Whither Academic Publishing?
Stephen Bourne, President of Cambridge University Press.

The third great age in the two-thousand-year history of publishing is now squarely upon us, but will it be an age of darkness or of light? What are the implications of technology for the constituencies who together make up the world of published work—readers, authors, collectors, conservators, designers, typographers, marketeers, printers and editors?

Is it "whither" or "wither"? Or has the publisher's death-knell already sounded? After 26 years in the publishing and printing industries, latterly as CEO and now President of Cambridge University Press, Stephen Bourne will explain to us why he believes that his successor has an exciting decade in prospect, and why there will be few losers and many winners. But the keyword is "change", and change always comes at a price. How deep are our intellectual pockets? How ready is each one of us for change?

The US Presidential Campaign: How unlimited corporate money and political extremism have changed the game
Jeff Shields, Professor and former Dean, Vermont Law School.

The talk, by someone who has held several government positions, covers: (1) the stakes of the outcome including women's rights, healthcare, taxes, foreign policy, and education; (2) the importance of the Citizens United case; (3) the T-Party and the Republican primaries and general election; (4) debates do matter; (5) the use of alternative media; (6) lies, damn lies and statistics.

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from upload.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1335026
for listening on your favourite device.

Rousseau, Happiness and Human Nature
Graeme Garrard, Senior Lecturer, Dept of Politics, Cardiff University.

In the middle of the eighteenth century the Swiss writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was born three centuries ago this year, argued that the principal source of human unhappiness was our tendency to make invidious comparisons when humans were forced to cooperate in the pre-social state of nature.  He believed that this fuelled a desire for status and relative position which is the main source of the unhappiness in modern civilisation.

Was he right?  There is now substantial evidence supporting Rousseau’s view that status matters much more to individuals than do absolute levels of wealth.  But there is also mounting evidence that he failed to appreciate the extent to which our desire for status is natural.

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from upload.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1336677
for listening on your favourite device.

Religion and British Emigrants 1849-c.1910
Rowan Strong
, Associate Professor of Church History, Theology Program,
 Murdoch University, Australia

This paper focuses on the commencement of a new research project looking at the religion of British emigrants going to British settler colonies in the nineteenth century.

It examines the place of religion in the historiography of British emigration, in contrast to the importance of religion in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It goes on to outline some of the issues, questions, and difficulties in a project that seeks to detail how Christianity did, or did not, matter to British emigrants of all social strata in nineteenth-century Britain.

Finally, it will make some preliminary remarks about coherences and contrasts between the religion of the emigrants and that of their religious professionals, the clergy.

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from upload.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1348672
for listening on your favourite device.

Female Quixotism and Colonial Girlhood: 1895-1912
Elizabeth Hale, Senior Lecturer in English and Writing, School of Arts, University of New England, Australia.

I examine turn of the century formulations of talented girlhood in literature from Australia, the United States and Canada. I argue that the talented girls in question are adolescent versions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote; they follow a tradition in women’s novels, since Charlotte Lennox initiated the type in The Female Quixote (1752). They also incorporate the idea of the teenage girl writer/artist (as popularized by Louisa May Alcott in the 1860s). 

Focusing on Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom, Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna, I shall offer some ideas about why this literary type flourishes at this time, specifically in the context of representations of colonial girlhood by colonial writers.

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from upload.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1356077
for listening on your favourite device.

Could Cambridge become an Eco-City?
Elizabeth Garnsey PhD, Reader in Innovation Studies, Emeritus, Institute for Manufacturing, Dept of Engineering, University of Cambridge

Cambridge has become a centre of technology innovation as a result of the expansion of clusters of technology firms that originated in the university. But it has not pioneered city-wide environmental innovations. The reasons for this contrast between leading edge science & business enterprise and a lagging urban environment  will be explored.

We will review the emergence and spread of innovative technology-based firms in the Cambridge area, and then turn to the challenge of environmental innovation and some of the city-wide developments that are underway in response to these issues.  Efforts are being made by many local organisations and authorities to elicit support  from the university and residents in environmental initiatives, but could more interest and action be generated?

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from upload.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1356105
for listening on your favourite device.

The whole is more than the sum of the parts: narrowing the gap between Psychology and Law
Andreas Kapardis
Professor of Legal Psychology, Department of Law, University of Cyprus

Justice is too important to be left to police officers, prosecutors, judges and juries.

What is the evidence for, and why do some people confess to, crimes they have not committed? How reliable is the testimony provided by eyewitnesses, especially by children? Can false memories be created?  What non-legal factors have been shown to influence jury verdicts and sentences imposed by magistrates and judges? Are humans better at detecting lies than machines?

The talk provides a brief introduction to legal psychology and then address these contemporary issues drawing on legal psychology internationally. In the process, the question of how best to narrow the remaining gap between psychology and law will be answered.

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from
 upload.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1388659
for listening on your favourite device.

Nature or nurture: how much of language is innate?
Dr. Michelle L. Sheehan
Research Associate, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

The question of how language is acquired has fascinated scholars of linguistics and philosophy since ancient times. Chomsky's work on this topic in the mid 20th century sparked a cognitive revolution after which the focus shifted from behaviourist approaches towards mental models positing a richly specified Universal Grammar (UG).

More recently, though, different kinds of objections have been raised to the concept of UG, notably the issue of how such a system could evolve.

In this talk, I discuss the status of language universals and gaps in relation to this debate. We shall see that many things which we might expect to find in human languages simply never occur. These gaps, we shall see, provide quite strong support for some kind of cognitive bias in language acquisition, particularly when evidence from artificial language acquisition studies is considered.

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from
 http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1406165
for listening on your favourite device.

Bletchley Park 1942-1945
Michael Loewe
Bletchley Park Code Breaker 1942-45
University Lecturer in Chinese Studies 1963-1990

This is an extraordinary opportunity to hear someone who has personal experience of work at Bletchley Park during WW2. The high-level intelligence produced at Bletchley Park, codenamed Ultra, provided crucial assistance to the Allied war effort. Sir Harry Hinsley, a Bletchley veteran and the official historian of British Intelligence during the Second World War, believed that Ultra shortened the war by two to four years and that the outcome of the war would have been uncertain without it.

Michael Loewe was recruited as a code breaker while still an undergraduate at Oxford.  He writes:

‘We were a mixed bag: highly distinguished scholars and mathematicians; senior officers of the armed services; eccentrics; wise men and fools; veterans, long experienced in ‘the game’; or, as some of us, undergraduates torn away from the dreaming spires of Oxford or the fens of East Anglia.

Codes and ciphers varied in their complexity.  There were the simple systems used solely to deny information to lower ranks in the German, Italian or Japanese forces.  There were the highly refined versions of the commercially available ‘Enigma’ machine and its successors, used by commanders in the field, captains of submarines or naval attachés. 

In some cases, once the key to reading a message was found or broken, it could be read in its entirety; but for some systems the work was never complete and did not allow more than a partial reading, perhaps with the key word (the name of a place or a ship) undecipherable.

Codes and ciphers were broken by exploiting basic information, such as the behaviour of units of a language or predicting parts of the content of a message.  Those struggling with their wits at the Park blessed the well worn habits, the careless errors or the laziness of the cipher clerks!  But a basic characteristic of the Enigma machine itself provided the way in.

Occasionally the British services themselves helped, e.g. by a specially planned military operation designed to capture documents, or by laying a minefield at sea to provide a reaction by signal.’

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from
 http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1410601
for listening on your favourite device.

Kulikovo Refought – The role of medieval battles in Russian historiography
Kati Parppei PhD Postdoctoral Researcher (General History), Academy of Finland/University of Eastern Finland. Visiting Fellow Clare Hall; Visiting Scholar, Department of Slavonic Studies.

National identities are largely defined by exclusion, by drawing a line between “us” and “them”. The role of national history writing in creating and maintaining these dichotomies has been crucial. Representations of battles and conflicts fit conveniently into the picture: dramatic turning points appeal to emotions and subconsciously shape the collective ideas of the “common past”.

Due to their prominent roles in national histories, battle narratives can be seen as “landmarks” in the collective imagery of a nation’s position in temporal as well as in spatial dimensions. Unraveling and contextualizing their historical layers may help us understand the use of history in creating and maintaining collective identities and power structures.

In this postdoctoral project Russian historiography is used as a case study, tracing the formation, changes and interpolations of narratives of famous medieval battles, such as the Kulikovo Battle (1380), from the middle ages to the present.

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from
 http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1427887
for listening on your favourite device.

Translating the Greek Bible into Japanese: a personal history
Gohei Hata
Professor Emeritus, Tama Art University, Tokyo

Many people have asked me why I became interested in the Greek Bible, not the Hebrew Bible.  When I published my translation into Japanese of the first five books of the Greek Bible almost ten years ago, many people asked me if I would keep translating the Greek Bible to its very end.  I am here at Clare Hall to continue the task.

I am now aged 71.  It is the age when I begin to feel that the time allotted to me is shortening.  I feel so all the more after I lost my wife on the first day of January 2012, and the approaching end-time is now clearly in my sight.

Naturally, I have to think of what kind of last contribution I can make to Japanese scholarship and Japanese Christendom: it is the completion of the translation of the Greek Bible because we do not have it in Japanese.  The past four decades of my scholarship seem to have paved the way for this final contribution.

In my talk I will first look back upon my life as a scholar and a classicist and then briefly mention the history of the Greek Bible.  I will discuss its importance for the understanding of Judaism and Christianity in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from
 http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1443981
for listening on your favourite device.

Ethics at the end of life
Robert Macauley, MD

Few areas of medicine are as rife with ethical questions as the end of life. 

Is it ever appropriate for a physician to hasten a patient's death?  Do those who are using a disproportionate amount of societal resources have a "duty to die"?  Is the terminally ill patient who takes his own life acting courageously, or taking the easy way out?  Who decides when "enough is enough"?  

In this talk, an ethicist and palliative care physician will examine questions such as these from both analytic and practical angles, with reference to recent controversies such as Sarah Palin's supposed "Death Panels" and the current furore over the Liverpool Care Pathway.
Accompanying slides (PDF, 1.7 MB)

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from
 http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1474268
for listening on your favourite device.

Gender Equality and Diversity: a must for managing Human Resources
Covadonga Aldamiz-echevarria PhD
Senior Lecturer, University of the Basque Country
Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall

Women are generally under-represented in management positions  in commerce and industry and frequently also in the workforce itself. This is not only a problem for the women but also for the companies that do not benefit from the talent, perspectives and capabilities of  women who are not only potential managers and workers, but also consumers.

In order to have more women playing important roles in business organizations, it is frequently necessary to take a proactive approach towards their inclusion.

In this talk I will analyse the relevant factors highlighted by the progress report Women in economic decision-making in the EU recently published by the department of Justice of the European Union.

I will then present the findings of my own research on the recruitment and promotion of women by ‘excellent’ British organizations (as defined by the European Foundation for Quality Management criteria).

Drawing on their best practices I will make recommendations on how  gender equality may be encouraged.

Accompanying lecture slides (PDF, 475 KB)

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from
sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1481647
for listening on your favourite device.

Memorialising war: How we remember, lest we forget
Trudi Tate, Fellow of Clare Hall; Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of English
Keir Reeves, Senior Monash Research Fellow, National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University; Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall and McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

Trudi Tate and Keir Reeves will engage in a conversation about their work on Australia’s involvement in foreign wars, and how this is remembered (or not) in the years which follow.

Trudi will talk about her recent book, The Listening Watch (2013), which is based on interviews with an Australian veteran who served in Viet Nam. Written in the spirit of W. G. Sebald it explores questions of listening and bearing witness to wars, and to those who have served, and it meditates upon the effects of trauma on an individual and his family.

Keir will explore the concept of writing about war memories, history and travel to destinations associated with difficult heritage. He wrote about these themes in the co-edited Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with Difficult Heritage (2009) and the co-authored Anzac Journeys: Walking the Battlefields of the Second World War (forthcoming 2013).

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from
sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1481661
for listening on your favourite device.

Academe and the Industrial Revolution
Robert G W Anderson
Vice-President, Clare Hall

In this talk I shall explore how the academic world and industry came together in unpredictable ways in Scotland in the later eighteenth century.

This was not something that would happen in the more limited cultural world of the two English universities. In particular, two medical professors, William Cullen and Joseph Black, interacted with promoters and improvers in a way which resulted in significant economic change.

It is interesting to compare this situation with Manchester and Birmingham, where there was plenty of industrial and intellectual activity but there were no universities, as such.

An MP3 version of this audio file is available from
sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1486681
for listening on your favourite device.