Sarah Ogilvie will join Hermione Lee in conversation about her recent book The Dictionary People. She will reflect on her discovery of the 150 year-old address books belonging to Sir James Murray, the longest serving editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Therein lay the names and addresses of three thousand people around the world who helped created the Dictionary between 1858 and its completion in 1928. Sarah spent eight years researching their lives. Far from the learned elites, it turns out that most of these people were amateurs and autodidacts, and many more women than previously thought. They included female archeologists, astronomers and suffragists; inmates of psychiatric hospitals; vegetarian vicars; the inventor of the tennis net adjuster; three murderers, a pornography collector, and a cocaine addict found dead in a railway station lavatory. This is a story of devotion and obsession that shines a light on many lives previously unknown and unsung.

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At the core of OCLW's new programme on Writing Jewish Women's Lives, our new series of afternoon literary seminars are a chance to discuss books by and about Jewish women. At this seminar we welcome authors Lisa Appignanesi and Devorah Baum to talk about loss and grief, love and laughter, and being Jewish.



Losing the Dead is Lisa’s profound memoir of the time she returned to Poland on a quest to seek out her mother’s wartime secrets at the very moment when her mother’s own memory was getting lost to Alzheimer’s. In so doing, Lisa was led to reflect on the secrets of her own past and identity formations. Devorah, who happens to be Lisa's daughter-in-law, draws on some related tropes of memoir and psychoanalysis in her writing and film-making. In this conversation, Lisa and Devorah will discuss Losing the Dead and then, more generally, the role played by familial stories in their work.

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Join us for a very special event to celebrate the launch of the A DIRTY, FILTHY BOOK: Sex, Scandal, and One Woman’s Fight in the Victorian Trial of the Century by Michael Meyer.



THE FIRST MAJOR BOOK ABOUT AN EMPOWERING PIONEER OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS WHO HAS BEEN OVERLOOKED FOR FAR TOO LONG



London, 1877. A petite young woman stands before an all-male jury, about to risk everything. She takes a breath, and opens her defence. Annie Besant and her confidant Charles Bradlaugh are on trial for the sordid crime of publishing and selling a birth control pamphlet.



Before Britain’s highest judge she declares it is a woman’s right to choose when, and if, to have children. At a time when women were legally and socially subservient to men, Annie’s defiant voice was a sensation. The trial scandalised newspapers, captivated the British public and sparked a debate over morals, censorship and sex.



Critically acclaimed writer and historian, Michael Meyer pieces together unpublished archives, private papers and courtroom transcripts to bring Annie and Victorian London to life. He tells the gripping story of a forgotten pioneer who refused to accept the role the Establishment assigned to her. Instead, she chose to resist.

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At the core of OCLW's new programme on Writing Jewish Women's Lives, our new series of afternoon literary seminars are a chance to discuss books by and about Jewish women.



At this event we welcome Meriel Schindler to talk with Rebecca Abrams about their various books and the issues raised when writing about or as Jewish women. Topics will include family relationships, assimilation and legacy - as well as addressing practical questions about researching, writing and structuring a multiple-strand story. There will be time for questions from participants, with priority given to in-person participants.

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This event is part of the Beyond Music series, generously supported by Felix Appelbe.







About Dame Imogen Cooper:



Regarded as one of the finest interpreters of Classical and Romantic repertoire, Imogen Cooper’s future concerto performances include the London Symphony Orchestra with Sir Simon Rattle, the Hallé with Sir Mark Elder and The Cleveland and Helsinki Philharmonic orchestras with Dame Jane Glover. Her solo recitals this season include performances in London, New York and Washington DC.



Imogen has a widespread international career and has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Berliner Philharmoniker, Vienna Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, Budapest Festival and NHK Symphony orchestras. She has played at the BBC Proms and with all the major British orchestras, including particularly close relationships with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia.



As a committed chamber musician Imogen performs regularly with Henning Kraggerud and Adrian Brendel. Her lieder partners include Ian Bostridge, Sarah Connolly and Mark Padmore. Imogen’s most recent solo recordings have been for Chandos Records.



Imogen received a DBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2021. The Imogen Cooper Music Trust was founded in 2015, to support young pianists at the cusp of their careers and give them time in an environment of peace and beauty.

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Title: Moral Uncertainty in Autonomous Agents



Abstract:

One important goal of machine learning is to create agents that can behave ethically. Such ethical behaviour would allow autonomous agents to be safely used in a wider range of cases, e.g. fully autonomous vehicles may encounter unexpected moral dilemmas during deployment. At the same time, there is no agreement within or between societies as to what constitutes ethical behaviour. Fortunately, there has been recent work in philosophy called 'moral uncertainty', e.g. here in Oxford by William MacAskill, that aims to address this very issue. In this talk, we first look at a paper by Ecoffet and Lehman (from Open AI) to see how ideas from moral uncertainty can be used alongside with Reinforcement Learning to implement autonomous agents with multiple ethical theories. We also look at my recent AAAI paper, which looks at fanaticism, a well-known problem within moral uncertainty. In particular, should small parts of society be able to completely determine what ethical behaviour means (such that the other parts of society are disregarded), just because they are morally repulsed? Consider that only a very small part of society believes that abortion is ethically unaccaptable. Due to fanaticism, agents may also consider abortions ethically wrong, despite the majority of society thinking otherwise; is this desirable? Finally, we look at interesting unsolved problems within moral uncertainty and their relevance to machine learning.



Bio:

I am Jazon Szabo, currently a final year PhD student at the Safe & Trusted AI CDT, co-organised by King's College London and Imperial College London. My main research interests are value alignment and machine ethics; I look at the use of moral uncertainty to address problems within these fields. I am also greatly interested in the field of AI Ethics: I have been running an online AI Ethics Reading Group for 3 years and I have helped create course material for an AI Ethics course at KCL.



This is a hybrid meeting. Please find the Teams link on XML webpage: https://users.ox.ac.uk/~ndog0178/XML/xml_index.html

Mary Chapman specializes in American literature and transnational American Studies; in particular, she works on intersections between cultural forms (i.e. suffrage activism, print culture, parlor theatricals, parades), literary production, and politics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. She is currently writing a biography of an enslaved Chinese girl who toured the world with an acrobatic troupe during the Gold Rush and later became the mother of the two writers who founded Asian American literature: Edith Eaton (“Sui Sin Far”) and Winnifred Eaton (“Onoto Watanna”). Chapman is the Director of the Winnifred Eaton Archive https://www.winnifredeatonarchive.org/ and founding director of University of British Columbia's Public Humanities Hub.

I am a zooarchaeologist (PhD Archaeology 2015, University of Exeter) with a speciality in geometric morphometric methods. My research focuses upon detecting domestic animal breeds in the archaeological record in order to evaluate the impact of ecology, connectivity and cultural integration upon human economy and subsistence over the longue durée. I have worked from contexts ranging from prehistoric Final Bronze Age societies in the Central Asian steppe to contemporary historic industrial pig breeding in pre- and post-war Germany and am particularly interested in the impact of trade and disease upon domestic animal pheno- and genotypes.