhil students and research staff welcome. *This session will focus on academic applications only*
Join us as we welcome some brilliant scholars at Oxford, currently supported by the Black Academic Futures scholarship. Amunet Boafo and Michelle Codrington-Rogers will each deliver a short paper on some of their current and upcoming work, welcoming feedback, questions, and advice from the Race & Resistance community. After both papers, we will host a Q&A and an opportunity for feedback. Black Workers, "Mestizo" City: Constructing ethno-racial identities across formal and informal labour markets in Bogotá, Colombia Amunet Boafo is currently pursuing a DPhil in International Development as a Black Academic Futures Scholar. Her research explores the effects of both informal and formal labour market interactions on ethnic self-expression amongst urban Afro-descendant communities in Bogotá, Colombia. She has previous experience living and working in the UK, Japan and Colombia, where she has spent time working at several NGOs, including a feminist organisation in Bogotá supporting women victims of gender-based violence and displacement and a children’s foundation employing art and music as tools to combat the influence of local drug-trafficking gangs. Prior to starting her PhD, Amunet spent several months working at an NGO based in Tokyo focussed on addressing pressing issues such as rapid urbanisation and rural depopulation using community-based solutions. Bringing together digital and social justice: how ethnic identities and educational aspirations of Black and Dual Heritage pupils are shaped by online communities and spaces. Michelle Codrington-Rogers has spent 20 years in the classroom as a qualified citizenship teacher at a large secondary school in Oxford. Michelle is also an activist within the trade union movement and has sat on a number of committees including Black workers, LGBT, Women's and the General Council. She is currently completing an MSC-Education - digital and social change at the Oxford University Department of Education. ---- Bluesky: raceresistance.bsky.social Subscribe to our mailing list by sending a blank email to: race-and-resistance-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
An agent engages in sequential search. He does not directly observe the quality of the goods he samples, but he can purchase signals designed by profit maximizing principal(s). We formulate the principal-agent relationship as a repeated contracting problem within a stopping game, and characterize the set of equilibrium payoffs. We show that when the agent's search cost falls below a given threshold, competition does not impact how much surplus is generated in equilibrium nor how the surplus is divided. In contrast, competition benefits the agent at the expense of total surplus when the search cost exceeds that threshold. Our results challenge the view that monopoly decreases market efficiency, and moreover, suggest that it generates the highest value of information for the agent.
See https://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/event/the-jowett-society-friday-week-7-tt25 for updates.
TBC
Consider what you know of Albert Einstein. Your knowledge likely forms a narrative, linking pieces of information related to the events of his life and work. Now consider what you did yesterday. This knowledge also translates into a narrative linking the events of the day. These examples demonstrate that narratives organize events into knowledge. In this talk, I will propose that our brains form narratives through a process termed “replay”. Originally observed in rodents during spatial navigation tasks, replay involves the rapid reactivation of cell firing patterns related to previous locations. It is postulated that replay binds these locations into an internal model of the environment, which can be used for navigation. I will propose that reactivations, measured in human fMRI data, can similarly bind the neural representations of previous events into an internal model of a narrative. This model can subsequently be used to regenerate the narrative from memory.
Clarins Shieryl, Blackfriars Hall, and Ignatius Bambang Sugiharto, Parahyangan, will speak at this online seminar about the charity work they have carried out recently. All are welcome, registration required.
Political economy models often assume that voter beliefs are consistent with available information. Recent work emphasizes instead the role played by narratives, subjective causal models that may be incorrectly specified. In this paper, we study the role of political narratives in the context of climate policy. We develop a theory of narrative entanglement, where policy dimensions—initially distinct—become strategically intertwined through narratives created by politicians to sway support. Shocks in one dimension can thus influence unrelated policy areas. We test this theory in the context of EU climate policy before versus after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which affected the economic costs of climate policy but not its ability to address climate change. Using a large language model to analyze speeches in the EU Parliament, we find that narratives are strongly entangled: Members of the European Parliament that emphasize the need to address climate change also emphasize economic benefits, while those denying climate change stress economic costs. After the energy price shock associated with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, narratives shift not only in the economic dimension but also in the climate dimension, with speeches becoming less likely to imply that climate policy is necessary to combat climate change. This pattern holds at the individual politician level, with politicians from right-wing parties showing a more pronounced narrative change than those from the left.
TBC
Join us for lunch at the Old Kitchen Bar, Magdalen College.
Linked datasets from Ministry of Justice and Department for Education have made it possible to interrogate the relationship between care experience (i.e. having been in kinship care, foster care and/or children’s homes), ethnicity and youth justice involvement in England using population level data. Taking a critical perspective, Katie will draw on findings from an ADR UK Fellowship project using these datasets showcasing the potential of administrative data to challenge (in)justices. Join on Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OTNiZGM1MzItOTcwOS00YThjLWJmYTAtZGFjZGM1YzkyNjQw%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2275f39f15-fefd-45cf-b904-2e2174db4aa1%22%7d
HDRUK Oxford Monthly Meetup, Monday 16 June 2025, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Speakers: 1) Professor Aiden Doherty; Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Oxford Population Health, University of Oxford 2) Mr. Charilaos Zisou; Oxford Population Health, University of Oxford Abstract: Smartphones and wearable devices provide a major opportunity to transform our understanding of the mechanisms, determinants, and consequences of diseases. For example, around 9 in 10 people own a smartphone in the United Kingdom, while one-fifth of US adults own wearable technologies. This high level of device ownership means that many people could contribute to health research from the comfort of their home by offering small amounts of time to share data and help address health-related questions that matter to them. A leading example is the seven day wrist-worn accelerometer data measured in 100,000 UK Biobank participants between 2013-2015 that has led to important new findings. These include discoveries of: new genetic variants for sleep and activity; small amounts of vigorous non-exercise physical activity being associated with substantially lower mortality; and no apparent upper threshold to the benefits of physical activity with respect to cardiovascular disease risk. However, challenges exist around cost, access, validity, and training. In this talk I will review progress made in this exciting new area of health data science and share opportunities to provide new insights into physical activity, sleep, heart rhythms and other exposures relevant to health and disease. Short Bios: 1) Professor Doherty is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Oxford. His team of ~20 researchers develop reproducible methods to analyse wearable sensor data in both clinical trials and very large health studies to better understand the causes and consequences of disease. The team has played a key role in the collection of wearable sensor data in over 150,000 research participants across the UK and China as well as complementary open human activity recognition validation datasets to further enhance these resources. His team develops open software tools and data resources for machine learning methods to measure sleep, sedentary behaviour, physical activity behaviours and steps. 2) Mr. Zisou is a DPhil student in Population Health at the University of Oxford, supported by the Oxford British Heart Foundation Centre for Research Excellence, and also a Clarendon scholar. His research focuses on investigating the genetic factors influencing device-measured physical activity and their impact on cardiovascular disease risk. To this end, he leads the work of the ACTIGEN consortium, an international collaboration conducting a meta-analysis of genomic and wearable device data from over 200,000 individuals across diverse populations. Mode: Hybrid In-person Venue – Richard Doll Lecture Theatre, Richard Doll Building, Old Road Campus, University of Oxford To attend online – please register (link below)
Are you planning to present a poster at an upcoming conference, meeting or symposium? This introductory session will provide you with some top tips on how to create a poster presentation which will help you to communicate your research project and data effectively. There will be guidance on formatting, layout, content, use of text, references and images, as well as advice on printing and presenting your poster. This session will also provide help with locating resources such as templates, free-to-use images and poster guidelines. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Political economy models often assume that voter beliefs are consistent with available information. Recent work emphasizes instead the role played by narratives, subjective causal models that may be incorrectly specified. In this paper, we study the role of political narratives in the context of climate policy. We develop a theory of narrative entanglement, where policy dimensions—initially distinct—become strategically intertwined through narratives created by politicians to sway support. Shocks in one dimension can thus influence unrelated policy areas. We test this theory in the context of EU climate policy before versus after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which affected the economic costs of climate policy but not its ability to address climate change. Using a large language model to analyze speeches in the EU Parliament, we find that narratives are strongly entangled: Members of the European Parliament that emphasize the need to address climate change also emphasize economic benefits, while those denying climate change stress economic costs. After the energy price shock associated with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, narratives shift not only in the economic dimension but also in the climate dimension, with speeches becoming less likely to imply that climate policy is necessary to combat climate change. This pattern holds at the individual politician level, with politicians from right-wing parties showing a more pronounced narrative change than those from the left.
Schistosomes are parasitic flatworms that infect than 150 million people globally resulting in a chronic neglected tropical disease. The parasite is a complex pathogen, transmitted by aquatic snails, via free living larvae, to mammalian definitive hosts. Over a period of 5¬–7 weeks, the parasite migrates and develops, through the lungs and liver, before reaching blood vessels of the gut mesentery as fully developed, sexually reproducing, adult worms. The life cycle is marked by dramatic changes to the body plan of the parasite with discrete life stages composed of different tissues and anatomies. Enabled by genomic resources that we built and systematically improved, we and others are creating single-cell transcriptome atlases at key points in the life cycle. After defining the major cell types at each stage, a major goal is to understand the trajectories of developing cells and tissues, so we can temporally resolve key processes and regulators. In this presentation, I will discuss the challenges and recent progress in pooling insights across several heterogenous datasets. By uncovering key components of development, we hope to identify vulnerabilities that can ultimately be exploited in the development of new control strategies.. Bio-Sketch of speaker: Professor Matt Berriman, from the School of Infection and Immunity at the University of Glasgow, trained as parasitologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, before undertaking Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Rockefeller University in New York. He then moved to the Wellcome Sanger Institute for many years, where he led the parasite genomics group, producing and analysing the genomes of more than 30 important parasitic protozoa and helminths. Building upon reference genomes (including schistosomes, whipworm, tapeworms, threadworms), his team used large scale comparative genomics and transcriptomics approaches to identify genes associated with parasitism and created new resources for understanding major changes across parasite life cycles. His current research focuses on parasitic helminths, particularly schistosomes, employing large-scale single-cell sequencing approaches to create cellular ‘atlases’. His goal is to define major changes in the transcriptional architecture of schistosome at key points during their development, so that new biological vulnerabilities can be identified, as possible new points for intervention and parasite control.
The breakup of Pakistan in 1971—marked by a bloody civil war and military defeat by India—remains shrouded in layers of silence, making it difficult to ferret out the truth from the mistruths. The war ended with over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war (POWs) captured in East Pakistan-turned-Bangladesh, who were then transferred to Indian custody. Pakistan responded by interning roughly the same number of Bengali co-religionists in West Pakistan as leverage for the return of its captured POWs. Neither group would return home immediately in what arguably became one of the most significant cases of mutual mass internment post-1945. Over half a century after the 1971 war, the internment of Bengalis remains a non-event in the most significant political crisis in Pakistan’s history. Drawing on a wide range of untapped sources, this talk traces the trajectory of this crisis of captivity in which the Bengalis found themselves as rightless citizens with ‘traitor’ and ‘enemy’ status after the war. Educated at the universities of Warwick and Southampton, Ilyas Chattha is Associate Professor of History at LUMS. Before this, he was based at the University of Southampton where he completed his PhD in 2009. He is the author of ‘They Called Us Traitors’: The Hidden History of Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971-1974 (Cambridge, 2025), The Punjab Borderland (Cambridge, 2022), and Partition and Locality (Oxford, 2012). His work has also appeared in Modern Asian Studies, History Workshop Journal, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Contemporary South Asia, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and International Journal of the History of Sport, as well as several edited volumes. His current research focuses on the legacies of the 1971 War and Enemy Property in South Asia.
In this presentation, I uncover an overlooked genealogy of biometrics, tracing it back to early 20th-century race science and the rise of statistical thinking about human identity. Before biometrics became a technology of controlling human identity, it was a science aimed at understanding human diversity, specifically racial diversity. I examine the emergence of craniometry in the 19th century and how its methodologies paved the way for a novel approach to racial anthropology driven by mathematical statistics in the early 20th century. Finally, I explore the postwar development of computerized anthropology. *Iris Clever* is a historian of science, technology, and the body, and currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. Her book project, _The Afterlives of Skulls: How Race Science Became a Data Science_, traces the surprising origins of modern data technologies in colonial race science, revealing how the racialization of human bodies lies at the foundation of modern science. Her work has been published in _Isis, Perspectives on Science, and is forthcoming in American Anthropologist_. Registration is required for online attendance only, here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/2Eyuy06tTaCktw3CGdfT1Q#/registration.
In Steering Change, Rob Stokes — first Minister for Active Transport in Australia —reflects on the political and policy challenges of championing walking and cycling infrastructure in a car-centric world. Drawing on experience from the frontlines of government, he shares strategies for persuading treasury officials of the economic value of active transport and techniques for building lasting community support. This is a timely and practical look at how to turn good ideas into real change on our streets.
In this talk, I will briefly overview key genomic findings in relation to schizophrenia, before illustrating the application of integrated neuroscience approaches to understanding the functional impacts of risk variants. I will give examples from both common and rare variants, and will emphasise the potential impacts in terms of biomarker discovery and therapeutic innovation. This seminar is held in person in the Department of Psychiatry, Seminar Room. To join online, please use the Zoom details below: zoom.us/j/92620728590?pwd=s1JefrGff6bN0nZZcHSTBkCw8Z1RlT.1 Meeting ID: 926 2072 8590 Passcode: 196542
Join us for a digital scholarship coffee gathering - tea and coffee will be provided. If you'd like to get an email reminder of these coffee mornings please sign up for that here: https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/oxford/digital-scholarship-coffee-morning-keep-in-touch
Trusted Research is a dynamic landscape - do you know what the challenges are for international collaborations in your department? With the acute changes in the geopolitical landscape, university research is increasingly viewed as having a significant impact on national security. The threats are real, the impact of a malicious act could include reputational damage, constraint of academic freedom, legal or regulatory breaches, barring from holding funding from certain funders, and loss or compromise of results, data and intellectual property or cyber or physical infrastructure. The Research Services Trusted Research team supports compliance and safeguarding the integrity of the University’s vital international collaborations. We invite University staff to join the Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) to learn how this changing landscape might affect you or the activities within your department. Hear more from the experts, and take the opportunity to ask questions about how this will affect you. Tuesday, June 17th 2025, 11:00am Presentation approx. 45 minutes, with added time for questions to follow. The Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, Department of Physics, 20 Parks Road, Oxford OX3 3PU **Please visit either our Trusted Research or Export Control Webpages to pre-register by Friday June 13th 2025
Prof Butterworth’s research focusses on improving the biological effectiveness of radiotherapy by understanding the molecular mechanisms of radiobiological responses in tumours and normal tissues. Using advanced preclinical models of radiation response, his group aims to develop biologically targeted strategies for the realisation of precision radiotherapy.
Student Presentations
Description: The seminar will explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, AI, and technological innovation, co-taught by a philosopher and a technologist. The seminar will welcome a variety of visiting discussants from philosophy, computer science, and the technology industry throughout term. The focus will be on how a concern for human flourishing can be embedded in the global technology development pipeline, and on exploring how broader bridges can be built between philosophy and technology. The seminar is primarily aimed at philosophy graduate students and computer science graduate students but participants from other levels and areas are welcome. Topics include: truth-seeking AI, privacy, collective intelligence, decentralization in science and AI, and approaches to human autonomy. The seminar culminates in a clinic to facilitate grant applications for independent summer projects on the themes of the seminar. Fast grants: New for this year, Cosmos Ventures has established a dedicated funding pool that seminar participants can apply to for independent summer building projects on related themes. Prerequisites: please email HAI Lab philipp.koralus@philosophy.ox.ac.uk no later than April 27th with a (very) brief explanation of your interest in the seminar to reserve a spot, and the subject line “TT Seminar”. Space limited to maintain quality of discussion. Preparation: ● Draft a Cosmos Ventures application for feedback
*If you would like to meet the speaker before the seminar, please sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/23druvdp*
A common model of AI suggests that there is a single measure of intelligence, often called AGI, and that AI systems are agents who can possess more or less of this intelligence. Cognitive science, in contrast, suggests that there are multiple forms of intelligence and that these intelligences trade-off against each other and have a distinctive developmental profile. The adult ability to accomplish goals and maximize utilities is often seen as the quintessential form of intelligence. However, this ability to exploit is in tension with the ability to explore and to create world models based on that exploration. Children are particularly adept at exploration and model-building, though at the cost of competent action and decision-making. Human intelligence also relies heavily on cultural transmission, passing on information from one generation to the next, and children are also particularly adept at such learning. Thinking about exploration and transmission can change our approach to AI systems. Large language models and similar systems are best understood as cultural technologies, like writing, pictures and print, that enable information transmission. In contrast, our empirical work suggests that RL systems employing an intrinsic objective of empowerment gain can help capture the exploration and theory formation we see in both children and scientists. Empowerment learning, in particular, may help construct causal models both in childhood and in science.
COURSE DETAILS Being at Oxford provides you with an amazing opportunity to meet a wide range of extraordinary people who could help you and who you could help. This session will enable you to develop this important skill, which will: help you make contacts; discover opportunities; open doors; and speak to the right people. It will also enable you to devise a strategic approach to networking which can have lifetime benefits for you. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will: Understand more about the benefits of networking. Feel more comfortable networking. Have learnt some new techniques to help you network more effectively. Have started to develop a strategy for networking.
Do you need help managing your references? Do you need help citing references in your documents? This online session will introduce you to EndNote, a subscription software programme which can help you to store, organise and retrieve your references and PDFs, as well as cite references in documents and create bibliographies quickly and easily. On completing the workshop you will be able to: understand the main features and benefits of EndNote; set up an EndNote account; import references from different sources into EndNote; organise your references in EndNote; insert citations into documents; and create a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
For online access, Microsoft Teams links will be sent to the mailing list in advance or email "$":mailto:christina.debellaigue@exeter.ox.ac.uk for a link.
TORCH Talks: a new series debating some of the most urgent and topical issues of our time from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Practitioners from radically different disciplines and fields share their views and insights on major global challenges. Everyone is welcome and lunch will be provided.
The Lunchtime Lab Talks aim to introduce and highlight the broad spectrum of research that is carried out at the Centre and encourage multidisciplinary interactions. Throughout the year, groups are invited to speak and present their work to our community. Lunch is available from 12:15 in Room A&B and talks run from 12:30–13:30. iPSC Facility Speaker: Sonia Yiakoumi Title: ‘Exploring the physiological roles od Tau protein in develooping neurons’ Cellular Imaging Facility Speaker: TBC Title: TBC
A practical session 180-minute workshop where participants will work on searches for their review across multiple databases. Librarians from the Bodleian Health Care Libraries will be on hand to demonstrate online tools for facilitating the process and give practical advice on refining individual search strategies. By the end of this classroom-based session you will be able to: improve a search strategy that you are working on; adapt the search across multiple databases; use tools such as Yale MeSH Analyzer, Polyglot and the SR Accelerator to improve your searches; describe alternative methods for identifying references, including citation tracking; de-duplicate results from multiple database searches; start screening results for inclusion in your review; and report your search methods according to PRISMA-Search. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
TBC
Join via Microsoft Teams here: https://tinyurl.com/5d5s7x5k
Christina Thatcher will share some selections from her new book, Breaking a Mare. Breaking a Mare is an investigation of silence, goodness and girlhood. It invites readers into the barn, the sawdust mill, the rodeo arena. These poems expose the hard work women do on farms, the loss of rural landscapes and the role death can play in these spaces. They ask what it means to be good in the face of physical, emotional and ecological threat. Ultimately, these poems want to know what breaks us and what makes us stronger. Christina Thatcher grew up between a farm and a ranch house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She won a Marshall Scholarship to undertake two MAs in the UK, after which she completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University, where she is now a Lecturer. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including Ambit, Butcher's Dog, Magma, Poetry Wales, The North, The Poetry Review and more. There will be a drinks reception in the Saugman Common Room following the poetry reading to which everyone is welcome. If you'd like to attend, please register at: https://www.stx.ox.ac.uk/event/breaking-a-mare
Leading and Managing People in Research (formerly “Essentials of People Management in Research”) is a module in The Confident Manager Series, designed to equip PIs/academic managers with knowledge of their responsibilities when managing research staff and with key people skills needed to create a healthy and productive research environment. Topics covered include recruiting effectively, leading and managing a team, having productive career conversations/annual reviews, supporting those on fixed-term contracts, and fostering positive research cultures, including excellence in research practice. This module is specifically for new PIs (Principal Investigators) / Academic Managers / Researchers who have secured a grant that will involve recruiting and managing others or experienced PIs looking to update their knowledge and skills. Objectives - Understand what is expected of PIs/academic managers at Oxford – Clarify HR essentials for recruiting and leading your team – Learn how to facilitate effective career development conversations / annual reviews (CDR/PCDR) and to manage fixed-term contracts – Explore your role in fostering a positive research culture and enabling excellence in research practice Please note: Professional services colleagues working in research or clinical trials are advised to enrol on the more appropriate module in The Confident Manager Series titled ‘Managing at Oxford’.
Engagement describes the ways in which we can share our research and its value by interacting with wider public audiences, generating mutual benefit. In this introductory session tailored to those new to engagement, we look at what public engagement is and some of the reasons why you might want to do it. We’ll highlight the multitude of different approaches you can take, and provide tips on getting started and where to get support.
The aim of the seminar is to foster a dynamic and interdisciplinary postcolonial research culture supportive of individual scholarship. Finalists, M.St. and D.Phil. students, lecturers, fellows, scholars from across the university community – all are welcome. If you’d like to appear on the seminar mailing list, please email zana.mody@kellogg.ox.ac.uk, riley.faulds@worc.ox.ac.uk OR hannah.fagan@mansfield.ox.ac.uk
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
This session will explore practical ways to develop resilience when looking for jobs or internships, to help you bounce back when things don’t go as planned. We’ll share ways of building resilience that have helped other students and useful links and resources to take away after the session. You won’t be asked to share your stories or strategies unless you’d like to.
Good research data management is a vital component of academic practice. Part of this is the principle that the data used to develop the arguments and outcomes of your research should be effectively stored and managed during a project, preserved for the future and - where possible - shared with other academics. This session introduces the University’s research data policy and outlines the practical impact this will have on your work. The services available at Oxford to assist you will be outlined. This session is not only essential during your current studies but will be invaluable if you plan to continue in research as a career.
For some of us, our research projects are situated back home or in locations where we have already spent considerable time. For the rest of us, our field sites could be in locations where we are visiting or living for the first time. Some of us work closely with people in our own communities, whilst others join local communities as external fieldworkers. Depending on our backgrounds, we may navigate fieldwork as "insider" researchers, "outsider" researchers, or both. There may be varying kinds of social norms and local expectations for researchers from different backgrounds. Some of us might start our fieldwork as outsiders, but we may find ourselves no longer entirely outsiders after spending some time in the field, and the ways in which locals consider us may also shift over time. Similarly, insiders may be subject to new expectations from their local communities when returning home for fieldwork after spending some time outside their communities. At this workshop, former fieldworkers will share their experiences in the field, and we will discuss the opportunities and challenges of navigating fieldwork as insiders, outsiders, or both. The workshop is an open space for meeting other fieldworkers and discussing various fieldwork-related topics, including but not limited to tips and strategies to prepare for and navigate fieldwork smoothly. Staff and research students are welcome to join the workshop. Moderator Keiko Kanno Panellists TBC
Please contact "$":mailto:sarah.apetrei@campion.ox.ac.uk for the Teams link to join remotely.
We are looking forward to welcoming you to Trinity Collage, Oxford, for this meeting to celebrate some of the achievements and challenges of the RESPOND programme (https://www.nds.ox.ac.uk/research/the-respond-programme). TOPIC OF INTEREST Innovative quality improvement (QI) initiatives inspired by RESPOND Human factors and systems approaches enhancing patient safety Strategies for optimising team performance Insights and lessons learned from RESPOND strands IMPORTANT DATES Abstract deadline - 25 April 2025 13:00 Acceptance notification - 12 May 2025 Conference date - 20 June 2025 Abstract submission: https://auth.oxfordabstracts.com/?redirect=/stages/77946/submitter
Join us all at Race & Resistance for our end of year, informal session, where we will share our highlights from the 24/25 academic year with some coffee/tea, cake, and snacks. We would like to thank you all, in person, for being a part of our community, so make sure to pop in. —- Bluesky: raceresistance.bsky.social Subscribe to our mailing list by sending a blank email to: race-and-resistance-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
See https://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/event/the-jowett-society-friday-week-8-tt25 for updates.
Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890), Chapters 29-32 Supplementary: William Morris, ‘The Society of the Future’ (1889); Tony Pinkney, William Morris in Oxford (2007): Conclusion
Associate Professor Antony Cooper is a cell and molecular biologist/geneticist with strong interests in elucidating how cellular dysfunction results in human diseases, with a specific interest in neurodegenerative disease such as Parkinson’s Disease. His research on neurodegenerative diseases focuses on understanding the basis of Parkinson’s disease. Antony completed a PhD at McGill University working on membrane trafficking, and post-doctoral studies at the University of Oregon involving both protein splicing and proteostasis/protein quality control in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). As an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri his interests evolved to protein misfolding, ER stress and oxidative stress, factors common to many neurodegenerative diseases. As a tenured Associate Professor in Missouri and since returning to Australia at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research he has focused his research on Parkinson’s disease.
Leadership in Action explores what leadership is and looks at some leadership theory. More importantly though it provides researchers with the opportunity to identify and develop their own leadership style through leading and participating in activities. It is a fast-paced face to face course that takes a ‘learning by doing’ approach – so while there are presentations on theory, most of the time is spent actively taking part in activities and then reflecting on them. The course will culminate in a celebratory dinner on the evening of the last day (Friday 21st June) where we will be joined by previous participants, and senior members of divisional staff.
In a time of planetary crisis, our understanding of the earth as a whole is a matter of ecological and geopolitical consequence. What extinguished worldviews might be salvaged from the past, and (how) can these historical imaginings invigorate new ways of thinking the global? This one-day interdisciplinary symposium will explore the theme of global imagining in literature and visual culture of the “modern age,” from the Copernican revolution up to the “earthrise” photographs of the 1960s, which captured a view of the earth from outer space for the first time. Taking as its focal point the idea and image of the terrestrial globe, the conference aims to investigate how and why artists, writers, and other thinkers imagined the earth as a whole before the age of space travel and neoliberal globalisation. We will look to past literary and artistic methods of imagining, representing, and (re)configuring the terrestrial globe across multiple chronological and cultural contexts, shedding new light on the ideological and philosophical stakes of global imagining and reassessing contemporary conceptions of the global.
Are you looking to learn about the ways in which to transmit scientific ideas and make your research accessible to a non-specialist audience through a variety of mediums? This session will serve as an introduction to science communication and how it can be successfully incorporated into our roles. By the end of this session you will be able to: define science communication and provide a list of examples; explain why science communication is important for both our CPD and the public; and list ways in which we can all get involved in science communication. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Abstract to follow at https://www.ethox.ox.ac.uk/events
1. Grangeon L, Roussel M, Gillibert A, et al. Applicability of the Edinburgh CT Criteria for Lobar Intracerebral Hemorrhage Associated with Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy. Clin Neuroradiol. 2023;33(2):455-465. doi:10.1007/s00062-022-01230-6 2. Huang X, Zeng X, Tang L, Liu X, Huang X, Liu X, Wang Z, Li N, Fan D, Yang Q. Subarachnoid hemorrhage and finger-like projection predict recurrence in patients with lobar intracerebral hemorrhage. J Neurol. 2025 Jan 24;272(2):166. doi: 10.1007/s00415-025-12900-z. PMID: 39849200; PMCID: PMC11757861.
Join Chris Morrison (Copyright & Licensing Specialist) and Georgina Kiddy (Digital Services Librarian) to play Copyright the Card Game. This interactive, games-based session introduces you to the key concepts of copyright law and allows you to apply them in practice. No prior knowledge is required, and the session caters for all whatever their level of experience with copyright. At the end of the session participants will be able to: explore how copyright really works in practice; interpret the legislation and apply the relevant legal concepts to their own work; practice using the exceptions and licences in sector-specific examples; and discuss the role of risk management in making decisions about the ethical creation and use of copyright material. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
A study day on the theme of 'Reproduction', followed by a handling session in the History of Art Photo and Slide Archive.
Health economic models are crucial for setting healthcare priorities and assessing the financial value of interventions, especially given the limitations of randomised clinical trials (RCTs). Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading global cause of death, but prevention efforts often start too late. Long-term prevention studies are expensive and challenging, making epidemiological modelling, such as Mendelian Randomisation, essential. The health economic model for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (HEM-PPCVD) model will appropriately capture all costs and value health outcomes of existing and new health interventions and this approach will identify at-risk individuals early when we take into consideration the cumulative impact of modifiable risk factors, ultimately saving lives and improving access to preventive measures.
Are you preparing a poster presentation for an upcoming conference, meeting or symposium? This interactive session, or ‘poster clinic’, will include a group discussion of different examples of poster presentations, as well as an opportunity to present your own draft of your poster presentation to your fellow attendees. It is expected that the small group of peers in attendance will provide feedback and respectful comments on each other’s work. Intended audience: Students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
So, you’ve got a great idea for a research study – but what approvals do you need before you can start? Who do you apply to? And how do you go about doing this? Join an online presentation through Microsoft Teams for an overview of: • how research is governed in the UK • which approval bodies are involved • a step-by-step guide on how to apply for approval • handling amendments to your study
The second in a duo of courses (attendees should attend the Fundamentals course prior to Logistics) that will cover the logistics of researching, publishing, and locating open scholarship resources and tools at the University of Oxford. Subjects include: what is the Oxford University Research Archive?; depositing work into ORA via Symplectic Elements; depositing data into ORA-data; applying for one of Oxford’s APC block grants; registering or connecting your ORCID; how to be included in the rights retention pilot; and locating and checking funder policies. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Book title: Foster Children, Rights and the Law: Best Interest, Normalcy and the Welfare System This book discusses child wishes, rights and participation in the foster care system. Making decisions in a foster child’s best interest is a widely used, but also widely criticized international legal doctrine. This work discusses the two major legal frameworks, best interest and normalcy, for which foster care decisions are made and how those frameworks might shape how child welfare professionals view and interpret children’s rights and participation. Normalcy, the idea that decisions should promote a “normal” life, is a separate legal doctrine which can be in conflict with best interest determinations. However, the concept of normalcy is also theoretically built into best interest decisions and therefore also plays a role in most child welfare systems. Mixing both empirical legal and child welfare research, the book demonstrates the ways in which risk aversion and fear drive best interest decision-making to the detriment of both practitioners and the children they aim to serve. It argues that a children’s rights framework starting with normalcy is a better tool for promoting child participation and centering the child within the dependency process. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers and policymakers working in the areas of children’s rights law, child welfare and international human rights law.
This talk explores the conceptual and didactical journey from the notion of continuity of the line in Euclidean geometry—embodied in the idea of the continuous line and formalized in axioms—to the formal construction of the real number system as a complete ordered field. Foundational challenges will be presented, including the key issues of the historical development of real numbers and how different constructions (Dedekind cuts, Cauchy sequences) address the notion of completeness. Moreover, the statement "real numbers are points of a line" will be problematized and analysed from a higher standpoint. On the didactical side, the talk will present a summary of the relevant literature on the topic, some open issues and the preliminary results of a study carried out in the context of a master's course addressed to prospective secondary mathematics teachers. The goal of the course was to bridge the gap between intuition and formalism and foster a deeper understanding of the "real number line". Organised by Professor Sibel Erduran, Subject Pedagogy Research Group
Join us for Oxford's 2025 Chinese Language Teaching Research Forum on Wednesday 2 July 2025, 1-5pm. Conference theme and further details forthcoming. Early pre-booking available. Tea, coffee and refreshments included with in-person ticket bookings. Oxford Education Deanery Scholarships available to join this event. Click here for more information and to apply: https://bit.ly/Apply-Deanery-Scholarship For: teachers at primary and secondary level engaged in, or interested in Chinese language teaching.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
Hagen Tilgner studied computer science in Germany and France, and after a Master’s thesis (for a French engineering school) at the Sanger Institute (UK), did his PhD with Roderic Guigó at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona. There he focused on RNA and the co-transcriptionality of splicing. His postdoctoral work at Stanford with Michael Snyder focused on technology development, specifically for long-read transcriptomics. He started his lab at Weill Cornell in New York City in 2016 focusing on technologies to decipher the actions of RNA isoforms in the brain. The lab is a multi-disciplinary lab, including wet-lab technology development (for example single-cell isoform RNA sequencing, ScISOr-Seq, ScISOr-ATAC) and dry-lab approaches, as well as combined large-scale efforts centered on the brain where Maths/CS, molecular biology and neuroscience backgrounds interact to further our understanding of isoforms in healthy and diseased brain of humans and model organisms.
During this forum speakers from Bodleian Open Scholarship Support and across Oxford will discuss current changes in the field of open scholarship. Including subjects like data, open access, open monographs, copyright and more. It is advised that attendees of the forum have previously attended the Fundamentals and Logistics courses to improve understanding. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY Fyodor Urnov is the Director for Technology and Translation at the Innovative Genomics Institute and a Professor of Molecular Therapeutics in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. He co-developed the toolbox of human genome and epigenome editing, co-named genome editing, and was on the team that advanced all of its first-in-human applications to the clinic. He also led the effort that identified the genome editing target for an approved medicine to treat sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. A major goal for the field of genome editing and a key focus of Fyodor's work is expanding access to CRISPR therapies for genetic disease. As part of that effort Fyodor directs the Danaher-IGI Beacon for CRISPR Cures - a first-in-class academia-industry partnership developing and advancing to the clinic scalable CRISPR-based approaches to treat diseases of the immune system. Fyodor also leads cross-functional teams in developing and advancing to the clinic CRISPR-based approaches to treat neurodegenerative, neuroinflammatory, and infectious diseases.
For our next talk, in the BDI/CHG (gen)omics Seminar series, we will be hearing from Professor Nathan Palpant, Group Leader at The University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB). We’re delighted to host Nathan in what promises to be a great talk! Date: Tuesday 8 July Time: 9:30 am – 10:30 am Talk title: Unsupervised Approaches to Decode the Functional Impact of Genetic Variation Location: Big Data Institute, Seminar Room 0 Bio: Professor Nathan Palpant is a Group Leader at The University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB). After PhD training at the University of Michigan and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington’s Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, he established his independent research group at the IMB in 2015. His research program focuses on studying mechanisms of cardiovascular development and disease, drawing on interdisciplinary approaches in stem cell biology, genetics and genomics, and drug discovery. He has particular interest in developing cell type agnostic models of genome regulation to gain insights into molecular regulation of cell identity in health and disease. Dr. Palpant is a Heart Foundation Fellow and has received numerous awards including the International Society for Heart Research Young Investigator Award, the Lorne Genome Millennium Science Award, and the Australian Cardiovascular Alliance Excellence in Cardiovascular Research Translation Award. Drawing on seminal studies in his lab on novel stress pathways in heart disease, Dr Palpant co-founded Infensa Bioscience to develop ASIC1a inhibitors as first-in-class therapeutics for ischemic heart disease and stroke. Abstract: The increasing availability of large-scale data is transforming our ability to study genetic regulation of cell states. However, understanding how genetic variation governs cellular function and complex diseases remains a challenge, requiring new analytical frameworks capable of integrating diverse genomic datasets to infer functional relationships. This seminar will present new unsupervised computational approaches for dissecting genetic regulation of cellular phenotypes. Our analysis of evolutionary and epigenetic conservation across human cell types has identified domains under cellular constraint that encode functional determinants of cell identity. By calculating genome-wide, single base resolution cellular constraint scores, I will demonstrate their utility in fine-mapping causal variants from genome-wide association studies, improving polygenic risk models, and predicting clinical outcomes in machine learning-based cancer survival models. These findings form the basis for development of multi-omic genome-wide unsupervised machine learning frameworks and variant-to-trait models that provide powerful approaches for functional annotation of non-coding variants and partitioning disease-associated genetic variants governing complex trait and disease sub-phenotypes. I will illustrate the versatility of these methods across various experimental applications including the study of multi-lineage differentiation from pluripotent stem cells and ongoing efforts to study population-scale data to parse the genetic basis of complex diseases. These studies illustrate new strategies to bridge the gap between genomic variation and cellular function for guiding scalable and interpretable solutions to advance our understanding of human development, disease, and therapeutic discovery. ———————————————————————————————————————— All members of the University are welcome to join, please let reception at BDI know you’re here for the seminar and sign-in. We hope you can join us! We also now have a mailing list – To be added, ping genomics_bdi_whg-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk (with any message), you should get a bounce-back with three options to confirm your subscription. Follow any of those options, and with a bit of luck you should be signed up! As a reminder, the (gen)omics seminar series runs every other Tuesday morning and is intended to increase interaction between individuals working in genomics across Oxford. We encourage in-person attendance where possible. There is time for discussion over, tea, coffee and pastries after the talks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hybrid Option: Please note that these meetings are closed meetings and only open to members of the University of Oxford to encourage sharing of new and unpublished data. Please respect our speakers and do not share the link with anyone outside of the university. Microsoft Teams meeting – Join the meeting now Meeting ID: 346 123 289 586 Passcode: sr3mi9iL ——————————————————————————————————— If you wish to know more or receive information related to trainings and events at BDI, please subscribe by emailing bdi-announce-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. You’ll then receive an email from SYMPA and once you reply you’ll be on the list!
If you are planning to run a ‘non-CTIMP’ research study this introductory course is for you. Not all research is subject to clinical trials regulations, but the same standards of conduct apply. This course in Good Clinical Research Practice covers the legislation that applies to ‘non-CTIMP’ research, along with the detailed principles of good practice in clinical research studies. This three-hour online course consists of trainers’ led presentations, short video-talks from those experienced in the conduct of clinical research and interactive exercises. The course is run by the experienced research support specialists from the University of Oxford and Oxford University Hospital’s Joint Research Office, JRO. Join this online presentation through Microsoft Teams for an overview of: • Purpose of Good Clinical Research Practice including historical background • Difference between Clinical Care and Research Practice • Ethical and Regulatory Considerations in the UK • Research Study Requirements and Documentation • Research Study Conduct and Management
The rapid evolution of Generative AI, and its widespread availability, offers opportunities for experimentation within the collegiate University context. To support this, the Centre for Teaching and Learning, in partnership with the AI and Machine Learning Competency Centre, launched the AI Teaching and Learning Exploratory Fund in summer 2024 to explore how AI could be used within the context of teaching, learning, and academic administration at Oxford. The initiative is supported by Digital Transformation. Join us at this special event, where members of the 12 project teams supported this year will share their insights, experiences, and key findings. Open to all collegiate-University staff. Places are limited. Find out more about the 12 supported projects at https://www.ctl.ox.ac.uk/ai-teaching-and-learning-exploratory-fund. Find out more about the AI and Machine Learning Competency Centre at https://staff.admin.ox.ac.uk/ai-and-machine-learning-competency-centre.
Join us for a full-day workshop, on Thursday 10 July 2025, 9am-5:15pm, exploring the evidence around teaching children for whom English is an Additional Language (EAL). This course is designed for EAL leads, classroom teachers and other educators. It will provide an overview of research evidence on key themes in the field of EAL and will offer practical advice on how to interpret that evidence for policy and practice in mainstream classrooms. The course is led by Oxford’s world-leading educators and researchers, Professor Victoria Murphy, Professor Steve Strand OBE, Dr Hamish Chalmers and Dr Faidra Faitaki. They will bring their considerable experience from working across the field of EAL to help you understand how research informs practice and how you can support and promote inclusive learning environments for all. Coffee, tea and lunch is included in the ticket price. Oxford Education Deanery Scholarships available to join this event. Click here for more information and to apply: https://bit.ly/Apply-Deanery-Scholarship
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
The De Miranda lab is interested in uncovering the mechanisms that drive neurologic disease from environmental exposures. They are currently investigating chlorinated solvents, such as the degreasing compound trichloroethylene (TCE), and their role in dopaminergic neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s disease. They take a system wide approach to address these mechanisms – including understanding how route of exposure can influence neurotoxicity and disease phenotype (e.g., cognitive dysfunction). In addition to solvents, we undertake projects assessing how pesticides, metals, and other neurotoxic contaminants induce oxidative stress, impair mitophagy/autophagy, and influence neuroinflammation. Our overall goal is to mitigate toxicity with therapeutic interventions or environmental remediation efforts.
Abstract to follow at https://www.ethox.ox.ac.uk/events
Workshop on Immigration, Health and Wellbeing October 23-24, 2025 University of Oxford Call for Papers Submission deadline: 15 July 2025 Keynote Speakers: Ian Preston (UCL) Hyejin Ku (UCL) Tamara Smith (Gov London) On October 23-24, 2025, the University of Oxford, will host the IX Workshop on Migration, Health, and Well-Being, following the success of the previous editions. The workshop’ focus is broad, covering empirical economic research on the topics of immigration, health economics, economics of migration and wellbeing. Spanning two days, the event will feature a select number of hour-long research presentations, fostering in-depth discussions. The workshop aims to strengthen connections among scholars with shared interests in these fields. Conference Organisers: C. Nicodemo (Brunel University of London and University of Oxford) C. Tealdi (Heriot-Watt University) Submissions and Deadlines: The deadline for submissions is 15 July 2025 at 23h59 (CEST). Please send a draft of your paper to oxfordmig@gmail.com Decisions will be made by 30 July 2025 Participation fees: £255
RGEA is pleased to announce the launch of a new course ‘Good Clinical Practice (GCP) for laboratory staff’. The course is for University of Oxford staff working in laboratories handling samples derived from clinical trials, and outlines the principles of GCP from the perspective of the laboratory. It will be delivered in-person at Boundary Brook House (Old Road Campus), by members of RGEA who have previous experience of working in laboratories.
For our next talk, in the Digital Phenotyping seminar series, we are delighted to host Ben Busby, Senior Alliance Manager for Genomics at NVIDIA on 17 July 2025, 1:00 pm, BDI seminar room 1. Title: Ideas for accelerated and integrated compute in imaging, genomics, and devices, in Biobank and other datasets Date: 17 July 2025 Time: 13:00 – 14:00 Venue – BDI/OxPop seminar room 1 Abstract As we enter the age of AI, agents will play a larger role in analysis and knowledge management and contextualization will become critical. The scientific (and practical) implementation interfaces will not be limited to AI and chatbots. Accelerated scientific computing is extremely likely to play an expanding role in traditional analysis, particularly when using biobank scale data. Some vignettes on specific topics in acceleration will be offered: - Sequence alignment and annotation - Synthetic image generation - Knowledge graphs as memory - Single cell analysis - On-device computing - Estimation of cis- and trans- effects on variant penetrance by background haploblocks We’ll end with a discussion of contextualization, validation, and garbage collection of model generated datasets with a focus on improvement of healthcare systems. Bio: Ben Busby is the Senior Alliance Manager for Genomics at NVIDIA, where he focuses on areas such as prototyping, disease subtyping, deep learning, and knowledge graphs. He also holds an adjunct faculty position in the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as an advisor to both Johns Hopkins University and Research to the People at Stanford. Ben earned his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and did a postdoc in evolutionary genomics at NCBI. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hybrid Option: Please note that these meetings are closed meetings and only open to members of the University of Oxford. Please respect our speakers and do not share the link with anyone outside of the University. The purpose of these seminars is to foster more communication among employees throughout the University, so we strongly advise in-person attendance whenever feasible. Microsoft Teams meeting Join the meeting now Meeting ID: 377 252 440 130 6 Passcode: PB3pp2pZ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you wish to know more or receive information related to trainings and events at BDI, please subscribe by emailing bdi-announce-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. You'll then receive an email from SYMPA and once you reply you'll be on the list!
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
This course is designed for undergraduates aiming for postgraduate study, graduate students who want to strengthen their skills, and professionals seeking to advance their expertise. Participants will delve into key areas such as economic theory, applied mathematics, and econometrics, equipping themselves with essential quantitative skills and analytical tools. Join us in Oxford for an immersive programme that includes a welcome reception, college formal dinner, and exclusive social activities and tours—the perfect opportunity to network and experience Oxford’s academic life firsthand. Visit the website for more information and registration: https://ouess.web.ox.ac.uk/event/fundamentals-of-graduate-economics
Welcome to Oxford Battery Modelling Symposium (OBMS), a unique event for the battery community. OBMS brings together mathematicians, chemists, physicists and engineers from academia and industry to discuss the latest modelling research and applications. Our philosophy is to invite a small number of outstanding speakers spanning a range of topics from atomistic to continuum modelling, controls and beyond, giving broad and inspiring presentations and open discussions. Our first event in 2019 was attended by 170 people with leading experts including John Newman speaking; our subsequent events were held online during lockdown periods but continued to be wildly popular. We are delighted to invite you back to join us for Oxford Battery Modelling Symposium 2025, which will return as an in-person meeting hosted at the Examination Schools in Oxford. Further details on the event can be found on the event website: https://batterymodel.ox.ac.uk. The event will also include a poster session and a wonderful dinner at Rhodes House.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
Are you baffled by open, confused by embargoes? Does the mention of the colour gold or green catapult you into a realm of perplexed irritation? Come to this session, where we’ll break down open access and all its many jargon terms, confusing publishing structures and hint at the advantages you can reap by publishing open. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers, other staff.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
From the Laboratory to the Clinic is an annual translational research conference established in 1984, held at Trinity College, Oxford. The conference brings together an international mix of basic scientists, clinicians, and industry researchers to explore how the latest discoveries in immunology and molecular medicine can be applied to improve clinical medicine. The major topic this year's conference is vaccines, along with other therapy-related topics of Gene Therapy and Regulatory T-Cells. The meeting will be in-person and streamed live online.
Talk titles TBC
Our September Summer School is tailored for postgraduate students, researchers, and professionals in economics. Your application includes enrolment in two academic courses in Applied Microeconomics, Macroeconomics or Econometrics (from two different disciplines, or focusing on a single field of interest), along with a formal dinner and welcome reception at an Oxford college, daily lunch and refreshments, and a certificate of completion. Visit the website for more information and registration: https://ouess.web.ox.ac.uk/september-summer-school
So, you’ve got a great idea for a research study – but what approvals do you need before you can start? Who do you apply to? And how do you go about doing this? Join an online presentation through Microsoft Teams for an overview of: • how research is governed in the UK • which approval bodies are involved • a step-by-step guide on how to apply for approval • handling amendments to your study
Working towards universal access to safe, affordable surgical, anaesthesia and obstetric care. This intensive five-day course, in person, in Oxford, is suitable for those in all disciplines interested in global surgery, anaesthesia and obstetrics. The course comprises presentations, discussions and seminars looking at major topics in global surgery such as burden of disease, health workforce capacity, training, partnership, supplies, service management, research needs, advocacy and ethics, and resource allocation. There will also be a half-day session on practical preparation for going to work in new contexts alongside local surgical teams. Traditionally surgery has been taught as a technical and practical specialty; however this short course takes a completely different approach and looks at the provision of surgical services at a global level. The term 'Global Surgery' in this course encompasses all related specialities including obstetrics, gynaecology and anaesthesia/critical care. For more information, please visit the Global Surgery Course website.
If you are planning to run a ‘non-CTIMP’ research study this introductory course is for you. Not all research is subject to clinical trials regulations, but the same standards of conduct apply. This course in Good Clinical Research Practice covers the legislation that applies to ‘non-CTIMP’ research, along with the detailed principles of good practice in clinical research studies. This three-hour online course consists of trainers’ led presentations, short video-talks from those experienced in the conduct of clinical research and interactive exercises. The course is run by the experienced research support specialists from the University of Oxford and Oxford University Hospital’s Joint Research Office, JRO. Join this online presentation through Microsoft Teams for an overview of: • Purpose of Good Clinical Research Practice including historical background • Difference between Clinical Care and Research Practice • Ethical and Regulatory Considerations in the UK • Research Study Requirements and Documentation • Research Study Conduct and Management
So, you’ve got a great idea for a research study – but what approvals do you need before you can start? Who do you apply to? And how do you go about doing this? Join an online presentation through Microsoft Teams for an overview of: • how research is governed in the UK • which approval bodies are involved • a step-by-step guide on how to apply for approval • handling amendments to your study
RGEA is pleased to announce the launch of a new course ‘Good Clinical Practice (GCP) for laboratory staff’. The course is for University of Oxford staff working in laboratories handling samples derived from clinical trials, and outlines the principles of GCP from the perspective of the laboratory. It will be delivered in-person at Boundary Brook House (Old Road Campus), by members of RGEA who have previous experience of working in laboratories.
Medical Statistics Drop In Session with Dr Lei Clifton,Lead Statistician, Applied Digital Health (ADH) Group, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford. Day: Thursday Date: 16 October 2025 Time: 11:00 -12:00 Venue: BDI conference room (lower ground, near the cafe) Registration: https://forms.office.com/e/b8UEEgrBrY?origin=lprLink Do you have a burning medical statistics-related question that you would like to discuss with the wider Oxford Biomedical community? Submit your question in advance and join the drop-in session, where Lei Clifton will address your query. If you’re interested in being part of the conversation but don’t have a specific question, feel free to attend the session in person and follow along. This is an excellent opportunity to engage in knowledge exchange with your peers. The session will be informal and conversational, encouraging participants to share their perspectives on medical statistics. There will be no set agenda or specific topics of focus; instead, discussions will be spontaneous, shaped by the questions and interests brought forward on the day. Attendees will have the freedom to drop in and ask questions without restrictions, allowing for an open and dynamic exchange of ideas. While the session will not include presentations or detailed statistical analysis, general advice on study design and statistical methods will be provided. The emphasis will be on applying statistical thinking to real-world questions rather than conducting in-depth explorations of predefined topics. This is an in-person event only.
So, you’ve got a great idea for a research study – but what approvals do you need before you can start? Who do you apply to? And how do you go about doing this? Join an online presentation through Microsoft Teams for an overview of: • how research is governed in the UK • which approval bodies are involved • a step-by-step guide on how to apply for approval • handling amendments to your study
If you are planning to run a ‘non-CTIMP’ research study this introductory course is for you. Not all research is subject to clinical trials regulations, but the same standards of conduct apply. This course in Good Clinical Research Practice covers the legislation that applies to ‘non-CTIMP’ research, along with the detailed principles of good practice in clinical research studies. This three-hour online course consists of trainers’ led presentations, short video-talks from those experienced in the conduct of clinical research and interactive exercises. The course is run by the experienced research support specialists from the University of Oxford and Oxford University Hospital’s Joint Research Office, JRO. Join this online presentation through Microsoft Teams for an overview of: • Purpose of Good Clinical Research Practice including historical background • Difference between Clinical Care and Research Practice • Ethical and Regulatory Considerations in the UK • Research Study Requirements and Documentation • Research Study Conduct and Management
