Gresham College Lectures

Gresham College

Gresham College has been providing free public lectures since 1597, making us London's oldest higher education institution. This podcast offers our recorded lectures that are free to access from the Gresham College website, or our YouTube channel.

  1. 10 JAM LALU

    Why Do We Fear? - Robin May

    Fear is one of the earliest emotions to have evolved. Most vertebrates – and possibly some invertebrates – show fear when they are threatened. At its most core, fear keeps us alive, helping us flee from predators or avoid dangerous environments. But why does this process sometimes backfire, leaving us paralysed by otherwise harmless phobias? And why do so many people deliberately seek out fearful situations, from horror movies to parachute jumps, when instinct tells us to do the opposite? Can understanding the biology of fear help us conquer it, or simply make us more vulnerable to its impact? This lecture was recorded by Robin May on the 1st of October 2025 at Bernards Inn Hall, London Professor of Infectious Disease at the University of Birmingham, and (interim) Chief Scientist at the UK Health Security Agency, Robin May was appointed Gresham Professor of Physic in May 2022. Between July 2020 and September 2025 he served as Chief Scientific Adviser at the Food Standards Agency (FSA).  Professor May’s early training was in Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford, followed by a PhD on mammalian cell biology at University College London and the University of Birmingham. After postdoctoral research on gene silencing at the Hubrecht Laboratory, The Netherlands, he returned to the UK in 2005 to establish a research program on human infectious diseases. He was Director of the Institute of Microbiology and Infection at the University of Birmingham from 2017-2020.  Professor May continues his work on Infectious Disease at the University of Birmingham. A Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Wolfson Royal Society Research Merit Fellow and Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, Professor May specialises in research into human infectious diseases, with a particular focus on how pathogens survive and replicate within host organisms. As the FSA’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor May provides expert scientific advice to the UK government and plays a critical role in helping to understand how scientific developments will shape the work of the FSA, as well as the strategic implications of any possible changes. The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/why-fear Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham College's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today   Website:  https://gresham.ac.uk X: https://x.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollege Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/greshamcollege.bsky.social  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greshamcollege Support Us: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Support the show

    45 mnt

  2. 3 H LALU

    Hitler, Jesus & How to Win a Culture War - Alec Ryrie

    Since 1945 Hitler and the Nazis have been the Western world’s one fixed moral reference point: the way we know what evil is. But that consensus has always been more fragile than it felt, and now it is unravelling. This lecture will trace how we came to build our values around the memory of the Second World War, why that consensus isn’t enough to deal with our current predicaments – and why the resolution to all this might be more hopeful than you think.  This lecture was recorded by Alec Ryrie on the 30th of September 2025 at Bernard's Inn Hall, London Alec Ryrie was Gresham Professor of Divinity. He is also Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, Co-Editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and President of the Church of England Record Society. From 2015-17 he was Visiting Professor in the History of Religion at Gresham College and gave two series of lectures on the history of Protestant Christianity. In 2019 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He studied History as an undergraduate, at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before completing a Master's in Reformation Studies at St. Andrews and a D.Phil. in Theology at St. Cross College, Oxford. From 1999-2006 he taught at the University of Birmingham, moving to Durham in 2007. He was Head of the Department of Theology and Religion from 2012-15 and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow from 2015-18. He is on the editorial boards of St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Ashgate) and the Royal Historical Society's New Historical Perspectives. Since 1997 he has been a Reader in the Church of England, and he is licenced to the parish of Shotley St. John (diocese of Newcastle). Professor Ryrie is a historian of the Reformation era and of Protestantism more widely, with a particular focus on England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is an expert on the emergence and development of Protestant and radical beliefs, identities and spiritualities, and on the history of Protestant missions and missionaries. He has written several prize-winning books and his 2017 book Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World gives an overview of the history of Protestantism from Luther to the present. Much of the book was prefigured in his lectures at Gresham College in 2015-17. His Gresham lectures from 2018-19 presented aspects of his 2019 book Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt; his Gresham lectures from 2020-1 presented aspects of his 2020 book The English Reformation. His lectures on the early global spread of Protestantism form the basis of his forthcoming book The World’s Reformation, due to be published in 2026. Meanwhile, in 2025 he published The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It, and will be speaking about its themes at Gresham in September 2025.’ The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/hitler-jesus Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham College's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today   Website:  https://gresham.ac.uk X: https://x.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollege Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/greshamcollege.bsky.social  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greshamcollege Support Us: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Support the show

    46 mnt

  3. 10 OKT

    How It Ends: What We Know about the Fate of the Universe - Chris Lintott

    How will it all end? Predicting the far future of our Universe depends on understanding its present. This lecture starts with what seems to be a paradox in modern cosmology: that we have a model that does a fantastic job of explaining what we see, but which says 95% of the Universe is in forms (dark matter and dark energy) that we don’t understand. From there, we get a quick tour of the next 100 billion years – and speculate how the Universe’s end may hold the secrets of its beginnings. This lecture was recorded by Chris Lintott on the 24th of September 2025 at Conway Hall, London Professor Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College. Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve, to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He was the founder of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, 'The Crowd and the Cosmos’. His latest book is ‘Our Accidental Universe’.  Professor Lintott is best known for presenting the BBC's long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer. Away from work, he cooks, suffers through being a fan of Torquay United and Somerset cricket, and spends time with a rescued lurcher, Mr Max. He can often be found at the helm of Oxford’s science comedy night, ‘Huh, That’s Funny’. The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/how-it-ends Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham College's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Website:  https://gresham.ac.uk X: https://x.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollege Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/greshamcollege.bsky.social  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greshamcollege Support Us: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Support the show

    50 mnt

  4. 7 OKT

    AI Will Be Your Overlord: Faster, Brighter, Better Than You?

    “Scary”, “Worried”, “Dangerous” were some of the most frequent words to describe AI in a recent UK Government public survey. Do you fear, as many do, that AI will lead to us becoming second-class entities? In this first lecture, we will explore this ascendency, considering how notions of intelligence, sentience, perception, consciousness and reasoning are being framed and challenged in an AI-centred world; and surface the social, economic and ethical implications of these developments. This lecture was recorded by Professor Dominic Broomfield-McHugh on 23rd September 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London. Matt Jones is a computer scientist at Swansea University - and a Fellow of the British Computer Society - who works alongside colleagues from many other disciplines and directly with everyday folk across the world to explore the future of digital technologies. Over the last 30-plus years, this human-centred approach has led to novel approaches for, amongst other things,  mobile phone-based information searching and browsing, pedestrian navigation, voice assistants and deformable displays.   The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/ai-better Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/ Website:  https://gresham.ac.uk Twitter:  https://twitter.com/greshamcollege Facebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollege Support the show

    50 mnt

  5. 3 OKT

    Shakespeare’s Musical Fairies - Dominic Broomfield-McHugh

    Written in the era of the founding of Gresham College, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream portrays the hypnotic dreaminess of a fairy world in which the real and the fantastic are blurred. This lecture explores how the innate musicality of Shakespeare’s original has provoked adaptations across the centuries, including Ashton and Balanchine’s ballets based on Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the play, Britten’s opera, Purcell’s masque The Fairy Queen, Henze’s Eighth Symphony and Elvis Costello’s Il Sogno. What is it about Shakespeare’s fairies that have inspired such diverse musical responses? This lecture was recorded by Professor Dominic Broomfield-McHugh on 22nd September  2025 at Conway Hall, London. Dominic Broomfield-McHugh is Gresham Visiting Professor of Film and Theatre Music. He is also Professor of Music at the University of Sheffield and is a graduate of King's College London. His scholarship focuses on the American musical on stage and screen, and he has published eight books including Loverly: The Life and Times of 'My Fair Lady' (OUP, 2012), The Letters of Cole Porter (Yale, 2019) and The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical (2022). He is Associate Producer of the PBS documentary Meredith Willson: America's Music Man and has appeared on all the main BBC television and radio stations as well as NPR in America. He has given talks and lectures at the Sydney Opera House, New York City Center, the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Sadler's Wells, and Lincoln Center, among many others. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/musical-fairies Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/ Website:  https://gresham.ac.uk Twitter:  https://twitter.com/greshamcollege Facebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollege Support the show

    1j 7m

  6. 30 SEP

    Lessons from Guantánamo Bay - Clive Stafford Smith

    This lecture looks at the evolution of Guantánamo Bay, first as a focal point of Haitian immigration in 1991 (Gitmo 1.0), to the more famous detention of terror suspects in 2002 (Gitmo 2.0), and back to immigration in 2025. We will explore how Gitmo 3.0 is probably already over, and how we were able to head it off so quickly through legal challenges. However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the U.S. is “actively searching” for countries to accept migrants deported from the U.S., with both El Salvador and Rwanda under consideration. We will discuss how lessons from legal action around Guantánamo Bay might translate to other settings. This lecture was recorded by Clive Stafford Smith on 18th September 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London. Clive is the Gresham Professor of Law He is the founder and director of  the Justice League a non-profit human rights training centre focused on fostering the next generation of advocates.  He also teaches part time at Bristol Law School and Goldsmiths as well as running a summer programme for 35 students in Dorset, his home. He has received all kinds of awards in recognition of his work, including an OBE by Queen Elizabeth II for “services to humanity” in 2000. He has been a member of the Louisiana State Bar since 1984. The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/guantanamo Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Website:  https://gresham.ac.uk Twitter:  https://twitter.com/greshamcollege Facebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollege Support Us: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Support the show

    53 mnt

  7. 26 SEP

    The Shape of Hands: Symmetry, Chirality and Handedness - Alain Goriely

    The reflection of my right hand in a mirror is a left hand that looks similar yet is very different from the right. Many natural structures such as proteins, climbing vines, and seashells exhibit the same property known as chirality. Some of these objects are clearly left-handed, some are right-handed, some are both. The ultimate origin of chirality is one of Nature's great mysteries. In this talk, I will discuss the general problem of determining the chirality of an object and how it impacts all branches of science. This lecture was recorded by Alain Goriely on 16th September  2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London. Professor Alain Goriely FRS is Gresham Professor of Geometry. He is also a mathematician known for dynamical systems, mathematical biology, and mechanics. He developed the mathematical theory of biological growth and is Director of the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. His work spans plant tendrils, seashells, umbilical cords, brain modelling, and applied mathematics outreach. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/shape-hands Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/ Website:  https://gresham.ac.uk Twitter:  https://twitter.com/greshamcollege Facebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollege Support the show

    57 mnt

  8. 23 SEP

    Earth – Our Planetary Life Support System - Professor Helen Czerski

    Planet Earth is an intricate and interconnected system, with some fundamental rules that we usually ignore. But we are part of our planet, not separate to it or just perched on top of it. This lecture will consider the two primary rules of Earth: that energy continually flows through the system (in from the Sun and then out again to space) and that matter/atoms must be continually recycled and use these to build up an outsider’s view of our planet. This lecture was recorded by Helen Czerski on the 11th of September 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London Dr Helen Czerski is a physicist and oceanographer with a passion for science, sport, books, creativity, hot chocolate and investigating the interesting things in life.  She is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University College London and her research focus is the physics of breaking waves and bubbles at the ocean surface. These bubbles change underwater sound and light, help transfer gases from ocean to atmosphere (helping the ocean breathe) and also eject ocean material into the air. She has spent months working on research ships in the Antarctic, the Pacific, the North Atlantic and the Arctic, and is an experienced field scientist.  The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/life-support Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham College's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today   Website:  https://gresham.ac.uk X: https://x.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollege Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/greshamcollege.bsky.social  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greshamcollege Support Us: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Support the show

    46 mnt
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Mengenai

Gresham College has been providing free public lectures since 1597, making us London's oldest higher education institution. This podcast offers our recorded lectures that are free to access from the Gresham College website, or our YouTube channel.

Informasi

  • Kreator
    Gresham College
  • Tahun Aktif
    2015 - 2025
  • Episode
    1 rb
  • Penilaian
    Bersih
  • Hak Cipta
    © 2025 Gresham College
  • Situs Web Acara
    Gresham College Lectures

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