14 episodes
St John's College Oxford University
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- Education
Today, St John's is home to approximately 390 undergraduates, 200 graduate students, 100 fellows and 25 College lecturers. Nearly every subject studied at the University is represented in St John's. A vibrant international community, it fosters intellectual rigour, creativity, and independence in its students, teachers, and researchers.
St John's was founded in 1555 by Sir Thomas White, a wealthy London merchant. White was Master of the Merchant Taylors' Company, and established a number of educational foundations including the Merchant Taylors' schools.
Although primarily a producer of Anglican clergymen in the earlier periods of its history, St John's also gained a reputation for both law and medicine. Fellows and alumni have included Archbishop Laud, Jane Austen's father and brothers, the early Fabian intellectual Sidney Ball, and Abdul Rasul, one of the first Bengalis to gain the degree of Bachelor of Civil Law at Oxford.
More recently, graduates of St John's have included the novelists and poets A.E. Housman, Robert Graves, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and John Wain, as well as former Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
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The history of the future
The founders lecture 2016, by eminent historian and Honorary Fellow, Professor Sir Brian Harrison, FBA. The talk explores changing attitudes to the future and the reasons for them. This involves thinking about the changing relationship between past, present and future, and studying the attitudes and activities of people and professions claiming to be able to predict or even influence the future – such as statisticians, planners, demographers, actuaries, inventors, authors of utopias and dystopias, and religious visionaries. The lecture aims to set in perspective the importance (or otherwise) of historical study. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
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2000 Women Plenary and Panel Discussion: Leadership, Participation and Equality
The President of St John's, Professor Maggie Snowling introduces a discussion of leadership, participation and equality and how 2000 Women and an ongoing St John's Women’s Network might best support women to ever-greater success and fulfilment. Speakers: Rowena Ironside, Chair of Women on Boards; Sarah-Jane King (1997), Deputy Head of Unit for Equality Legislation, European Commission; and Nadia Motraghi (1997), a barrister specialising in employment and discrimination law.
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Lady White Lecture 2015: If not you, who? If not now, when?
Alumna and entrepreneur Caroline Plumb talks about the challenges of overcoming fears and expectations of normality to help find our path to success. Caroline Plumb reflects on her time at St John’s College and how it had changed her, giving her the confidence and skills to take the road less travelled and found her own business (FreshMinds, with fellow St John’s alumnus Charlie Osmond). She acknowledges all of us face the challenge of overcoming our fears and expectations of normality, and that for women in particular, pushing aside dutifulness and social expectation is vital if we are to find our path to success.
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Human Chain
Is the study of Arabic literature in the western academy going round in circles or moving forward? What has been the most important recent development in the field? The lecture will argue that it is the recognition of the importance of repetition - the deepening of motifs and ideas by reiteration through time or across media - and of human contacts and continuities. The latter have been inherent to the production of medieval Arabic literary culture; have played a significant part in the study of Arabic literature at Oxford since the founding of the Laudian Chair; and have produced the most exciting current initiatives.
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Human Chain (Slides)
Is the study of Arabic literature in the western academy going round in circles or moving forward? What has been the most important recent development in the field? The lecture will argue that it is the recognition of the importance of repetition - the deepening of motifs and ideas by reiteration through time or across media - and of human contacts and continuities. The latter have been inherent to the production of medieval Arabic literary culture; have played a significant part in the study of Arabic literature at Oxford since the founding of the Laudian Chair; and have produced the most exciting current initiatives.
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Can historians write the History of Sport?
The Annual Founder's Lecture is given by eminent historian and Emeritus Research Fellow, Dr Ross McKibbin is entitled 'Can historians write the History of Sport?' Over the last forty years there has been a huge expansion in the writing of the history and sociology of sport. Yet what constitutes 'sport' remains a very difficult subject to pin down - especially for historians - since it seems to stand for so many different things. In this lecture Dr McKibbin will try to pin it down; to see whether there is anything useful historians can say about sport, anything that cannot be said better, for example, by anthropologists or sociologists. Was Roger Caillois right when he wrote in a famous book, Les Hommes et Les Jeux (Man, Play and Games in English), that historians have contributed nothing to the study of sport - largely because they can't?