10-Minute Talks
Podrobnosti kanálu
10-Minute Talks
The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
Nedávné epizody
96 epizod
Tutankhamun’s Table: Food & Drink for a King
In 1922, the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings astounded archaeologists and the public alike. Beyond the ornate treasures, th...
Judith Butler on Gender
“Gender studies as a discipline is by definition interdisciplinary, drawing from several paradigms, and it is defined by a set of debates and problema...
Who invented the potato? And why should we care?
"How did Sir Walter Raleigh invent the potato?” In this 10-Minute Talk, Rebecca Earle FBA takes up Philomena Cunk’s question to explore the global his...
The Man Who Shot Nelson: A French Take on Trafalgar
From a fake news report claiming a French victory to fictional memoirs and literary retellings, the Battle of Trafalgar’s legacy in France became shro...
Why Truth is Not Enough
In a post-truth world, can we always trust data? And what about our human biases? Walking us through ‘the ladder of misinference’, Alex Edmans FBA out...
The 21st Century Resurgence of Eugenics
Eugenics is a coercive ideology with a destructive history over the course of the 19th and 20th Centuries. But did support for eugenics die out after...
The Dead Sea Scrolls and Beginnings of Western Mysticism
What are the Dead Sea Scrolls? Who discovered them? And why are they important? Professor Philip Alexander FBA explores the history of the scrolls, an...
The rise and fall of Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General
What really happened when a breakdown of the legal system in the English Civil War fuelled a series of witch-hunts? In this 10-Minute Talk, Professor...
Schubert’s Die Forelle: how a classical music piece changes over time
Classical music is often wrongly considered to be unaffected by political and social change. Exploring Franz Schubert’s ‘Die Forelle’, Laura Tunbridge...
'Salvator Mundi': Leonardo da Vinci's missing masterpiece?
‘Salvator Mundi’ is a painting surrounded by mysteries. In this talk, Professor Martin Kemp FBA explores evidence that it is indeed a work of Leonardo...
What does a neuropsychologist do?
What exactly is the work of a neuropsychologist? In this 10-Minute Talk, Professor Barbara Sahakian FBA unpacks some of her key work over the years an...
Traditional Japanese theatre and audience interaction
Japanese theatre has, from its beginnings, encouraged audience participation – from formal fan-clubs to lessons on dancing and chanting. Hear Professo...
What are empires, nation states and colonialism?
How do we understand empire in the modern age? In this 10-Minute Talk, Professor Gurminder K Bhambra challenges the idea that modern nation-states eme...
Books in wartime: innocent victims or guilty parties?
While books are often thought of as victims of war, looted or burned in libraries, in this 10-Minute Talk Professor Andrew Pettegree suggests an alter...
What was the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings?
Expanding on her book, ‘Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy’, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed unpacks the evidence around this c...
Shakespeare in popular culture
What is it that makes great works from the past endure in the present? In this 10-Minute Talk, Professor Sir Jonathan Bate FBA explores Shakespeare’s...
What have sign languages taught us about human language development?
Sign language and how we use it and implement it into society has developed rapidly in the last 50 years, from little-to-no representation in educatio...
Aesthetics and emotions in pre-modern India
In the West, emotions are often understood through the philosophy of cognition and experimental psychology – separated from the world of art and aesth...
Freud, Hollywood and the male gaze
In this 10-Minute talk, Laura Mulvey FBA responds to three key questions regarding her 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Returning to...
Genocide and International Law
‘Genocide’ (meaning “to kill a group”) was first used as a legal term in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin in the hope that it would come to signal the agreed li...
Hannah Arendt's lessons for our times: the banality of evil, totalitarianism and statelessness
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was one of the most influential political theorists and philosophers of the 20th Century. In this 10-Minute Talk, Professor...
What is extremism?
In a famous 1963 letter, Martin Luther King Jr. argued that ‘extremism’ is not an inherently bad thing because it can be a way of describing radical a...
South Asia, the partition of India and the birth of three nations
Following the partition of India in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, what was once one nation became three. Presenting anecdotes from h...
Plato, Aristotle and the question of self: what makes you 'you'?
The question of what makes you ‘you’ has been a central theme in philosophical thought since ancient times. In this talk, Professor Richard Swinburne...
Coffee as connection – tradition, controversy and literary representations
Traversing the history of coffee through several literary examples, Professor Wen-chin Ouyang FBA explores coffee as not only a drink, but as traditio...
Why politics fails
Sharing insights from his book 'Why Politics Fails', in this 10-Minute Talk Ben Ansell FBA unpacks the challenges of democracy. Given that humans rare...
What makes us social? Autism, mentalising, and the need for new labels
How we understand autism has changed greatly over time. In this talk, Uta Frith FBA discusses developments in the scientific study of autism and its r...
The Lion of the 17th: the story of Georges Dukson and the Liberation of Paris
Gary Younge Hon FBA explores the French Liberation of 1944 and the story of Georges Dukson, "le Lion du 17ème", a soldier from French Equatorial Afric...
Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature
In this talk, Ato Quayson shares insights drawn from his book Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature. He argues that disputatiousness is one of the start...
Hypermasculine leadership
In this talk, Georgina Waylen discusses hypermasculine leadership within the context of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaker: Pro...
The politics of humiliation
The modern history of humiliation is different from the history of public shaming; both share certain features and practices, but differ as to intenti...
Paradoxes of the Roman Arena
In this talk, Professor Kathleen Coleman FBA highlights certain paradoxes at the root of Roman civilisation, specifically those related to the staging...
Public finances and the Union since 1707
In this talk, Professor Julian Hoppit FBA introduces his new book, The Dreadful Monster and its Poor Relations. Taxing, Spending, and the United Kingd...
The making of Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) is, in terms of sheer achievement, the greatest English commoner of all time and yet remains a deeply controversial figure...
Poetry as Experience
In this talk, Derek Attridge addresses the question: "What is a poem's mode of existence?" Using a poem by William Wordsworth as an example, he argues...
Disastrous: thoughts on a pandemic inspired by ancient astrology
In this talk, Jane Lightfoot considers what a particular corner of the classical world, astrology, thought about disease – how it classified it, what...
The 1951 UN Refugee Convention: its origins and significance
In this talk, Peter Gatrell discusses the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, signed in Geneva on 28 July 1951. He explains...
Syntax: where the magic happens
Syntax is the cognitive system that underlies the patterns found in the grammar of human languages. In this talk, David Adger explains what syntax as...
Looking at sign languages
This talk introduces research on the sign languages of deaf communities: natural, complex human languages, both similar to and different from spoken l...
The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: The East India Company and the English quest for Japan
Over the winter of 1610-11, a magnificent telescope was built in London. It was almost two metres long, cast in silver and covered with gold. This was...