Come join us for a discussion led by Clara Barker on the challenges and achievements of LGBTQI+ inclusion in Science, Technology,

Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

Clara Barker is a thin-film material scientist who manages the Centre for Applied Superconductivity, in the materials department at Oxford University, her work briefly profiled in Nature in Jan 2021, which can be read here.

Clara Barker the chair of the LGBT+ advisory group to Oxford University and the Dean for Equality and Diversity at Linacre College, as well as a member of the Royal Societies Equality and Diversity Committee.

In 2018 she won the first VC’s diversity role model award from the University. She runs a youth group for LGBTI+ young people, is a Stonewall school role model, and presented a talk at a TEDxWomen London event in 2018. For her volunteer work she won a Points of Light Award from the UK Prime Minister in 2017.

The Art of Mass Decarceration

Bryonn Bain in conversation with Wolfson Creative Arts Fellow Carey Young

Join us for a dialogue about the power of the arts as a tool for building movements for justice in the age of mass incarceration, and creative potential of dialogues between art and the legal sphere.

Bringing hip hop, spoken word poetry, theatre, and the blues into prisons in 25 US states and across three continents, Bryonn Bain will discuss the challenges and triumphs of his work over three decades to build bridges between carceral institutions - including Rikers Island, Sing Sing, Folsom, Whitemoor, and Brixton prisons – and institutions including UCLA, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Carnegie Hall.

Bain will also introduce two formerly-incarcerated poets, Jermaine Archer and Brandy Russell, who will read their work. This event will be chaired by Wolfson Creative Art Fellow Carey Young and is organised in collaboration with Beyond the Bars (Los Angeles) and Abolition Curriculum (ABC).

To register please contact Luisa Summers, Arts Administrator at luisa.summers@wolfson.ox.ac.uk by 12noon on Thursday 25 February 2021. Details to join the event on Zoom will be sent to you by email.

About Bryonn Bain:

Described by Cornel West as an artist who “…speaks his truth with a power we desperately need to hear,” Bryonn Bain is Brooklyn’s own hip hop theatre innovator, spoken word poetry champion, prison activist, actor, author and educator. After teaching the first hip hop and spoken word workshop in the Dramatic Arts at Harvard University, Bain began consulting Columbia University’s Center for Justice and School of Law as a Visiting Scholar, and founded the prison education program offering college degrees from NYU to men incarcerated in upstate New York. Bain is a Professor in the School of the Arts and African American Studies at UCLA, where he is also the director of the UCLA Prison Education Program and co-supervises the UCLA International Human Rights Law Clinic. Bain has worked with students, faculty and administrators across the university to develop UCLA’s Prison Education Program.

Wrongfully imprisoned during his second year at Harvard Law School, Bryonn successfully sued the NYPD, interviewed with Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes,” and wrote the Village Voice cover story – “Walking While Black” – drawing the largest response in the history of the nation’s most widely-read progressive newspaper. He is the creator and performer of the critically acclaimed theatre production Lyrics From Lockdown (executive produced by Harry Belafonte), and the author of four books including The Ugly Side of Beautiful: Rethinking Race and Prisons in America (Third World Press, 2012) and the forthcoming Critical Minded: Rebel Voices on Justice. Bain is developing a limited TV series based on his life and work with Emmy Award winner Rob Reiner (“A Few Good Men”) and Warner Brothers. Bryonn is also the host and co-producer of a new series for AMC/The Sundance Channel titled “We The Jury”, which reviews some of America’s most controversial courtroom cases. www.bryonn.com

About Carey Young:

Carey Young is current Wolfson Creative Arts Fellow, and is a visual artist based in London. She is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Her artistic work since 2003 has focussed on law as subject and medium. Recently, she has created films and photographic series within carceral architectures and courthouses in order to tell new stories about law, identity, gender and power. Young has exhibited widely, including Tate Britain, Centre Pompidou (Paris and Brussels), New Museum (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) and Migros Museum (Zurich) amongst others. Young is Associate Professor in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, and Hon. Research Fellow in the School of Law, Birkbeck. www.careyyoung.com

I trained in medicine and psychiatry in Oxford and London, and was a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow before being appointed to my present post in 1997. I head a research group investigating molecular, psychopharmacological and therapeutic aspects of mood disorders and schizophrenia - and, more recently, the psychiatric and neurological consequences of COVID-19. I have published over 320 papers and several books, including Shorter Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry, and Schizophrenia (with Daniel Weinberger). I am a Theme Leader in the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, and an investigator in the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. I am a Deputy Editor for Biological Psychiatry. Awards include the CINP/Paul Janssen Schizophrenia Prize (1998), the British Association for Psychopharmacology Senior Clinical Prize (1999), the A.E. Bennett Award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (2004), the Joel Elkes Research Award of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (2005), the CINP Lilly Clinical Neuroscience award (2010), and the ECNP Clinical Neuropsychopharmacology award (2012). I was President of the British Association for Psychopharmacology from 2014-2016.

We will meet to discuss "Girl, Woman, Other" by Bernardine Evaristo [308 pages - ebook available through SOLO]:

This is Britain as you've never read it.

This is Britain as it has never been told.

From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years.

They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope...

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

We’re pleased to invite you to this year’s Alumni Lecture on Monday 1 March at 6pm. ‘Leonardo da Vinci and National Identity’ will be given by Dr Matthew Landrus, Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson and History Faculty, University of Oxford.

Matthew Landrus is one of the world’s foremost experts on the work and reception of Leonardo da Vinci. The author of several books on Leonardo, Landrus is a specialist on the working methods and intellectual interests of artist/engineers, using cross-disciplinary investigative and inventive approaches to study the histories of ideas, science and technology. 

The event will be streamed on YouTube. Click here to register.

The Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Centre's celebration of the Tibetan New Year of the Iron Ox 2148!

Join the Wolfson Feminist Society for a casual crafting event! We will look at the work of some collage and 'femmage' artists and activists for inspiration before trying our hand at feminist collage. All are welcome, including any other members of your household who would like to join in.

If you would like a materials kit delivered to your pidge ahead of the event, please sign up here.

The meeting will take place on Zoom. 

Old Wolves event

Thursday 11 February 2021 1.30 p.m. via Zoom*

Skilled Crafts in the early Stone Age

A talk by Laurence Hutchence

Wolfson DPhil candidate Laurence Hutchence has degrees in Archaeology from UCL and Cambridge. He worked in Media before returning to academia.

In his spare time, when not adding to his collection of homemade tools, Laurence works in the Wolfson College Library and assists the College Archivist.

*Please join Zoom Meeting

Meeting ID: 880 7151 7595
Passcode: 817485
Download Zoom here

The event is organised as part of our Old Wolves series but is open to all – no charge. It is a change to the original programme.

Contact: College Archivist archives@wolfson.ox.ac.uk