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.

St John's College

The history of the future

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.

2000 Women Plenary and Panel Discussion: Leadership, Participation and Equality

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.

Lady White Lecture 2015: If not you, who? If not now, when?

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.

Human Chain

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?

Can historians write the History of Sport?

In this provocative talk that celebrates women past, present and future, Clare Shine explores what it will take for women to overcome the ties that still hold them back—and lead. The Lady White Lecture 2014 at St Johns College. 100 years ago the Great War changed the fate of a generation of women—and all those to come. It “found them serfs and left them free” as women en masse left the kitchen, entered the work place and tasted the delights of greater economic and political freedom. In richer countries, today’s generation of women have never done better at school, have vastly broader choices open to them and are set to live longer than any cohort in history. So why does business-as-usual still dominate the public sphere and why do so many women mute their voices? Can we get beyond contortionist antics of “having it all”? Should we “lie back”, “lean in” or rally women and men to launch a new movement for radical change? Clare Shine has never quite found a way to fit within the box. One of the earliest alumnae, whose international career has straddled business, the Bar, environmental policy and arts journalism for the Financial Times, she is currently Vice President and Chief Program Officer at Salzburg Global Seminar as well as a wife and mother.

Brave New World: how women can lead the way

The President of St John's College, Professor Margaret Snowling, in conversation with Dr Carolyne Larrington, Supernumerary Fellow in English at St John's. They discuss Carolyne's interest in medieval English literature.

Language and Medieval literature.

Eminent psychologist and President of St John's, Professor Margaret Snowling talks about her research for the Founder's Lecture 2013.

Dyslexia, Language and Learning to Read

The President of St John's College, Professor Maggie Snowling, in conversation with Dr Heather Bowman, a Fellow in Biological Sciences at St John's. They discuss Heather's research work as a biological oceanographer.

Phytoplankton: the Ocean's Microscopic Flora

In this St John's College Research Centre 2012 Annual Lecture, Professor Margaret MacMillan examines the reasons why this question has remained important over the last 100 years and suggests some possible explanations for the outbreak of the war.

Why are we still trying to understand the outbreak of World War One?

The 2012 Founder's Lecture on Imagination and Testimony: Trusting What You're Told delivered by Professor Paul Harris, Harvard University, Emeritus Fellow and formerly Tutor in Experimental Psychology at St John's. The lecture took place on Thursday 10 May. Experimental work in psychology has traditionally focused on our capacity to observe and remember reality in a more or less veridical fashion. But recent research in developmental psychology has increasingly begun to analyze our human ability to set reality aside and to think about unobservable or fictional possibilities. Professor Harris will describe how this imaginative capacity emerges in early childhood, the key role that it plays in learning from what other people say and do, and its larger impact on our trust in historical, scientific and religious claims.

Trusting what you're told: Founder's Lecture 2012

Sir Christopher surveys the technical and political challenges of providing sufficient energy in the face of rising population, climate change, and fossil fuel depletion.

The Energy Challenge (Founder's Lecture 2011)

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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