Events

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

Those attending Professor Sue Hamilton’s (UCL Institute of Archaeology) inaugural lecture on Tuesday 8 May at UCL were treated to a tour de force of more than two decades of archaeological fieldwork engaging with the artefacts, sites and landscapes from Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, Puglia in southern Italy to the monumental landscapes of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in order to answer precisely that question.

Hamilton’s major influence in the field has been her unfaltering commitment to reconfiguring archaeology theory and practice as a form of ‘people work’.

At the heart of her innovative fieldwork methodology is the idea that archaeologists share something with the people whom they study – they inhabit the same landscapes and, therefore, can use their own bodies to generate multi-sensory theories about the past.

What does it feel like to walk to and from ancient sites in the landscape, what can you see and hear when inside or outside them? What can this tell us?

Read the rest of this entry »

Annette Mitchell writes about Professor Miriam Leonard’s inaugural lecture.

Is Classics important today? After studying ancient history for more than 10 years, many people ask me what can you do with it? And it is a question I often asked myself until I started reading Freud and got curious about all the references he made to antiquity. By sheer coincidence, when I was accepted for a PhD on this subject in 2007 Miriam Leonard was joining the Greek and Latin Department and she became my supervisor.

I had heard of her before, but I thought it would be a good move to read more of her work and rooted out a copy of Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (2005). This was the first time I really got a sense of ‘Reception Studies’.

‘Reception Studies’, as a sub-discipline of Classical Studies, not only covers how antiquity is received in future times, but also considers how antiquity is used to express important political, social, cultural questions in future times.

Professor Leonard’s inaugural lecture on 1 May, entitled ‘Tragedy and Modernity’, squarely honed in on this latter aspect. She explained how specific German philosophers have used Greek tragedy, in particular Sophocles’ play Oedipus Tyrannos, to express certain conditions, since the mid-1700s.

Professor Leonard mainly concentrated on Hegel and Freud, explaining how both used Oedipus Tyrannos to encapsulate what they believed to be the modern condition.

Read the rest of this entry »

Alexia Svolou (Biochemistry 1992), Health Editor for a Greek national newspaper, reports on an alumni reception held at the British Embassy in Athens.

It is an undeniable fact that Greece, my home country, has lived through better days, but despite our society’s gloomy mood – due to the continuing recession – the UCL alumni reception in Athens, last week, was a great success.

Hundreds of Greek alumni put aside their problems and anxiety about the future, and came in the best of their spirits to the “hottest event in town”, as our Provost, Professor Malcolm Grant, so smartly said.

On 25 April, for one night, the talk of the town was not the recession, but our beloved British university and the memories that we cherish from our student years.

All the Greek UCL alumni that attended the reception at the British Embassy felt proud to be part of the history of UCL. The first University to accept women as students, the first University that put religion aside – UCL is part of our personal history.

The legacy of UCL runs in our veins and reminds us nowadays that although our country is on the verge of default, there is always a solution and that science and technology can always find a way, even in the gloomiest situations.

Our Provost, Professor Malcolm Grant, opened the UCL alumni reception with a friendly and spirited speech that reminded us once again how lucky we are to be a living part of UCL.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have always thought that the Italian military from the 1920s until 1943 were simply fascists and puppets of the Nazis. At UCL on 24 April, Holocaust survivor Imre Rochlitz and his son Joseph presented the easily forgotten account of many Italian soldiers’ determination to thwart the transfer of up to 30,000 Jews into German hands during WWII.

Titled Honouring the Righteous, in recognition of both Holocaust survivors and those who saved their lives, the event was organised by the UCL European Institute, the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) and the UCL Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Joseph Rochlitz screened his 1994 documentary, The Righteous Enemy, which illuminated how Italian soldiers repeatedly disobeyed demands from Nazi officials to hand over Jews from Italian-occupied Croatia, Greece and southern France. Interviews with Italian commanders revealed their determination to undermine even direct orders from Mussolini to comply with Nazi directives.

Read the rest of this entry »