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Our Inaugural Lectures provide an opportunity to recognise and celebrate the achievements of our professors who are undertaking research and scholarship of international significance.
The lecture series offers an insight into the strength and vitality of the arts, humanities and social sciences at UCL, and has been jointly hosted by UCL's Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences and Faculty of Arts & Humanities.
From September 2021, inaugural lectures will be hosted by our respective departments: keep up to date with details of future lectures via our Faculty events feed.
In Case You Missed it! Catch up on previous lectures
- Translation as Microhistory
Kathryn Batchelor, Professor of Translation Studies, School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS)
This event took place on Tuesday 8 October 2019.
About the lecture
Translations are things that we often look through, rather than at. We use translations as tools for overcoming language barriers; we rarely stop and inspect the tools themselves. In this lecture, I argue that there is value in studying translations as historical objects in their own right. In an approach inspired by microhistory and histoire croisée, I consider translated books to be concrete traces of intercultural interactions from the past. By investigating how and why they came to be, and by paying attention to the details of their physical presence (that book cover, those word choices), I show that translations can enrich our historical understanding of political and cultural developments.
About the speaker
Kathryn Batchelor was appointed Professor of Translation Studies at the UCL School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) in January 2019. She is the author of Translation and Paratexts (2018) and Decolonizing Translation (2009), and has co-edited four volumes of essays including Translating Frantz Fanon across Continents and Languages (2017) and China-Africa Relations: Building Images through Cultural Cooperation, Media Representation and Communication (2017).
60 seconds with...Kathryn Batchelor
Read the blog post by Helen Tappin, BA German student
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MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/93252145 - Surviving the Anthropocene: The Role of Groundwater
Richard Taylor, Professor of Hydrogeology, Department of Geography
This event took place on Tuesday 15 October 2019.
About the lecture
Freshwater demand for food, industry and human health is rising globally while we collectively warm the planet. How will we locally and globally supply this growing demand for water and sustain the vital ecosystems in which we live? Focusing on the tropics whereby in 2050 the majority of the world’s population will live, I will argue that groundwater - water that flows in rocks and sediments beneath the land surface – provides a natural, distributed and often renewable store of freshwater that, managed equitably and sustainably, could feature prominently in solutions to the global water crisis.
About the speaker
Professor Richard Taylor is a hydrogeologist who for nearly three decades has sought to better understand groundwater systems in the tropics and how these can contribute to poverty alleviation. A native of Toronto, he currently leads two research consortia, GroFutures and AfriWatSan, working in 7 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa funded by The Royal Society, UKRI and DFID.
60 seconds with... Richard Taylor
Read the blog post by Isabelle Colvin, BSc Geography student
Watch the recording:
MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/89147173 - Party Booby Trap: Selected Works by Thomson & Craighead
Jon Thomson, Professor of Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art
This event took place on Tuesday 22 October 2019.
About the lecture
Jon will present and discuss a selection of works made in collaboration with Alison Craighead spanning their first twenty-five years working together. Rather than giving a general overview, the lecture will focus on their visual use of text, and how it has remained a central part of their wider practice.
About the speaker
Jon Thomson working in collaboration with Alison Craighead, makes artworks that examine the changing socio-political structures of our Information Age. In particular, they have been looking at how the digital world is ever more closely connected to the physical world becoming a geographical layer in our collective sensorium. Time is often treated with a sculptor’s mentality, as a pliable quantity that can be moulded and remodelled.
60 seconds with... Jon Thomson
Read the blog post by Robert Mead, PhD student, Slade School of Fine Art
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MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/34195186 - Schools, Houses, Fruits, Taxes and Other Differentiated Products
Lars Nesheim, Professor of Economics, Department of Economics
This event took place on Tuesday 29 October 2019.
About the lecture
Which is more important for student outcomes, school quality or the quality of students? How do investments in roads and rail affect property prices and public welfare? How does the price of cherries affect demand for bananas? Should council tax rates and housing benefit levels be higher or lower in city centres?
Four disparate questions tied together by a common analytical theme: theories of differentiated products and household sorting. This lecture discusses how to combine these theories with large scale modern datasets to provide evidence to help address these questions.
About the speaker
Lars Nesheim is a Professor of Economics at UCL and Co-Director of the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CeMMAP).
He obtained his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2001 and worked for 2 years at the Institute for Fiscal Studies before joining UCL in 2003. He teaches industrial organisation and econometrics.
His research interests focus on structural econometrics, computational economics, industrial organisation, urban economics, economic dynamics and hedonic models.
Read the blog post by Tom Gray, BSc Economics student
Watch the recording:
MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/64284801 - The Future in Retrospect: Land Art to the Moon and Back
Joy Sleeman, Professor of Art History and Theory, Slade School of Fine Art
This event took place on Tuesday 12 November 2019.
About the lecture
My lecture retraces the steps of some of the artists and some of the journeys taken, actual and imaginary, while researching Land art over the past thirty years.
Land art is a term used to designate new forms of landscape art that emerged in the mid-1960s. The term itself and its origins, temporal and geographical, are much disputed, but its continuing relevance to contemporary debates and art making are abundantly evident. The emphasis of my research is on Land art in Britain and that, in spite of the extra-terrestrial referent in the title, is also the focus of this lecture.
About the speaker
Joy Sleeman is Professor of Art History and Theory and Head of Taught Courses in History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. She is a writer and curator whose research is focused on the histories of sculpture and landscape, especially 1960s and 1970s Land art. Her most recent book, Roelof Louw and British Sculpture since the 1960s, was published by Ridinghouse in 2018.
60 seconds with... Joy Sleeman
Read the blog post by Cliodhna Timoney, MFA fine arts student
Watch the recording (UCL username and password required):
MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/73412810 - Refuge in a Moving World: Beyond Hospitality and Hostility
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies, Department of Geography
This event took place on Tuesday 10 December 2019.
About the lecture
People have been displaced throughout history and across all geographies, and yet attention to displacement ebbs and flows across time and space. Most displaced people remain within their regions of origin, often facing a combination of hospitality and hostility, and developing different ways of responding to their own situations.
This lecture traces the multiple ways that responses to displacement are enacted by people with personal and family experiences of forced migration, including in their capacity as researchers, writers and artists, and aid providers. Drawing on research conducted in camps and cities in the Middle East and North Africa, this lecture examines how different people experience and respond to their own situations (and that of others), in the presence of diverse barriers and structural inequalities.
Ultimately, the lecture argues that working collaboratively through interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies has the potential to develop nuanced understandings of processes of migration and displacement, and, in turn, more sustainable modes of responding to our moving world.
About the speaker
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is Co-Director of UCL's Migration Research Unit and Director of the Refuge in a Moving World interdisciplinary network. She is currently leading a number of multi-year research projects including the AHRC-ESRC funded project, 'Local Community Experiences of and Responses to Displacement from Syria' (www.refugeehosts.org) and an ERC-funded project, Southern-Led Responses to Displacement from Syria (www.southernresponses.org). Her recent books include The Ideal Refugees: Gender, Islam and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival, South-South Educational Migration, Humanitarianism and Development, The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies and The Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations.
Read the blog post by Jonathan Ren, BSc Geography student
Watch the recording:
MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/78239956 - The Power of Maps
James Cheshire, Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography, Department of Geography
This event took place on Wednesday 15 January 2020.
About the lecture
Maps are everywhere and have never been more important for navigating some of the biggest challenges we face. They give us a view into some of the enormous datasets we collect about our world and the best provide clarity in the face of immense complexity. Drawing from a decade of work at UCL Geography, this talk will make the case for why we need more maps and will share the analytical and creative processes that are required to create them.
About the speaker
James Cheshire is Director of the UCL Q-Step Centre and Deputy Director of the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre. His research focuses on the use of “big” and open datasets in social science and he has a passion for mapping and data visualisation. He’s co-authored two books London: The Information Capital and Where the Animals Go and won numerous awards including the Royal Geographical Society’s Cuthbert Peek Award.
60 seconds with... James Cheshire
Read the blog post by Jonathan Ren, BSc Geography student
Watch the recording:
MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/33914231 - Fast Urbanism: Between Speed, Time and Urban Futures
Ayona Datta, Professor in Human Geography, Department of Geography
This event took place on Tuesday 21 January 2020.
About the lecture
Speed is fundamental to producing the modern city. In India, speed is shaping new imaginations of the future city as ‘fast urbanism’ – the ubiquitous use of technology to manage and efficiently organise urban life in the future. Drawing upon recent research, this lecture will examine what fast urbanism looks like from the margins of the Indian city. It will examine what happens when contrary to the promise of a fast and seamless urban life that delivers the gift of time, the urban poor are confronted with new struggles with mobility, new exclusions from digital and physical infrastructures, reorganisation of domestic life, as well as the dangers of sexual harassment and assault both online and offline.
About the speaker
Ayona Datta is Professor of Human Geography with research interests in gender citizenship, urban futures and smart cities in the global South. She is author of ‘The Illegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement’ in 2012, co-editor of ‘Translocal Geographies: Spaces, places, connections’ in 2011 and ‘Mega-Urbanization in the Global South: Fast Cities and New Urban Utopias’ in 2016. Ayona is a public scholar with op-eds in Guardian, openDemocracy and ConversationUK as well as invited presentations at the UN headquarters in Geneva and New York.
Read the blog post by Jonathan Ren, BSc Geography student
Watch the recording:
MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/68653348 - Forecasting Tomorrow's Election Today
Benjamin Lauderdale, Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science
This event took place on Tuesday 28 January 2020.
About the lecture
Why does political polling sometimes fail to predict election results? Polling is not a central concern of the academic field of political science, but insights from political science are potentially beneficial to the project of predicting elections.
This lecture discusses standard polling methods as well as newer modelling frameworks like "multilevel regression and post-stratification" that are increasingly used for projecting election polling data onto "first-past-the-post" outcomes at the constituency/district/state level in countries like the UK and US. These methods are only likely to perform well where their assumptions are well-grounded in the enduring findings of the political science research literature regarding patterns of voting behaviour across elections and the properties of self-reported political attitudes and intentions.
About the speaker
Benjamin Lauderdale is a Professor of Political Science at UCL. He obtained his PhD from Princeton in 2010 and taught at the London School of Economics from 2011 to 2018. He is currently an Associate Editor of the American Political Science Review (2016-2020) as well as a Senior Data Science Advisor to YouGov. His research is focused on the measurement of political preferences from survey, voting, network and text data. Applications of these methods have included citizens, legislators and judges in the US, UK and EU.
Read the blog post by Sanjana Balakrishnan, BSc Politics and International Relations student
- Living in a World of Rules
Claudio Radaelli, Professor of Public Policy, Department of Political Science
This event took place on Tuesday 4 February 2020.
About the lecture
Living in a world of rules is a conversation with the audience on why laws and regulations save lives and protect the environment but can also stymie growth and trigger corruption. I will explain how I became concerned and scientifically interested in regulatory reform. And how this scientific interest led me to regulatory encounters with the worlds of regulatory guillotines, regulatory czars, regulatory management and international organizations that promote reform and management of public rules. But this lecture is also an opportunity to share with you some thoughts on how, project after project, I came to reflect on my own perspective and engagement with regulatory reform. I live in a world of rules as a citizen, as a policy analyst who leads on research programmes, but also as a researcher whose knowledge, findings and narratives contribute to the debate on what regulatory reform is, should be and who should benefit from it.
About the speaker
Claudio M. Radaelli is Professor of Public Policy in the UCL Department of Political Science. He is currently leading on an ERC (European Research Council) advanced grant on Procedural Tools for Effective Governance (Protego). His research interests lie in learning in public policy (his first ERC advanced grant was on Analysis of Learning in Regulatory Governance, ALREG), regulation, how the EU works and its impact on domestic policy. Claudio has also published on research design in the social sciences.
60 seconds with...Claudio Radaelli
Read the blog post by Sanjana Balakrishnan, BSc Politics and International Relations student
Watch the recording:
MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/46528256 - A Journey through the World of Jewish Languages
Lily Kahn, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Languages, Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies
This event took place on Tuesday 10 November 2020.
About the lecture:
This talk will introduce listeners to the rich variety of languages spoken and written by Jews over the past three thousand years. These include not only well-known languages like Hebrew and Yiddish, but also more surprising ones like Chinese, Esperanto, Malayalam, and Zulu, all of which have an intriguing Jewish story to be told. The talk will first consider the question of ‘what makes a language Jewish?’ It will then explore the special features of various Jewish languages and look at some of the fascinating and diverse texts produced in them.
About the speaker:
Lily Kahn’s main research areas are Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages, as well as minority languages more broadly. She is co-editor with Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi of the UCL Press series Grammars of World and Minority Languages and has recently published Jewish Languages from A to Z (co-authored with Aaron Rubin; Routledge, 2020). She is currently conducting an AHRC research project on contemporary Hasidic Yiddish (with Kriszta Eszter Szendrői, UCL Linguistics).
Read the blog post by Francesca Ashfield, BA student, Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies
Watch the recording:
MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/3DbhBBAc - Global Firms: International Trade and Investment with Financial Frictions and Global Value Chains
Kalina Manova, Professor of Economics, UCL Department of Economics
This event took place on Wednesday 17 March 2021.
About the lecture:
Technological change and trade policy have fundamentally transformed international trade and investment in recent decades. For individual firms, new challenges and opportunities have arisen as production has fragmented across firm boundaries and country borders. For countries at different levels of economic development, the increased heterogeneity and complexity of firms’ participation in the world economy has raised new and different policy questions about the impact of globalization. This lecture will summarize the key lessons emerging from my research agenda on the roles of financial market frictions and global value chains for firm performance and aggregate welfare.
About the speaker
Professor Kalina Manova is a Harvard AB/AM/PhD, and was previously professor at Stanford, Princeton and Oxford. She is CEPR Research Fellow, EEA Executive Committee Member, REStud editorial board member, and Bank of England Consultant. She has received a Leverhulme Prize in Economics, €1.5M ERC Consolidator Grant, and ₤750 ESRC Governance After Brexit Grant. Her research examines three themes in international trade and investment: financial frictions, firm productivity, and global value chains..
60 seconds with... Kalina Manova
Read the blog post by Oscar Perelló P., PhD student in Economics
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MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/A8IEJ9g9 - Better Together: Collaboration in Education
Professor Cloda Jenkins and Professor Parama Chaudhury, UCL Department of Economics
This event took place on Tuesday 23 March 2021.
About the lecture
In life, we collaborate with others all the time, at home, at work and in society. At school and at university, students spend most of their time working on their own, often seeing others as ‘the competition' rather than the potential support. In our research, we explore how working with others, in the classroom and outside the classroom, online or on campus, can benefit student learning, sense of community and skill development. Collaborative learning design has its challenges and is not always appreciated by students. We explain ways to manage lecturer effort and deliver benefits for students.
About the speakers
Professor Cloda Jenkins is Associate Director (and co-founder) of UCL’s Centre for Teaching and Learning Economics (CTaLE). She is a member of the Economics Network Executive Group and the EEA Education Committee. She is interested in developing research-based education and employability skills in economics degrees. Cloda is also an expert in regulatory economics and mechanism design. She has applied this expertise to practical policy making in a range of sectors since 1997.
Professor Parama Chaudhury is Director (and co-founder) of UCL’s Centre for Teaching and Learning Economics (CTaLE). She is a member of the Royal Economic Society’s Education Committee and the Teaching and Learning Committee of the CORE Project. Her main interests lie in evaluating techniques and technologies for economics education and more broadly, using the tools of economics to understand how people learn.
60 seconds with... Professor Cloda Jenkins and Professor Parama Chaudhury
Read the blog post by Arshiya Sawhney & Shivam Gujral, BSc Economics students
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MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/g0e8FbHh - Anti-racism as Politics
Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities and Founding Director, Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation
This event took place on Thursday 6 May 2021.
About the lecture
This lecture will address aspects of Professor Gilroy's scholarly career as a researcher, in several disciplinary settings, into the problems presented by ethnic absolutism and the attachment to race. It will reflect critically on approaches to the study of racial hierarchy that reduce work in this difficult area to the examination of interpersonal relations or confine understanding of the political aspects of this critical work to the matter of identity alone.
About the speaker
Professor Paul Gilroy joined UCL as Professor of the Humanities in August 2019 and as Founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation. He is one of the foremost theorists of race and racism working and teaching in the world today. Author of foundational and highly influential books such as There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Against Race (2000), Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) and Darker Than Blue (2010) alongside numerous key articles, essays and critical interventions, Gilroy’s is a unique voice that speaks to the centrality and tenacity of racialised thought and representational practices in the modern world.
- Life in the gap: amplifying lives that flourish along the edges
Rebecca Empson, Professor of Anthropology, UCL Department of Anthropology
This event took place on Monday 24 May 2021.
About the lecture
How does attending to things that do not fit received models or linear ideas of progress allow us to observe alternative ways of living and arranging things?
This lecture focuses on three examples from my research. Although the content is different, a thread runs through them. They show how life often flourishes outside of the models that we bring to bear on them, creating unexpected insights that revise our understanding of the phenomena.
Attending to and writing about these differences can be seen as a political act. Amplifying their existence goes some way into bringing them into being for the people who articulate and live them and as objects of analysis for anthropology.About the speaker
Rebecca Empson is Professor of Anthropology at the UCL Department of Anthropology. She studied anthropology as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics and a PhD at Cambridge, with fieldwork along the Mongolian-Russian border. She wrote her thesis on the work of care needed for kinship relations to grow and continue. Three postdocs later, she joined UCL Anthropology where she has taught at all levels. Most recently she has run a large European Research Council project on the fluctuations of the Mongolian economy and written on forms of subjectivity, ownership and temporary possession, as well as the physical object of the desk while people work from home during the pandemic.
Read the blog post by Leo Krapp, 3rd year BSc Anthropology student
Watch the recording:
MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/Eg86e5FI - Art Deco: A Literary Style?
Maria Rubins, Professor in Russian and Comparative Literature, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
This event took place on Wednesday 2 June 2021.
About the lecture
Despite its name, Art Deco was much more than a style in applied arts and architecture of the Jazz Age. Indeed, it could be seen as the first truly global, comprehensive cultural phenomenon, informing nearly all spheres of life, including social practices, fashion, cinematography, music, visual arts, ideological preferences, gender roles, and automobile design. Could literature have escaped its pervasive influence?
In her lecture, Professor Maria Rubins will explore Art Deco fiction and its distinctive narrative strategies, genres and thematic repertoire, shaped by new conceptions of commercial success. She will discuss interwar writers’ ironic and ambivalent response to the ethos of hedonism, consumerism, the cult of speed, and the apparent dominance of cinema over other artistic media. Finally, she will consider why no subsequent style has achieved the same degree of cultural supremacy.
With a welcome and introduction from Professor Diane P. Koenker, UCL SSEES Director and Professor of Russian and Soviet History, and response from Professor David Bethea, Professor Emeritus in Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
About the speaker
Maria Rubins is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at University College London. She received her B.A. from Saint-Petersburg State University (Russia) and Ph.D. from Brown University (USA). Before joining the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, she taught at Russian State Institute of Performing Arts, Brown University, Rice University and the University of Georgia. She has been the recipient of grants from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Slavic-Eurasian Research Center of the University of Hokkaido, and Kennan Institute in Washington. Her research interests include modernism, exile and diaspora, bilingual writing, Russian-French cultural relations, and the interaction between Hebrew, Arabic and Russophone literatures in the geopolitical context of the Middle East.
Professor Rubins is the author of several books, including Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ecphrasis in Russian and French Poetry (2000) and Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris (2015), and over one hundred articles and book chapters. She has edited many volumes for academic and general audiences, most recently Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920-2020 (2021). She is also a translator of fiction from English and French into Russian, including books by Elizabeth Gaskell, Judith Gautier, Arnaud Delalande and Irène Némirovsky.
60 seconds with... Maria Rubins
Read the blog post by Ada Wordsworth, 4th year Russian Studies BA student
Watch the recording:
MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/D4dBeiFj