Wolfson College Humanities Society

Latest Episodes:

Laura Zucconi: Transgendered Copper Mining in the Levant Jun 08, 2015

Show notes

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

Jennifer Davis: Trade (mark) Wars, 1860-1920: Sweatshops, the Retail Trade and the Meaning of Trade Marks May 20, 2015

Show notes

A registered trade mark acts an indication of origin for goods but tells us nothing specific about the circumstances under which the goods originated. This limitation was not inevitable. After trade marks became objects of registration in 1875, what information they would embody was a matter of heated contestation between manufacturers, retailers, exporters, trade unions and anti-immigration activists. This lecture will examine this debate and suggest why, in the end, it was the interests of labour which lost out.

Professor David Feldman - Israel and Antisemitism Feb 12, 2015

Show notes

When does criticism of Israel become antisemitic? This longstanding debate was revived last summer in the context of British and European responses to Israel’s assault on Gaza. David Feldman will analyse last summer’s controversies as well as the question of when, if ever, criticism of Israel is a form of racism.

Hugh Gault: C.R.Fay: The Differences between Making History and Writing It Dec 18, 2014

Show notes

The economic historian Charles Ryle Fay (1884-1961) was a staunch advocate of workers’ and women’s rights, and also became one of the leading British machine gunners during World War One. As an economist his associates included Alfred Marshall, JM Keynes and Sir Austin Robinson; as a historian he taught at Cambridge University for almost thirty years and in Canada in the 1920s, writing twenty books, including idiosyncratic works defying biographical norms – on his heroes William Huskisson and Adam Smith. What does his life tell us about the differences between making history and writing about it?

J. Lee Thompson: Un-Righteous Neutrality: Theodore Roosevelt and the Great War, 1914-1917 May 30, 2014

Show notes

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

Philip Allott: 'The True Function of Education' Feb 13, 2014

Show notes

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

Louise Foxcroft : Calories and Corsets: 2000 years of diets and dieting Nov 14, 2013

Show notes

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

Prof. Simon Goldhill: Sappho, Lincoln, & the American Senate: Picturing Female Desire in the 19th Century Jun 18, 2013

Show notes

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

Professor David Maxwell: Zimbabwe since Independence May 29, 2013

Show notes

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

Professor Bruce Berman: Culture, Politics, identity: how we know who we think we are May 22, 2013

Show notes

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

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