The four speakers in this event each have 5 slides and 5 minutes to talk about aspects of their research, with each talk followed by 15 minutes of conversation. The speakers are: Prerita Govil (Classical Indian Religion/Comparative Philosophy), Joel Bellviure Perez (Classical Archaeology), Ellen Sharman (History/Early Modern Reception), Alessia Zubani (History of Science/Late Antiquity).



The event is catered with wine, soft drinks and nibbles.

The Indo-European language family comprises ten primary branches (Anatolian, Tocharian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian). The academic study of these languages together as a group may be said to begin in 1816, and the method of linguistic reconstruction still in use crystallised in the second half of the 19th century. The 20th and early 21st centuries saw the discovery of the Tocharian and Anatolian branches, as well as a number of changes and refinements in theory. What is the situation of these studies today, and where are they (~should they be) going?



As a Lunch Table event, members of the Cluster are invited to join Tim for lunch in Hall at 12.30. The talk, beginning at 1.15 in the Levett Room, is catered with tea/coffee and cakes (all welcome).

The spectacular ‘Main Deposit’ excavated by James Quibell and Frederick Green at Hierakonpolis in 1897–98 included hundreds of fragments of human statuettes carved from hippopotamus and elephant ivory. The cache represents men, women and children in a variety of poses and costumes, ranging from complete examples to the detached heads, arms, legs, feet and bases of many others. Debate continues concerning the date of their manufacture and the reason for their deposition. I will present a new study of the corpus, relating the Hierakonpolis pieces to comparative material from deposits found at other sites across Egypt. I also challenge the standard interpretation of such deposits as discarded temple offerings and propose an alternative explanation of the contexts in which they should be understood.



As a Lunch Table event, members of the Cluster are invited to join Liam for lunch in Hall at 12.30. The talk, beginning at 1.15 in the Levett Room, is catered with tea/coffee and cakes (all welcome).

The AWRC is proud to host a live performance of the Roman tragedy Octavia directed by Cluster member David Wiles. Octavia survived because it was thought to have been written by Seneca. Written a generation or so after Seneca’s death, the play attacks the brutality of Nero. A mixed student and community cast will present a half-hour version of this tragedy, performed in the translation of c.1561. This was a moment when it was no longer safe to perform biblical plays, and people were forced to turn to the classics in search of a new way of making theatre. The translation forges an exuberant rhetorical language in order to create some performative equivalence to the Latin, and the text does not seem to have had an airing in the last 450 years. Just as Nero discarded his first wife, so too did Henry VIII, and the fruit of his love match had come to the throne in 1558, so tackling this play was a bold choice. Nero’s argument for authoritarian rule retains its relevance today.



The performance of Octavia will be organised as one of our 'Lunch Table' events. Cluster members are invited to join David for lunch in Hall at 12.30. The performance, beginning at 1.15, is in the Buttery and will be catered with tea/coffee (all welcome).

Our research network is an online global meeting space for researchers in the field of life-writing. This event is open to members only. Find out more about joining via the linked page.



Writing Closed Worlds



In her memoir, Cloistered, Catherine Coldstream tells the story of her twelve years in a traditional silent monastery in the 1990s. In this talk she will be discussing her experience of writing about life in a closed world, and how she met the challenge of conveying an essentially ‘hidden’ life in narrative form.



Catherine Coldstream was born in London, and has studied at the Universities of Oxford, East Anglia, and Goldsmiths, London. After converting to Roman Catholicism, in her twenties, she entered the Carmelite order as an enclosed nun. Since leaving monastic life she has taught philosophy and ethics in schools and completed a doctorate in Creative Writing (Memoir) at Goldsmiths.



The Many Lives of Mary Lamb



This talk will explore absences and illness in the writing of Mary Lamb (1764-1847). Her life-writing is fragmentary, glimpsed in her stories for children, letters, one polemic essay; writing about her life is often constrained by difficulty in describing her mental illness and her matricide. We will focus on her evasive, intriguing tales for children and how to read their hidden stories of grief, loss, belief and consolation.



Felicity James teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and creative writing, at the University of Leicester, in the School of Arts and the Centre for Empathic Healthcare. She is editing the children’s writing of Charles and Mary Lamb for the Oxford Collected Works; more broadly, she researches religious dissent, specifically Unitarianism, and its rich literary culture.

Sir Stephen Hough joins Dr Kate Kennedy in conversation about life-writing, music, and Stephen's recent autobiography, Enough (2023).



Sir Stephen Hough is one of the most distinctive artists of his generation. He combines a distinguished career as a pianist with those of composer and writer.



Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Hough was the first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (2001). He was awarded Northwestern University’s 2008 Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano, won the Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist Award in 2010, and in 2016 was made an Honorary Member of RPS. In 2014 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2022.



Since taking first prize at the 1983 Naumburg Competition in New York, Sir Stephen has appeared with most of the major European, Asian and American orchestras and plays recitals regularly in major halls and concert series around the world from London's Royal Festival Hall to New York’s Carnegie Hall. He has been a regular guest at festivals such as Aldeburgh, Aspen, Blossom, Edinburgh, La Roque d'Anthéron, Hollywood Bowl, Mostly Mozart, Salzburg, Tanglewood, Verbier, and the BBC Proms, where he has made 29 concerto appearances, including playing all of the works of Tchaikovsky for piano and orchestra, a series he later repeated with the Chicago Symphony.



Many of his catalogue of over 60 albums have garnered international prizes including the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, Diapason d’Or, Monde de la Musique, several Grammy nominations, eight Gramophone Magazine Awards including ‘Record of the Year’ in 1996 and 2003, and the Gramophone ‘Gold Disc’ Award in 2008, which named his complete Saint-Saens Piano Concertos as the best recording of the past 30 years. His 2012 recording of the complete Chopin Waltzes received the Diapason d’Or de l’Annee, France’s most prestigious recording award. His 2005 live recording of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos was the fastest selling recording in Hyperion’s history, while his 1987 recording of the Hummel concertos remains Chandos’ best-selling disc to date.



Published by Josef Weinberger, Sir Stephen has composed works for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, organ, harpsichord and solo piano. He has been commissioned by the Takacs Quartet, the Cliburn, CMS Lincoln Center, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, the Gilmore Foundation, The Genesis Foundation, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, London’s National Gallery, Wigmore Hall, Le Musée de Louvre and Musica Viva Australia among others.



A noted writer, Sir Stephen has contributed articles for The New York Times, the Guardian, The Times, Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine, and he wrote a blog for The Telegraph for seven years which became one of the most popular and influential forums for cultural discussion and for which he wrote over six hundred articles. He has published four books: The Bible as Prayer (Bloomsbury and Paulist Press, 2007); a novel: The Final Retreat (Sylph Editions, 2018); a book of essays: Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More (Faber & Faber and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019); and a memoir: Enough: Scenes from Childhood (Faber & Faber, 2023).



Sir Stephen is an Honorary Fellow of Cambridge University’s Girton College and holds the International Chair of Piano Studies at his alma mater, the Royal Northern College in Manchester. He is also a member of the faculty at The Juilliard School.



Please find event accessibility details here: https://www.accessguide.ox.ac.uk/holywell-music-room-0

Part of the Vera Fine-Grodzinski Programme for Writing Jewish Women's Lives



Thinking about both the women who survived and who did not survive the Holocaust demonstrates that especially under extreme conditions gender continues to operate as an important arbiter of experience. Whilst men and women were both sentenced to the same fate, gender nevertheless operated as a crucial signifier for survival.



Zoë Waxman, is Professor of Holocaust History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Writing the Holocaust: memory, testimony, representation (2006), Anne Frank (2015), and Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (2017), as well as numerous articles relating to the Holocaust and genocide.



Please find event accessibility details here: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/accessibility-wolfson-college