The four speakers in this event will have 5 slides and 5 minutes to start a conversation about aspects of their research, each followed by 15 minutes of conversation. The speakers are:



Lara Bampfield (Assyriology/Digital Humanities), Mridulla Gullapalli (Ancient History), Adriana Molina Muñoz (Historical Linguistics/Sanskrit), and Nathan Websdale (Late Antique/ Medieval History).



The event will be catered with wine, soft drinks and nibbles.

Taking Cicero’s pro Ligario as my starting point, I will offer some thoughts on pity and on the role of emotion in the writing of history. I will look at the suicide of Cato as a frame for Cicero’s perspective, and I will frame my own perspective by discussing briefly the oratory of Clarence Darrow. I will be speaking partly from an academic perspective, but also from the perspective of a professional writer (i.e. having personally, in the career sense, left academia for writing) and I will situate my thoughts with reference to a few twentieth and twenty-first century writers (George Orwell, Yiyun Li, Marlon James, Bandi). These reflections are intended to offer a rationale and a way of thinking about emotion in the writing of history.



The AWRC has reserved a lunch table at 12.30 in Hall for Cluster members to meet the speaker Alison Rosenblitt. The talk at 1.15 in the Florey Room is catered with cakes and tea/coffee, all are welcome.

Egyptologist Jaroslav Černý (1898-1970) introduced the everyday life of ancient Egyptians to Egyptology. Remembered mostly as a philologist, he intended to write social and economic history of New Kingdom Egypt, and remains closely linked to the study of the settlement of Deir el-Medina. During his career, he was part of a scholarly network that connected Czechoslovakia, United Kingdom, Egypt and France, crossing national and institutional boundaries. Toward the end of his life, he was part of a team recording Egyptian monuments and organized by the Egyptian authorities and specialists in cooperation with UNESCO. This talk will introduce his professional journey, addressing the sociology of knowledge in Egyptian archaeology and history.



The AWRC has reserved a lunch table at 12.30 in Hall for Cluster members to meet the speaker Hana Navratilova. The talk at 1.15 in the Florey Room is catered with cakes and tea/coffee, all are welcome.

For a long time, the Neolithic has been understood as a great radical shift in how people lived and behaved, the moment when people first became like us, emerging from a wild hunting and gathering past to farm, settle down and live in houses and villages, to worship gods – in short set the foundations of modern humanity. This powerful image has set the framework for research to such an extent that it has been hard to conceive of the process except in terms of origins, threshold moments, and evolutionary success. Research has gradually been revealing a much more messy, diverse, and interesting Neolithic, full of innovation but not targeted at a single development goal.



The AWRC has reserved a lunch table at 12.30 in Hall for Cluster members to meet the speaker Bill Finlayson. The talk at 1.15 in the Florey Room is catered with cakes and tea/coffee, all are welcome.

Join us on Tuesday 12 March 2024 for a day colloquium to launch the Vera Fine-Grodzinski Programme for Writing Jewish Women's Lives. Speakers include a range of world-renowned authors and scholars presenting their views on Jewish women's life-writing and how this body of literature contributes to social and cultural history. The conference will conclude with a round table to bring together all the ideas discussed during the day.

Register here 

This new student-led reading group is an opportunity for graduate students and early career researchers to join us to discuss all aspects of memory studies and life-writing, from the personal to the political, the local to the transnational, within disciplines and without, the ordinary to the extraordinary. Ars Memoriae aims to promote and generate awareness about the growing discipline of memory studies while also recognising the pressing need to synthesise memory studies scholarship with purposeful cultural analysis.



Inspired by the Latin phrase ars memoriae, ‘the art of memory,’ our fortnightly reading group seeks to interrogate memory in all its forms while placing literary texts at the core of our conversations. As memories and the process of memory-making are fundamental to human existence, entering a dialogue with memory will inevitably require us to engage with pertinent questions of history, politics, sociology, psychology, and so on. While thinking outside the box is an essential aspect of critical inquiry today, the happening realm of memory studies, via its focus on memory, asks us a crucial question: What is a box, and do we really need one?



With literary texts and interdisciplinary scholarship that foreground memory in their discourse as our scaffolds, we, as a reading group, will think, discuss, and interrogate memory in all its forms. Our aim is also to facilitate the creation of a space where everyone can reflect on the role and place of memory in their own research and how it connects with contemporary issues of the world around us.

Register here 

This new student-led reading group is an opportunity for graduate students and early career researchers to join us to discuss all aspects of memory studies and life-writing, from the personal to the political, the local to the transnational, within disciplines and without, the ordinary to the extraordinary. Ars Memoriae aims to promote and generate awareness about the growing discipline of memory studies while also recognising the pressing need to synthesise memory studies scholarship with purposeful cultural analysis.



Inspired by the Latin phrase ars memoriae, ‘the art of memory,’ our fortnightly reading group seeks to interrogate memory in all its forms while placing literary texts at the core of our conversations. As memories and the process of memory-making are fundamental to human existence, entering a dialogue with memory will inevitably require us to engage with pertinent questions of history, politics, sociology, psychology, and so on. While thinking outside the box is an essential aspect of critical inquiry today, the happening realm of memory studies, via its focus on memory, asks us a crucial question: What is a box, and do we really need one?



With literary texts and interdisciplinary scholarship that foreground memory in their discourse as our scaffolds, we, as a reading group, will think, discuss, and interrogate memory in all its forms. Our aim is also to facilitate the creation of a space where everyone can reflect on the role and place of memory in their own research and how it connects with contemporary issues of the world around us.

Register here

This new student-led reading group is an opportunity for graduate students and early career researchers to join us to discuss all aspects of memory studies and life-writing, from the personal to the political, the local to the transnational, within disciplines and without, the ordinary to the extraordinary. Ars Memoriae aims to promote and generate awareness about the growing discipline of memory studies while also recognising the pressing need to synthesise memory studies scholarship with purposeful cultural analysis.



Inspired by the Latin phrase ars memoriae, ‘the art of memory,’ our fortnightly reading group seeks to interrogate memory in all its forms while placing literary texts at the core of our conversations. As memories and the process of memory-making are fundamental to human existence, entering a dialogue with memory will inevitably require us to engage with pertinent questions of history, politics, sociology, psychology, and so on. While thinking outside the box is an essential aspect of critical inquiry today, the happening realm of memory studies, via its focus on memory, asks us a crucial question: What is a box, and do we really need one?



With literary texts and interdisciplinary scholarship that foreground memory in their discourse as our scaffolds, we, as a reading group, will think, discuss, and interrogate memory in all its forms. Our aim is also to facilitate the creation of a space where everyone can reflect on the role and place of memory in their own research and how it connects with contemporary issues of the world around us.

Register here 

This new student-led reading group is an opportunity for graduate students and early career researchers to join us to discuss all aspects of memory studies and life-writing, from the personal to the political, the local to the transnational, within disciplines and without, the ordinary to the extraordinary. Ars Memoriae aims to promote and generate awareness about the growing discipline of memory studies while also recognising the pressing need to synthesise memory studies scholarship with purposeful cultural analysis.



Inspired by the Latin phrase ars memoriae, ‘the art of memory,’ our fortnightly reading group seeks to interrogate memory in all its forms while placing literary texts at the core of our conversations. As memories and the process of memory-making are fundamental to human existence, entering a dialogue with memory will inevitably require us to engage with pertinent questions of history, politics, sociology, psychology, and so on. While thinking outside the box is an essential aspect of critical inquiry today, the happening realm of memory studies, via its focus on memory, asks us a crucial question: What is a box, and do we really need one?



With literary texts and interdisciplinary scholarship that foreground memory in their discourse as our scaffolds, we, as a reading group, will think, discuss, and interrogate memory in all its forms. Our aim is also to facilitate the creation of a space where everyone can reflect on the role and place of memory in their own research and how it connects with contemporary issues of the world around us.