Events

Reviews of UCL public lectures, debates, exhibitions, shows, and more…

These days, when people think of classical drama they think of Greek tragedy. Professor Gesine Manuwald (UCL Greek & Latin) sought to redress this notion with her enticingly-titled lecture, ‘Drama & theatre in ancient Rome: braggart soldiers, parasites & murderers’ on 15 May, which formed part of the UCL Festival of the Arts.

She began by outlining how Roman drama grew out of the regular festivals and ceremonies held in Republican Rome to honour various gods.

In 364 BC, the magistrates of Rome decided to introduce performances and Etruscan dancing to appease the gods after an outbreak of pestilence. However, it wasn’t until 240 BC that they commissioned Livius Andronicus (Rome’s first poet) to write a play – the first of its kind – one year after the Punic War to celebrate the victory.

Read the rest of this entry »

On 14 March, sandwiched between the UK national No Smoking Day and the international World No Tobacco Day, a lunch hour lecture explored what might be the most successful product ever: cigarettes.

Cigarette courtesy of
Fried Dough on Flickr

Deputy director of Cancer Research UK and UCL Cancer Trials Centre Professor Allan Hackshaw reminded us all just why cigarettes are so terrible.

There were a billion smokers in 2010. That’s a big number, and it’s going up, despite all that’s known about the health risks that smoking brings.

That might seem strange, until you look at how much each side of the table spends. In 2011, the US spent $457 million to reduce tobacco-related harm.

However, the tobacco industry spent more than $8 billion promoting, marketing and advertising their products, which makes it a little easier to understand why a product that kills half its consumers is still finding new ones.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earth, courtesy of Kevin M
Gill on Flickr

There are currently 6.9 billion people living on our planet and with that figure set to rise, many people are worried about how long the Earth will be able to sustain us all and cope with the damage that we are inflicting on it.

The UCL Grant Museum of Zoology has a “case of extinction” featuring, among others, dodo and Tasmanian wolf (thylacine) specimens. Both of these species were hunted to extinction by humans and since their deaths many other species have faced the same fate. Which led Dean Veall, the museum’s learning and access officer, to ask the Big Question: are there too many people on the planet?

When the question was first posed to a packed JZ Young lecture theatre, after a glass of wine and a mooch around the Grant Museum’s always fascinating collection, the answer from the crowd was a resounding ‘yes’. But over the course of the night, we stood to have our opinions tested and potentially changed.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Vision of Hell viii, iII. Gustave Doré
(UCL Library Special Collections)

Severed heads, rivers of blood and pools of faeces might not seem the most appealing topics over lunchtime, but there was standing room only at Professor John Took’s talk at the UCL Festival of the Arts on 14 May about Dante’s Divine Comedy – one of the most horrifying, yet uplifting, poems ever written in western literature.

In the words of Professor Took (UCL Italian), Dante’s Commedia (Comedy) – which charts one lost soul’s metaphorical journey to Hell, Purgatory, Heaven and back in several thousand lines of rhyming poetry – is “a work of tremendous stature, which lays hold of you by the throat and won’t let you go”.

A note for the pedants: the Divina (Divine) prefix, by which the poem is better known, was added by the Church during the Counter-Reformation in an attempt to co-opt the work – which already tells you something about the poet’s representation of the Papacy.

Read the rest of this entry »