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. 7h ago

    Shakespearean England and Views of the Irish Language - Mícheál Ó Mainnín

    The Irish language has been associated with politicisation and conflict, particularly in the context of contemporary Northern Ireland identity politics. However, debates around the language extend much further back in time and some key elements of the discourse may be traced to the sixteenth century in particular. This lecture looks at the portrayal of the Irish language by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the motivations for some negative stereotypes which were to prove resilient and enduring in later centuries. This lecture was recorded by Mícheál Ó Mainnín on the 1st of October 2026 Professor Mícheál Ó Mainnín works within the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen's University Belfast. His principal research interests lie in the areas of linguistics (particularly onomastics and historical linguistics); Irish and Scottish Gaelic literary texts; language politics; Irish and Scottish identity and relations in the medieval and modern periods. The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/shakespeare-irish 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

  2. 4d ago

    The Gods of Ancient Greece | Gresham College Podcast with Prof Melissa Lane and Prof Ronald Hutton

    This episode of the Gresham College Podcast features a conversation between two Gresham Professors: Melissa Lane, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric and Ronald Hutton, Gresham Professor of Divinity.   Together they explore the gods of ancient Greece: where deities come from, why the same god could have several different parents, stories and personalities, and why the Greeks never expected their gods to be good. Ronald explains why Greeks addressed their deities as "sir and madam" rather than "Lord God", how blood sacrifice worked more like a community barbecue, and how ordinary people struck deals with the gods for help with toothache, childbirth or a safe voyage.    Melissa traces how philosophers from Xenophanes to Plato began to question the poets' badly behaved gods, and how religion collided with Athenian democracy, from the law courts to the trial of Socrates. The conversation then turns to the mystery religions, from the Eleusinian Mysteries to the women-only rites of Dionysus, the role of blindfolds and ordeal in initiation, and the gold leaves buried with initiates as calling cards for the underworld. It closes with the Greek view of the afterlife, and the story of the goddess Athena, evicted from the Parthenon, knocking at the philosopher Proclus's door.    Further Viewing:  Watch Ronald Hutton's Gresham College lecture, Mithras: Master of Mystery: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/god-mithras    Watch Melissa Lane's Gresham College lecture, Cicero In and On Political Crises: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/cicero    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

  3. 5d ago

    Women of Bath and Willesden: Ordinary Women in English Literature - Marion Turner

    In this lecture, Professor Marion Turner explores ‘ordinary women’ in English literature, arguing that Chaucer’s 14th-century Wife of Bath was the first such woman: a middle-aged, sexually active working woman who tells the outrageous story of her own life. Zadie Smith’s 21st century translation of her story demonstrates the ongoing relevance of thinking about the space we have for women’s voices in theatre, poetry and public life. This lecture discusses the historical context for the emergence of the voices of ‘ordinary women’ in literature and considers what has and hasn’t changed across time. This lecture was recorded by Marion Turner on the 30th of September 2026 Marion Turner has published several award-winning books including Chaucer: A European Life  (Princeton, 2019) and The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton, 2023). She curated a major exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Chaucer Here and Now, in 2024.  She is deeply committed to public engagement, working regularly with schools and with adult education as well as talking at literary festivals such as Hay on Wye, the Edinburgh festival, the Cheltenham festival, and the Oxford literary  festival, and on the radio, e.g. Start the Week, the Today programme, Women’s Hour, You’re Dead to  Me, Ian Hislop’s Oldest Jokes. She holds the senior chair in medieval literature at the University of  Oxford – the J.R.R. Tolkien Professorship of English Literature and Language.  The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/women-bath 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

  4. Oct 16

    AI as Therapist? Intimacy Without Understanding - Matt Jones

    AI systems are increasingly positioned as supports for anxiety, loneliness, and distress. This lecture examines large language models trained to simulate therapeutic dialogue alongside biofeedback systems that modulate physiological states. We distinguish responsiveness from empathy, asking where AI may scaffold reflection and where automated comfort subtly displaces responsibility. This lecture was recorded by Professor Matt Jones on the 29th of September 2026 at Barnard’s Inna 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.  Much of his work has been driven by intense and sustained engagements with “low resource” communities from informal settlements in India, South Africa, and Kenya. Through their generous and gracious participation, these extra-ordinary users with the fresh and diverse perspectives have stimulated insights into the future of digital technologies for everyone, globally. In all this work, Matt works as part of a long-standing collaborative team with Jen Pearson, Simon Robinson and Thomas Reitmaier (from Swansea) and colleagues in India (including Dani Raju) and South Africa (including Minah Radebe). His work has been supported by the UK’s science funders (EPSRC and UKRI). Currently, this funding includes a Fellowship to explore the future of interactive AI and leadership roles in responsible AI and inclusive digital technologies. This funding has led to a series of impactful publications, talks and influences on people, policies, and practices. Matt has collaborated with private, public and third sector organisations, including Microsoft, the NHS, Google, IIT-B, the BBC and IBM. He is a member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office’s Research Advisory Group and Welsh Government’s AI reviews. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/ai-therapist 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

  5. Oct 13

    Where is Queer Love in the Shoah History? - Anna Hájková

    Where are the stories of great queer love in the Shoah? There are almost none. Anna Hájková explains why the history of same-sex desire in the Shoah, that is, queerness among Jews persecuted by the Nazis for their race, has been excluded and marginalised, and how its return to our understanding of the Holocaust can offer an inclusive and feminist history of this genocide. Based on original and extensive archival research, this lecture offers a concise insight into the queer history of the Holocaust. This lecture was recorded by Dr Anna Hájková on 28th of September 2026 at Barnard’s Inn Hall, London. Dr Anna Hájková is Reader for modern European continental history at the University of Warwick, where she co-directs the Centre for Global Jewish Studies.  Her first book, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, came out in 2020 with Oxford University Press. Her second book People Without History are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust (University of Toronto Press, 2025) was awarded the National Jewish Book Award 2026.  She is a pioneer of queer Holocaust history and her work has been awarded the 2020 Orfeo Iris Prize.  The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/queer-shoah Support the show

  6. Oct 9

    Carbon: Our Flexible Friend that Built the Natural World - Helen Czerski

    Carbon used to be something that was only mentioned in school chemistry classes, but now it seems to be everywhere: on the news, in political debate, in discussions on health, and as a framework for thinking about our civilisation’s future. But the carbon that’s the focus of most of that debate is what’s in the atmosphere, and that’s only about 2% of the accessible carbon on Earth. This lecture puts that 2% in context, showing how the whole carbon cycle works, how we’re affecting it, and looks at the proposed strategies for deliberately manipulating carbon reservoirs in the future. This lecture was recorded by Helen Czerski on the 24th of September 2026 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 a 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.  Helen has been a regular science presenter on the BBC for 15 years, covering the physics of the natural world in BBC2 landmark documentaries (including ‘Orbit’, ‘Operation iceberg’ and ‘Supersenses’), and the physics of everyday life in a range of BBC4 documentaries (including ‘From ice to fire: The incredible science of temperature’, ‘Sound waves: The symphony of physics’, and ‘Colour: The spectrum of science’, along  with many others). She currently co-hosts BBC Radio 4’s flagship climate and environment programme Rare Earth.  Helen's first book Storm in a Teacup won the Italian Asimov Prize and the Louis J. Battan Author prize from the American Meteorological Society. Blue Machine won the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing. She was awarded the Institute of Physics Gold Medal in 2018 for her work on physics communication, and an Honorary Fellowship of the British Science Association in 2020. She was a Trustee of Royal Museums Greenwich from 2018-2026, and was one of the 2020 Royal Institution Christmas Lecturers, giving her Lecture on the topic of the ocean. The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/carbon 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

  7. Oct 6

    Cosmology’s Mad Idea: Inflation & the Creation of Our Universe - Chris Lintott

    Our expanding Universe only makes sense if, early on, it expanded rapidly in a period of cosmic inflation. In this lecture, we consider the evidence for this apparently arbitrary idea, and asks whether we are on the brink of finding inflation’s signature in our observation. As the story moves from theorist's blackboards to desert observatories, and from the cosmos’s first moments to the far future, we question the nature of the Universe, its eventual fate and even the form of scientific enquiry itself. This lecture was recorded by Chris Lintott on the 23rd of September 2026 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/cosmology-mad 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

  8. Oct 2

    The Future of Creativity - Daniel Susskind

    This lecture was recorded by Daniel Susskind on the 23nd of September 2026 Dr Daniel Susskind is a writer and economist. He explores the impact of technology, and particularly AI, on work and society. He is the Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College. He is also a Digital Fellow at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, an Associate Member of the Economics Department at Oxford University, and a Research Professor at King’s College London. He is a member of the UK Government’s Expert Panel on AI and the Future of Work.  His new book, Growth: A Reckoning (2024), was chosen by President Obama as one of his ‘Favourite Books of 2024’ and was a runner-up for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year 2024. He is also the author of A World Without Work (2020), described by The New York Times as "required reading for any potential presidential candidate thinking about the economy of the future” and a runner-up for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year 2020, and co-author of the best-selling book, The Future of the Professions (2015). His TED Talk, on the future of work, has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.  His next book, What Should My Children Do? How to Flourish in the Age of AI, will be published in 2026. And his first novel, The Basilisk Stare, will be published in 2027.  Previously he worked in various roles in the British Government – in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and in the Cabinet Office. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.  The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/future-creativity 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

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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Gresham College
  • Years Active
    2015 - 2026
  • Episodes
    1K
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Gresham College
  • Show Website
    Gresham College Lectures

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