Gresham College Lectures
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Gresham College Lectures
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.
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2952 פרקים
Becoming AI – Your Journey to Assimilation? - Matt Jones
Wittgenstein wrote: “If a lion could talk, we would not understand it”. That is, as lions and humans are not of the same material, they could not say...
Limitarianism and Capitalism - Ingrid Robeyns
Limitarianism holds that it is immoral to have personal wealth above a certain level. Is this idea compatible with capitalism? Defenders of capitalism...
Do Not Resuscitate Forms - Who’d Have One? - Mark Taubert
In this lecture, Mark Taubert, who chairs the national DNACPR policy for Wales, and is a palliative care clinician, reviews current practices. He will...
The Great God Pan: Lord of the Wild - Ronald Hutton
Pan started as a shepherds’ god in a wild and backward area of Greece, but became one of the best-known in the Greek and Roman world. This was partly...
Minor Criminal: The Trial of the Man Who Murdered My Grandmother - Lord Daniel Finkelstein
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/oQeUePfTrEQ
The Royal Historical Society Colin Matthew Memorial Lecture.
In Apr...
China’s Economic Prospects on the Cusp - George Magnus
China has important islands of technological excellence, even dominance, but these islands exist in a sea of macroeconomic imbalances and headwinds. X...
Ocean: The Liquid Engine That Dominates Our Planet
We often talk about living on a blue planet, but when we think we’re talking about the ocean we’re generally only discussing what’s in it: fish, whale...
Music of Animals - Milton Mermikides
Do animals make music? Are the languages of whales and birds truly songs? To answer this, we must first understand what we mean by music as human anim...
The Economics of Work and Technology - Daniel Susskind
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/v0RoRG2YA-0
Why has automation anxiety – the fear that new technologies cause mass unemploym...
Whither War; Whither the Law of War - Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice KC
How might we change the way we – and all our leaders think – so that we never go to war?
The war between Russia and Ukraine, as well as the con...
From Tyranny to Athenian Democracy - Melissa Lane
When – and how – did Athenian democracy begin? There is no unambiguous answer to this question. This lecture explores one plausible origin: the popula...
China and Chineseness: Lessons from the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan - Steve Tsang
This lecture is about the meaning of China and being Chinese. It examines critically how the Chinese state, under the control of the Communist Party d...
War's Toxic Legacy - Ian Mudway
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/3LrIEG26m78
War's environmental legacies disproportionately burden the civilian populations...
How Does Mathematics Last? Heritage and Heritage-making in Mathematics - Caroline Ehrhardt
How is mathematical knowledge recorded and preserved across generations? Contrary to the idea that mathematics itself is somehow ‘permanent’, in this...
Evoking Empathy through Animal Portraiture
The natural world faces unprecedented threats, challenging historical perceptions of nature as inexhaustible. Photographer Tim Flach draws on his accl...
Why Do We Fear? - Robin May
Fear is one of the earliest emotions to have evolved. Most vertebrates – and possibly some invertebrates – show fear when they are threatened. At its...
Hitler, Jesus & How to Win a Culture War - Alec Ryrie
Since 1945 Hitler and the Nazis have been the Western world’s one fixed moral reference point: the way we know what evil is. But that consensus has al...
How It Ends: What We Know about the Fate of the Universe - Chris Lintott
How will it all end? Predicting the far future of our Universe depends on understanding its present. This lecture starts with what seems to be a parad...
AI Will Be Your Overlord: Faster, Brighter, Better Than You?
“Scary”, “Worried”, “Dangerous” were some of the most frequent words to describe AI in a recent UK Government public survey. Do you fear, as many do,...
Shakespeare’s Musical Fairies - Dominic Broomfield-McHugh
Written in the era of the founding of Gresham College, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream portrays the hypnotic dreaminess of a fairy world in wh...
Lessons from Guantánamo Bay - Clive Stafford Smith
This lecture looks at the evolution of Guantánamo Bay, first as a focal point of Haitian immigration in 1991 (Gitmo 1.0), to the more famous detention...
The Shape of Hands: Symmetry, Chirality and Handedness - Alain Goriely
The reflection of my right hand in a mirror is a left hand that looks similar yet is very different from the right. Many natural structures such as pr...
Earth – Our Planetary Life Support System - Professor Helen Czerski
Planet Earth is an intricate and interconnected system, with some fundamental rules that we usually ignore. But we are part of our planet, not separat...
Automation Anxiety - Daniel Susskind
Ever since modern economic growth began three centuries ago, people have suffered from periodic bursts of anxiety about the technologies of the time t...
Galileo’s Journey to the Underworld: The Case for Interdisciplinary Thinking - Sarah Hart
ttps://x.com/GreshamCollege Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/tv554JY9TPU
In 1588, the young Galileo delivered some lectures t...
A World Remade by Decolonization? - Martin Thomas
The lecture shares perspectives from global history, comparative politics, and international relations to revaluate whether the twentieth-century coll...
Oil, Decolonisation, and the Future of the Climate Emergency - Adam Hanieh
Decolonisation movements sought to win sovereignty and control over national resources, especially oil. This lecture explores oil’s influence on natio...
Shanawdithit: A Woman at the End of the World - Julia Laite
Shanawdithit was a woman who bore witness to the death of her world in the early nineteenth century, creating the only first-hand account we have of t...
Outsmart the System: How Psychology Hacks Your Money Decisions - Raghavendra Rau
Ever feel like the financial world works against you? This lecture discusses "behavioral finance" – how our brains get tricked by money matters. We wi...
Democracy and International Criminal Justice in the Fragile World of the Rule of Law - Howard Morrison
The lecture will examine the pros and cons of democracy in today's world, focusing on the importance of domestic and international rule of law to main...
The Future of Health - Chris Whitty
Health over the last 150 years in the UK and internationally has been transformed and this rapid rate of change will continue. Improvements in public...
Sum Stories: Equations and their Origins - Robin Wilson
How long is the coastline of Britain? What is a rhombicuboctahedron? Which US president proved Pythagoras’s theorem? These and many other intriguing q...
The Deceived Brain: Coding and Illusion - Alain Goriely
We perceive the world through the processing of information given by our senses. Sometimes, this processing is faulty leading to illusions: shapes or...
The Future of Immunity - Robin May
Our understanding of the human immune system today is vastly different from that of 50 years ago. This knowledge has led to immune-based therapies tha...
The Maths of Music (and the Music of Maths) - Milton Mermikides and Sarah Hart
This is the fourth lecture from the Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-ideas-2025
The Evolution of Music - Milton Mermikides and Robin May
This is the first lecture from the Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-ideas-2025
...
Climbing Mount Groove: Music and Dance in the Brain - Milton Mermikides and Morten Kringelbach
This is the second lecture from the Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-ideas-2025
The Virtues of Music - Milton Mermikides and Melissa Lane
This is the third lecture from the Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-ideas-2025
...
Remixing the Music of the Spheres - Milton Mermikides and Chris Lintott
This is the fifth and final lecture from the Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-ideas-2025
Architecture of Enslavement, Colonialism and Independence: The Story of James Fort in Accra - Elsie Owusu
Accra’s James Fort is an iconic monument for Ghana and modern Africa. This lecture explores the fort's evolution -from its role as a trading post in t...