History Faculty

Natalia Nowakowska (Tutor and Fellow in History, Somerville College and Principal Investigator 'The Jagiellonians Project') gives a talk for the History Faculty. In 1518, the Milanese Neapolitan princess Bona Sforza travelled to Krakow to marry King Sigismund I of Poland, in one of the most celebrated weddings seen in Renaissance Central Europe. The wedding is remembered today as bringing Italian food and culture to Poland. However, this lecture marking the 500th anniversary of the wedding, explores how it also generated new kinds of political ideas and language.

Professor Salvatore Settis, an archaeologist and art historian, presents a special lecture on the The Materiality of the Divine. Is the essence of the divine representable? Apparently, sharp border lines separate aniconic from iconic representations of gods; and nothing can be more opposed than iconography and iconoclasm. Yet, iconoclasm can be, and indeed was, conceived as an act of cult; its practices imply not only the power of images, but specific strategies of attention in the eye of beholders. Aniconism only makes sense within a wider context where iconic and/or narrative representations of divine entities are the norm. Religious iconographies focusing on death and rebirth allude not only to the story or myth they tell, but to the cultural practices of recollecting and indeed revitalising tradition in devotional activity such as ritual, prayer, and belief. The very status of ruins, as defined in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, can be described as a cultural formation that acts as a bridge between iconic and aniconic, meaning and destruction, iconoclasm and rebirth, “classical” and “renaissance”.

Professor Robert Gildea, Lecturer in History in Oxford, gives the Eighth Oxford Historians' Alumni Lecture on his research on political activists in Europe in the 1960s and their experiences during this time.

Dominic Sandbrook is a prolific writer of books on the recent history of Britain and America, as well as a regular columnist in BBC History magazine, the Evening Standard, the Telegraph and the Sunday Times. Here he addressesses OUHS on the Seventies, a topic for which he has gained fame through his controversial thesis of continuity and conformity in place of the traditional interpretation of a radical cultural revolution.

Robert Saunders gives a lecture on the Suffragette movement and the campaign for universal suffrage in Britain.

Having rewritten the historiography of the Glorious Revolution in his most recent work, 1688: the first modern revolution, Professor Pincus (Yale) is now considering the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century.