Statistics are vital in helping us tell stories – we see them in the papers, on social media, and we hear them used in everyday conversation - and yet in this era of fake news we doubt them more than ever. In his timely new book 'How to Make the World Add Up', Tim Harford navigates a world of disinformation, bad research and misplaced motivation to help us make sense of the numbers that swirl around us. Join him in-conversation with Hetan Shah as he outlines his 10 rules – plus one golden rule – for thinking differently about numbers. Speaker: Tim Harford, Economist, journalist and broadcaster; Author 'How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers'. Chair: Hetan Shah, Chief Executive, The British Academy

The British Academy

How To Make The World Add Up

The course of human history has been shaped by war, disease and natural disaster. Whether the Black Death, world wars or COVID-19, these crises have sent shockwaves across the globe, with far-reaching social, political and economic consequences. In this event, distinguished historian Margaret MacMillan joins Hetan Shah to discuss major turning points in history, and how insights from the many and varied catastrophes of the past can help us to make sense of the present. The British Academy’s Shape the Future programme examines the societal, economic and cultural implications of the pandemic Speaker: Professor Margaret MacMillan Hon FBA, Historian; public intellectual; Emeritus Professor of International History, University of Oxford; Professor of History, University of Toronto Chair: Hetan Shah, Chief Executive, The British Academy

Is COVID-19 a turning point in history? Learning from the past

Governments across the world are using behavioural ‘nudges’ to help slow the spread of coronavirus: wash your hands, don’t touch your face, stay at home. Based on an idea popularised by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, nudge theory encourages us to do the “right thing” by making the desired action easy, more obvious and more normal. But how far does nudging work in the context of a global pandemic, and what are its limits? If we are expected to nudge our way out of a crisis, what behavioural barriers – or sludge – need to be removed? In this event, eminent political scientist and Fellow of the British Academy Cass Sunstein joins Hetan Shah to discuss nudge and sludge in the age of COVID-19. The British Academy's Shape the Future programme examines the societal, economic and cultural implications of the pandemic Speaker: Professor Cass Sunstein FBA, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard Law School; Co-author Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness; former Senior Advisor to President Obama Chair: Hetan Shah, Chief Executive, The British Academy

Confronting COVID-19: nudge and sludge

Françoise Vergès discusses the history of counter revolution against women’s liberation from the 1970s to the 2000s and the forms it concretely took (femonationalism, femi-imperialism in the name of women’s rights) and current forms of decolonial feminism. Speaker: Dr Françoise Vergès, Chair of Global South, Collège d'études Mondiales, Paris Chair: Professor Tamar Garb FBA, Durning-Lawrence Chair of History of Art, UCL

Global Perspectives: decolonial feminism

Professor Martin Kemp FBA reflects on Leonardo's extraordinary life and legacy, the commercial implications of his worldwide fame, and the endless conspiracy theories he inspires.

Thinkers for our Time: Martin Kemp FBA on Leonardo da Vinci

Thinkers for our Time: Merce Cunningham by TheBritishAcademy

Thinkers for our Time: Merce Cunningham

What does ‘TubeCrush’ reveal about modern desire? by TheBritishAcademy

What does ‘TubeCrush’ reveal about modern desire?

Speaker: Professor Dr Hermann Parzinger FBA, Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation Chaired by: Professor Graeme Barker CBE FBA, University of Cambridge During the first millenium BC, nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppe as the Scythians, brought significant changes in economy, warfare, social life and arts. Their social structure is reflected by monumental burial mounds with rich inventories full of gold and precious imports. Our German-Russian excavations during the last years at different places between Siberia in the east and southern Russia in the west gave a lot of new information and contributed to a new understanding of these monuments. There are not any more just burials of nomadic elites but also places of memory and rituals which became architecture.

Albert Reckitt Archaeological Lecture - Scythian elite burial mounds in the Eurasian steppe

On 10 December 2018, it was seventy years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. The Universal Declaration was adopted in the aftermath of the horrors and suffering of the Second World War and has been the cornerstone of the development of a global project committed to the protection of human rights, a project which the Preamble to the Universal Declaration declares to be ‘the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. In her lecture, Catherine O’Regan considers not only the history of the adoption of the Universal Declaration and the developments that followed, but she also assesses the future of the Universal Declaration at a time when threats to the human rights project, which it initiated and symbolises daily, seem more menacing. Speaker: Professor Catherine O’Regan Hon FBA University of Oxford, former Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa Chair: Professor Conor Gearty FBA Professor of Human Rights Law, London School of Economics

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70: A moment both to look back and to look forward

Real wages are a measure of the value of an hour of work measured in goods. Comparisons across countries are a natural measure of worker productivity and well being. Orley Ashenfelter's large scale project compares wage rates across countries and over time using the standardized work and products at McDonald's restaurants. Despite some growth in developing countries, real wage rates differ massively in rich and poor countries, and there are surprising gaps between American states as well. Speaker: Professor Orley C. Ashenfelter FBA, Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics, Princeton University Chair: Lord Richard Layard FBA, Co-Director, Well-being Programme, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science

The McWages project: Comparing real wages across countries and time

Chatterton Lecture on Poetry The life Edward Thomas chose to live, the things he admired, and the poetry he wrote, attract the description ‘simple’. Walter de la Mare stated that Thomas’s poetry ‘ennobles by simplification’. Yet Thomas recognised that, paradoxically, simplicity is complicated and can be subject to infinite interpretations. ‘If only simplicity were truly simple to mankind’, he wrote in The Heart of England. This lecture addresses the simplicity in (and of) his poetry; and considers his life, career, and ‘simple lifers’, Georgians, Modernists, the First World War, and what Thomas called ‘the monotony and simplicity of death’. Speaker: Dr Guy Cuthbertson, Associate Professor, Liverpool Hope University Guy Cuthbertson is the author of Wilfred Owen (Yale, 2014) and Peace at Last (Yale, 2018). He edited Edward Thomas’s Autobiographies (Oxford, 2011), and co-edited Thomas’s England and Wales (Oxford, 2011) and Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (Enitharmon, 2007). He studied at St Andrews and Oxford, and is an Associate Professor at Liverpool Hope University. Chair: Professor Robert Crawford FBA, Professor of Modern Scottish Literature and Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry, University of St Andrews

‘I should want nothing more’: Edward Thomas and simplicity

Raleigh Lecture on History The 1970s saw a resurgence of interest in the paranormal. In the mass media, as well as in academic and popular conferences across the world, metal-bending, telepathy, clairvoyance, and remote viewing were avidly debated. In subsequent decades, historians and sociologists have also shown an interest in the phenomena, using it to reflect on the social construction of scientific knowledge. In this lecture, Joanna Bourke explores the social life of paranormal science in Birkbeck College and its links to radical critiques of scientific norms and practices. Para-physics provided a small group of scientists with a way to reflect on the three crises of politics emerging out of capitalism, the Cold War, and Stalinism. Speaker: Professor Joanna Bourke FBA, Professor of History, Birkbeck, University of London Joanna Bourke FBA is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. She is a prizewinning author of 13 books, on topics including histories of violence, war, pain, militarism, the emotions, and what it means to be human. She is the Principal Investigator of a 5-year Wellcome-Trust project entitled Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry and is currently writing the history of Birkbeck, University of London, for its bicentenary in 2023. Chair: Professor Richard J Evans FBA, Regius Professor of History, University of Cambridge

Radical physics: Science, socialism and the paranormal

In the glory years of the Parisian ‘café-concert’ music hall, one comedy character above all others was loved by French audiences: the Englishman. Hannah Scott introduces these roast beef-scoffing, beer-quaffing figures of fun from the nineteenth century. Speaker: Dr Hannah Scott, British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow, French and Francophone Studies, University of Nottingham

Singing Les Roastbeef: Comic English characters at the French music hall

How do we communicate ethically in an increasingly digital age? With social media platforms and search engines increasingly under fire for circulating fake news, propaganda and misinformation, urgent questions about corporate social responsibility need to be addressed. What role must tech companies take in fostering reliable communication? And should our social networks be regulated in the same manner as other media? Our expert panel discusses these issues. Speakers: Professor Rowan Cruft, Professor of Philosophy, University of Stirling Professor Rae Langton FBA, Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge Baroness Onora O’Neill FBA, Professor Emeritus, University of Cambridge; past President of the British Academy Chair: Professor Sir David Cannadine PBA, President, The British Academy; Dodge Professor of History, Princeton University

Ethical communication in a digital age

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is recognised as the greatest German literary figure of the modern era. An innovative writer of European stature in almost every genre from poetry to autobiography, and an early enthusiast for world literature, Goethe was also an impassioned investigator in many areas of natural science. As a self-declared 'citizen of the world', Goethe’s body of work, and openness to the world, continue to inspire and resonate today. Chaired by Ritchie Robertson, our panel discussed his life and legacy. Thinkers for our time is a series re-thinking the life and work of influential figures from across the Academy's disciplines, particularly history and the arts. This is the sixth in the series, following events exploring Sigmund Freud, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Malthus, Sylvia Pankhurst and Charlie Chaplin. Speakers: Dr Johannes Kaminski, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, University of Vienna Dr Charlotte Lee, Lecturer in Modern German Studies, University of Cambridge Professor Dan Wilson, Professor of German, Royal Holloway, University of London Chair: Professor Ritchie Robertson FBA, Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature, Fellow of The Queen’s College, University of Oxford and author of Goethe: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)

Thinkers for our time: Goethe

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