Works that Shaped the World: Charles E Rosenberg’s The Cholera Years (1962) and the Family Resemblances of Pandemics
Lecture
The crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has flushed out a gaggle of historians of medicine, all of us eager to read the lessons of history or, alternatively, make preliminary sketches for a history of the present. What do the various modes of historical analysis have to contribute to understanding our…
Books that Changed Humanity: “Govardhanram Tripathi’s Saraswatichandra”
Lecture
Published in serialised form between 1887 and 1901, Govardhanram Tripathi’s four-volume text was written during a transformative period in colonial India when new systems and social structures were being put in place. A canonical text in modern Indian literature, Saraswatichandra captured public…
Works that Shaped the World: No single story: Medical Humanities from the Parallel Chart to Performance Art
Lecture
Following the inspiration of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this presentation explores the multiple history of the Medical Humanities, selecting three moments in this history to consider whether, and if so, how, the Medical Humanities have changed Medicine. Beginning in late 1978 with the…
Books that Changed Humanity: Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style
Lecture
Youth culture, pop art, cultural studies, style – Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style was an influential early text in the march of cultural studies, but it was also very influential on artists and art criticism, and in fact Hebdige ended up teaching in art school in the US.…
Books that Changed Humanity: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace
Lecture
Dr Ibrahim Abraham explores this controversial masterpiece of post-apartheid South Africa at the turn of the twenty-first century. Disgrace is the novel that not only earned Coetzee (another) Booker Prize but guaranteed him the Nobel Prize awarded in 2003.
Books that Changed Humanity: The Quiet American
Lecture
The world may yearn for a ‘quiet’ American in 2020, but 65 years ago, the English novelist, Graham Greene presaged its dangers in The Quiet American. In an age where US leadership has all but flamed out, its remnant pyre illuminating mostly failure, Greene’s perfectly structured novel warned of…
Works that Shaped the World: Beethoven
Lecture
ABOUT THIS LECTURE In 1794 Joseph Haydn wrote a sonata for the brilliant pianist Therese Jansen, a work of astonishing depth and complexity. A year later his pupil Ludwig van Beethoven composed his first piano sonata, which owed more than a little to Mozart (who had died four years…