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.

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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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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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The annual Haldane Lecture will be delivered in 2024 by Professor Ulrike Felt, Head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna.

The lecture will take place in the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium (LWA). The lecture will also be livestreamed on YouTube. Please see the lecture title and abstract prepared by the speaker below.

Which science, for which society? Fostering a sustainable relation between science and society.

Today, as scientific and technological innovation is seen as fundamental to the future development of contemporary societies, the relationship between science and society requires closer attention than ever before. While science and technology have been seen as instruments of social progress and personal opportunity, the last decade has been marked by friction and conflict over techno-scientific issues that pose serious challenges to democratic societies. Whether it is the COVID pandemic, measures to combat climate change, new genetically modified organisms or digitalisation, they all point to the development of a new relationship between scientific knowledge production and economic and political power. While the demand for expert knowledge is increasing and science seems to be becoming a more prominent societal actor - think of the increasing talk about societal impact, innovation, ... - scientific knowledge is simultaneously facing increasing doubts and contestation and the distance to those who are supposed to be governed by this knowledge seems to be growing. This presentation will explore the considerations necessary to build and maintain a sustainable relationship between science and society under these changing boundary conditions, while preserving science’s essential capacity to be a source of impartial critical authority.

Watch the livestream here.

This competition is held annually in memory of the late Professor Jon Stallworthy (1935-2014), poet and Fellow of Wolfson College, and is open to any postgraduate student at the University of Oxford.

This year's theme was 'Borders'.


A prize of £1000 is awarded by two judges, the Professor of Poetry Alicia Stallings and her colleague and fellow-poet Bernard O'Donoghue.


The competition is now closed for this year, and the award ceremony will take place in the LWA on Thursday 18 January at 6.15pm.


Join us to hear the short-listed poems and discover this year's winner! You are also invited to drinks with the poets in the Wolfson Café after the event.

Dr Shew, appointed as the College's first Isaiah Berlin Junior Research Fellow in 2023, will give a lecture on her research into the idea of Birth Striking for Women's Rights in the early twentieth century.

The above image is an excerpt from an abstract painting by Alexandra Exter, c. 1925. She was born in Belestok, Ukraine in 1882 and studied at the Kyiv School of Art.

Christopher Davis has been an academic at University of Oxford (Economics and Area Studies) since 1991 and at Wolfson College (GBF 1991-2015, Emeritus 2016-Present) with expertise on the economies of USSR/Russia and East Europe. He has carried out research on the economics of health, demography, industry, and economics of defence. In the latter field, he has produced 15 publications, including a 2020 book chapter on the Russia defence-industrial complex and the article: Davis, C. (2016) “The Ukraine Conflict, Economic-Military Power Balances, and Economic Sanctions”, Post-Communist Economies, Open Access at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14631377.2016.1139301

He recently completed a successor article: Davis (2024) Economic Aspects of the War in Ukraine 2022-2024. The conference has been organised around the themes of his new article.

In order to register please complete the Google form - linked here.

A full programme will be sent to you upon registration or by an organiser if you send a request to the conference email address: OxfRussiaConf1223@gmail.com