Talk abstract:

Anthropogenic climate change is occurring at an unprecedented rate, and the magnitude of that change is expected to rival levels that characterize Earth’s largest extinction events. Despite the importance for future projections, understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which climate mediates extinction remains limited. The fossil record provides the unique opportunity to robustly test the interplay between extrinsic and intrinsic drivers of extinction under extreme climate change scenarios. We present the first integrated approach examining the role of potential intrinsic and extrinsic drivers in mediating extinction risk over the past 485 million years using state-of-the-art climate models to reconstruct physiological traits and localized climate change. We found that geographic range size, body size, realized thermal preference, realized niche breadth, and the magnitude of climate change are all necessary to predict extinction risk for taxa. Our results suggest that taxa previously identified as extinction resistant may still succumb to extinction if the magnitude of climate change is great enough.

Abstract:

With the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 by Open AI in November 2022 people gained unprecedented direct experience of AI using an exceptionally advanced Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) Model. Public interest in AI as a result surged, with a 900 % increase in searches on AI. Governments have in turn moved to start addressing AI’s perceived risks, both using existing law, and regulation, as well as by creating new AI specific laws and regulations. In February 2024 the UK Government for example announced its proposed strategy to regulating AI that will work through existing law and regulators based on five principles, while in March 2024 the EU passed the EU AI Act that adopts a more centralised, and prescriptive model. Thus only in the past two months, we have already seen both new law and regulation of AI, and greater variation in the nature of such law and regulation between countries. This talk will briefly review the law and economics of AI, and discuss emerging issues in relation to the application of law and regulation to AI, including recent developments and divergences in the EU, UK and US approaches, with particular attention given to the fast developing application of existing competition law in the EU, UK and US through AI inquiries and investigations. Research being undertaken on developments in other areas of law and regulation relating to AI, including copyright, contract, tort and criminal law, will also be briefly discussed.



Bio

Dr George Barker member of Wolfson College Oxford University, Honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University. Doctorate in Economics from Oxford University, and a Bachelor of Laws and Master of Economics (Hons). Director of the Centre for Law and Economics at Australian National University (ANU) from 1997-2017. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at Cornell University in 2000, and Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE) (2015-2018); the Centre for Law and Economics at University College London (2010-2015); and Oxford University 2008. Founding Member of the Editorial Board of the European Journal of Law and Economics. Authored books, and articles and given expert testimony on the economics of law including: competition law, trade law (the Effects of China joining the WTO Cambridge University Press 2003), corporations and labour law (the economics of trade unions), intellectual property law (especially copyright), taxation law and environmental law; and the economics of industry regulation, including the digital economy, communications, internet, energy, transport, mining, agriculture, insurance, finance, pharmaceutical, software, and media industries; and on the economic role of government, the economics of public policy, public finance, public sector management, social services (education, health, and welfare) and income distribution. Provides expert economic testimony before courts, ministers, Parliaments and regulatory agencies in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, and in arbitration disputes in the Hague. His work has been cited in the UK House of Lords, by the High Court of England and Wales and by the European Commission. Elected Honorary Fellow of the Law and Economics Association of NZ. Past President of the Australian Law and Economics Association, a Founder and Past President of the Law and Economics Association of New Zealand. Chief Analyst and Economic Advisor at the NZ Treasury 1984-1997. Member of the Governing Board of Wolfson College, Oxford University from 1990 – 1992, Board member of LECG Asia-Pacific Ltd (1997-2005), Celtic Pacific Ltd, and Upstart Investments Ltd (1999-2003), KEA Global and past Chairman of KEA Australia (2001-2010).

Professor Riles is the Executive Director of the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University and a Professor of Law and Anthropology. Her scholarship spans a wide range of substantive areas including human rights, managing and accommodating cultural differences, and the regulation of the global financial markets. Professor Riles work is known for its methodological contributions as well as for its contributions to the study of international institutions and expertise. She has conducted legal and anthropological research in China, Japan, and the Pacific and speaks Chinese, Japanese, French, and Fijian. Her publications span a range of topics, including comparative law, conflict of laws, financial regulation, and central banking.



Professor Riles is also the founder and director of Meridian 180, a multilingual forum for transformative leadership. Its global membership of 800+ thought leaders in academia, government, and business work together to generate ideas and guidance on the most important problems of our time, including global financial governance, environmental governance, and data governance.



The annual lecture will be followed by drinks to which all those who attend are welcome.



Please ensure that you register using the provided link.

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).

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

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



In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf created an imaginary sister for Shakespeare to ask what life would have been like for an equally talented woman. When considering the Yiddish literary landscape, there's no need to invent a fictional female - nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer's sister Esther Kreitman was also a novelist and short story writer; the probable role model for his depiction of Yentl, a woman desperate to learn. A recently discovered cache of letters from Esther to Bashevis has been translated by David Stromberg, the editor of the IBS estate, and published by Jewish Renaissance as a world exclusive, revealing how her gender, mental health and family relationships impacted her publication opportunities.





Dr Aviva Dautch is the Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance, the UK's Jewish arts and culture quarterly. She lectures on modern Jewish literature at the London School of Jewish Studies and JW3 and contributes to programmes on BBC Radio 4. She is also an award-winning poet whose residencies and commissions have included The British Museum, The National Gallery and Bradford and Hay Literature Festivals.



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

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



Berta Rosenbaum Golahny (1925-2005) was a Boston-area painter and printmaker who blended abstraction and realism, often in a single work. Golahny's parents, immigrants from Eastern Europe who settled in Detroit, promoted Jewish diasporic culture together with social justice, and Golahny's art shares her parents' humanistic, utopian impulse. Much of Golahny’s work is united by a concern with creation. Fascinated by the biblical account of the creation of the world (the Genesis series), the scientific account (the series Being and Becoming and the series Cosmos), the human and animal life-cycle, and the human imagination, Golahny depicted many originary moments. She also explored creation’s opposite, destruction, as in work on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Landscape of Man in Nuclear Age), the Holocaust, and the Korean War. At the same time, much of her work portrays daily and domestic forms of creation, such as Detroit ironworks and a mother nursing. Golahny explored creative and destructive forces in a life marked by quietly steady creation. This talk, by Golahny's granddaughter, Emily Kopley, is part of a book project that blends biography, memoir, and art criticism.



Emily Kopley (BA Yale, PhD Stanford), is the author of Virginia Woolf and Poetry (OUP, 2021), a critical biography. Her essays on Woolf appear in the TLS, Review of English Studies, English Literature in Transition, Teaching Modernist Women's Writing in English (MLA, 2021), Unpacking the Personal Library (Wilfred Laurier UP, 2022), and elsewhere. She is on the board of Woolf Studies Annual and has received grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She teaches at McGill University, in the Department of Jewish Studies.



Accessibility details can be found here: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/accessibility-wolfson-college

Sally Bayley is an acclaimed author whose books explore the relationship between autobiography, biography, memoir, literary fiction. She's the author of the auto/biographical trilogy which includes the volumes Girl with Dove (2018), No Boys Play Here (2021) and The Green Lady (2023): this tripartite coming-of-age narrative challenges traditional demarcations between literary categories to cast its own, unconventional form. Situated along the shifting relationship between fiction and non-fiction, the first two volumes are based on a story that builds momentum from a child's imaginative relationship between literary characters and artistic forms as she searches for ways of seeing around difficulties. The third volume pushes this experimentation even further, connecting personal and cultural memory, archival sources and ‘imaginary biographies’, in a composite narrative that shifts across epochs and is framed by imaginative and real contexts.



The discussion will focus on the third volume of the trilogy, highlighting how, in Bayley’s works, lived experiences become material for her creative processes, producing a hybrid narrative that simultaneously reads as an autobiographical, biographical and/ or fictional work. Furthermore, focusing on the concept of relationality that sees auto/biographical narrative not as a solitary but as a relational story, the discussion will underscore the relationship between the individual life and wider webs of familial, social and historical structures, testified by a shifting narrative voice that alternates between subjective and collective consciousness.



Sally Bayley is a prize-winning author. She is a fiction and non-fiction writer who lives on a narrowboat on the River Thames in Oxford. Sally was the first child to go to University from West Sussex County Council care services and she is a Lecturer in English at Hertford College. She also teaches academic writing, literature, film and creative writing for the Sarah Lawrence Visiting Programme at Wadham College. From 2018-2020 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and in 2021 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.



Eleonora Maio is pursuing her doctoral studies in the Humanities Department at the University of Palermo, Italy. She currently is a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford, working on her dissertation about Sally Bayley’s experimental auto/biographical trilogy.



For accessibility details please see: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/accessibility-wolfson-college

Foraging, or gathering food from our surroundings, is as old as human life on earth. Enclosure and privatisation of land, urbanisation, and industrialisation over the last centuries have shifted food practices away from local eating. This is compounded by mass production and trade under globalised food systems. However, the climate crisis, and unease at our increasing distancing from nature and biodiversity, are resulting in a revival of older relationships with food. Curious about ‘wild’ nutrition, and drawing on childhood memories of fruit, fish, leaves, and cactus thorns gathered in the mountains, plains, deserts of India, in early 2023, I chanced upon thriving foraging communities in the UK. This talk documents a year of rediscovering my surroundings through local herbs, spices (yes, its not all about cinnamon, cloves, pepper and nutmeg from afar), edible leaves and grasses, mushrooms, and fruit, and the range of products that have resulted—including a growing repertoire of wines and beers.

Please join us for a fun afternoon of Easter egg activities at the Buttery from 2 - 4 pm. We will provide light snacks. Eggs and painting supplies will also be provided.



See you!