Once upon a time, not so long ago, Freudian themes occupied an important place in every scholarly investigation of human sexuality. With the advent of gender studies and queer theory, Freud and his followers lost theoretical and conceptual ground in favour of allegedly less hetero-normative perspectives, such as Foucault’s arguments on the decisive impact of discursive power structures on gender performance and the body politic. At the same time, psychoanalysts themselves seem to have lost interest in all matters sexual, their intellectual efforts having been re-directed towards the precarious legitimization of their clinical practice in times of evidence-based cost-effectiveness. In this lecture, I will explore to what extent Freud’s original ideas on the human sexual experience may still be valuable for the way in which human sexuality manifests itself in the fast and furious 21st century.

What is the nature of mathematics? Can it be beautiful? Are there geniuses of mathematics? In this talk I will focus on the last two questions, and I will do so within the framework of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Mysteriously, Kant’s answer changed during his life. First he answered both questions with “yes”. Mathematics can be beautiful and there are geniuses of mathematics. But soon after the completion of his Critique of Pure Reason, he changed his mind. Why did this happen? As far as I know, Kant himself never wrote or talked about this change of mind. In order to understand this development, we need to understand his concepts of beauty, genius, and mathematics. I will explain these concepts, and I will try to explain why Kant changed his mind.

In this lecture, I shall reconstruct the notion of judgement to be found in the philosophical writings of Theodor W. Adorno.

It is commonly assumed that what little scientific advance there might have been in the Middle Ages was held back by the power of the Church.  But, in fact, there was important progress in science and technology during the medieval period.  And the influence of the Church was generally positive even if it imposed strict limits beyond which philosophers should not tread.  This talk will examine the scientific achievements of the Middle Ages and how they fed into the celebrated work of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo.

The field of cultural representations of the Holocaust over the long postwar era has been shaped by many different factors and filters.  In the case of Italy, the focus of this lecture, one of the key factors that has loomed large in the collective imaginary, in stories, images, events and commemorations of the Holocaust, has been the city of Rome; in particular, a series of dramatic and interlinked events that took place there between late 1943 and early 1944.  The lecture explores those events and their cultural ramifications, asking how the obsessive working over of their substance and meaning after the war has determined how Italy has confronted or failed to confront the legacy of the Holocaust.

The official line is clear: the UK does not 'participate in, solicit, encourage or condone' torture. And yet, the evidence is irrefutable: when faced with potential threats to our national security, the gloves always come off.

Drawing on previously unseen official documents, and the accounts of witnesses, victims and experts, prize-winning investigative journalist Ian Cobain looks beyond the cover-ups, the equivocations, and the attempts to dismiss brutality as the work of a few rogue interrogators, to get to the truth. From WWII to the War on Terror, via Kenya and Northern Ireland, Cruel Britannia shows how the British have repeatedly and systematically resorted to torture, turning a blind eye where necessary, bending the law where they can, and issuing categorical denials all the while. What emerges is a picture of Britain that challenges our complacency on human rights and exposes the lie behind our reputation for fair play.

IAN COBAIN was born in Liverpool in 1960. He has been a journalist since the early 1980s and is currently an investigative reporter with the Guardian. His inquiries into the UK's involvement in torture since 9/11 have won a number of major awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Prize and the Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism. He has also won several Amnesty International media awards. Cobain lives in London with his wife and two children.

The lecture will address literary projects in prisons and academic analyses of them. My suggestion is that we have not yet come to a proper understanding of what literature “does” in the prison context.

I shall argue that, in order to understand what literature does, we need a working theory of what literature is (how can we define “the literary”?); and that the context of prison writing and literature in prisons may help us reach a working definition. That in turn may help us articulate the point of literature both in and beyond prisons, which seems a necessary undertaking in the context of the current crisis in the humanities.

This talk begins by briefly reviewing the three kinds of explanations that are given for linguistic phenomena: socio-historical, functional, and formal. I then take up recent claims--particularly from some computationally oriented psychologists--that formal explanations, including especially the kinds of abstract, hierarchical, structures posited by Chomsky and others, are unnecessary, and that syntactic data can be explained simply by looking at sequences of words (like "beads on a string") in large enough corpora. I present traditional and new syntactic evidence showing that this view is wrong: I show that it cannot model well-known structural ambiguities or facts from ellipsis.

The Dispositif of Person

Abstract

If the point of philosophical reflection is to critically dismantle contemporary opinion, to radically interrogate what is presented as immediately clear to all, there are few concepts so in need of dismantling as that of "person". No term in the Western tradition enjoys the wide-ranging success that the term person does today.

My paper will focus not only on those areas directly related to it that run from philosophy to law to anthropology, to finally theology, but on those ideological perspectives that seem opposed to each other, like catholic and secularist bioethics.

While for Catholics a living being is to be considered a person since the moment of conception, for secularists it is much later. But, however, both agree on the value that is to be attributed to the title of person. For both, personalisation is the crucial passage through which a biological material that lacks meaning becomes something intangible. Only a life that has crossed through the symbolic door of the person is believed to be sacred or is valued in terms of its qualities.

Ostia, port of Rome, is the most extensively-excavated classical city in the Mediterranean basin. It is spectacularly well-preserved, thanks to the coastal sand which covered its ruins for many centuries. Most of the city was uncovered under Mussolini, who sought to recover an ideal of Roman urban achievement, which might inspire Fascist Italy. His 'political archaeology' made few records, and tended to ascribe buildings to the 'golden age' of Hadrian: the 'peak' of Roman civilisation. Yet, unlike Pompei, Ostia has surviving levels from across the full span of Roman urban history. The University of Kent's research, since 2008, has sought to investigate some of those later centuries. By applying a new type of field archaeology, adapted to extensively-excavated urban sites, we have been able to significantly alter views of the city at this time. For many decades, scholars have described Late Roman Ostia as a shadow of its former self - the coastal resort of a decadent senatorial class, slaves to luxurious domesticity, public leisure and escapist religion. But the work of Kent, alongside other teams, has revealed a host of new observations about everyday life in these later centuries. Ostia emerges as an active commercial and political centre, with its own distinctive story to tell, which sheds much light on life in Rome itself during the 4th to 6th centuries A.D.

An essential relationship with time seems to constitute a fundamental component of every literary creation, and demands to be investigated on a variety of levels; each narrative text presents, in this respect, a specific configuration, together with the opportunity to discover different facets (some fairly obvious, some more hidden) of the human perspective on temporality. The analysis of Levi's "Se questo è un uomo" will provide us with such an opportunity, with the added dimension of a pointed (albeit mostly implicit) questioning of the role and meaning of literature itself.

The invention of the cinema at the end of the 19th century conjured magically moving bodies via a mechanical decomposition of the body into a series of instantaneous spasms, giving birth to a species of automata. In this lecture I will read this process as an earlier symptom of modernity in the work of Baudelaire, then focusing on the way that the invention of the cinema emerges out of medical, psychiatric and pseudo-scientific discourses which produce certain kinds of bodies. But other kinds of bodies are possible; in the second part of the lecture I will focus on the work of Proust and Beckett in order to show how literature invents and pursues other bodies and forms of movement.

The study of the Roman Empire has become a global phenomenon with radical research agendas in Brazil, new 3d TV programmes being made in Korea for a world market, and it continues to thrive in its European heartland. These are signs that the Roman Empire is becoming more relevant today. This lecture will set out a means to capture the nature of the Roman Empire seeking to relate the local, Pompeii, to the global, the Empire. The content will be drawn from Ray Laurence's own experience of working on space with a focus on understanding how the spatial turn can allow Roman historians and archaeologists to create new explanations for a subject that has a longevity of scholarship back to at least the 18th century.  In so doing, a question is posed to provide a focus for the lecture: Was the Roman Empire a form of globalisation?

Schrödinger's Cat is famously both dead and alive. Or was it neither dead nor alive? Or indeterminately dead and alive; or did it no longer even make sense to think of it being dead or alive, at least until we bother to look, at which point our looking decides its fate? However it is understood, uncertainty and observer involvement make a good source of metaphors and literary devices. A particularly interesting example is the French Nouveau Roman of the later twentieth century, since uncertainty and reader involvement are features of the genre. In Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Monsieur, a Nouveau Nouveau Roman, the main character narrates the cat's story as a playful way of reflecting what his author is up to. This talk will start with an introduction to the themes in the foundations of physics that underlie the interpretative puzzles. Then we'll look at some recent work by philosophers on ways to think about indeterminacy, by way of illustrating the relationship between physics and philosophy, and see how the same kinds of ideas are useful in thinking about the literary case.

We live in an age in which poetry for many exists on the margins. In the song culture of early Greece poetry in performance was at the heart of public and private experience. This lecture explores the way poetry was used for love and hate, politics and war, wine and worship, the way in which songs travelled in a world without books, and the complicated process which led from the sung to written text.

Est dit en kenteytz: Kent and Anglo-Norman in the Middle Ages

The lecture will look at the term "kentish" in the Middle Ages (and since), and how it fits (or not) into a general discussion about language variation in both England and France; at some Anglo-Norman materials from Kent; and at modern dialect words (in Kent) which are of Anglo-Norman origin.

The contemporary sociolinguistic situation in Barcelona is characterised by extensive language contact between Catalan and Castilian (Spanish), as well as by recent developments in language policy and planning which favour the use of Catalan in many official domains. By and large, the relevant literature chooses to focus on one or the other of these characteristics. However, my current research examines both policy and contact in equal measure in order to offer an accurate portrayal of the sociolinguistic reality for bilingual Catalan-Castilian language users in Barcelona.

One of the aims of my research is to see whether policy and contact exert rival pressures on a given sociolinguistic situation, i.e. do they result in linguistic phenomena that are in some way in competition? This is to be tested using an innovative model, in which sociolinguistic phenomena will be categorised along three bifurcating axes, based on existing literature. I will show that language policy and language contact occupy the two maximally distinct extremes of the model, and shall be deemed to be key components of what will be termed top-down phenomena and bottom-up phenomena respectively.

Studying a linguistic community characterised by two maximally distinct phenomena (such as policy and contact in Barcelona) should prove a good testing ground for the model. When these two phenomena co-exist, what are the consequences for the model? Using data from recent fieldwork in Barcelona, I will show how this model of sociolinguistic phenomena can be applied to a real-life situation. This may help researchers gain a clearer insight into the complexities which characterise a situation such as Barcelona.

'Bad history? Virgins, vibrators and Queen Victoria in the history of medicine'

In this lecture, I shall be reflecting on current debates on doing historical research in the age of the internet. The amount of material that can be accessed continues to grow on a daily basis, and is often in full-text searchable form. So, while the length of time spent finding sources has been reduced, the amount of material to be mastered has grown. In the less formal side of the internet, history is now being written in blogs, and some bloggers are acting as gate-keepers to the field.

I shall be concentrating on how historical myths are spread through the internet; in particular, the myth of Queen Victoria's use of cannabis, and the myth of the early history of therapeutic masturbation. While acknowledging that the difference between 'good' and 'bad' history does not necessarily correspond to that between 'professional' and 'amateur' historians, I shall be asking how historians can engage with emerging debates in the blogosphere, and trying to define what counts as 'good' history today.

ŒGods, soldiers, mummies: making Egypt Roman
In the century after conquering Egypt from Kleopatra, did Rome have any cultural impact on Egypt¹s complex indigenous and hellenistic civilisation? Was there any ŒRomanisation¹ of Egypt? This illustrated lecture pursues some case studies drawing on both the papyrus documents and archaeological finds: the cult of the crocodile god Sobek at Tebtunis, the legionary veteran Pompeius and the death of his daughter, the Fayyum mummy portraits, the tax-collector Nemesion and the emperor Claudius¹ letter to Alexandria.