Writing and Resistance – The White Rose Pamphlets: A Live Reading

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TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

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At around 11am on Thursday 18 February 1943 two students in Munich were arrested for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. By Monday they had been interrogated, tried, and executed along with another member of the resistance circle.

Further arrests followed. From 15-27 February 2021 the White Rose Project will be following the events as they happened in real time through daily posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. This year marks the 78th anniversary of the first White Rose trials. It’s also a year when the dates and days of the week coincide. Imagine going about your normal routine on Monday, being arrested on Thursday, being interrogated over the weekend, and going to trial the following Monday morning.

At the heart of our week is a live reading of the White Rose’s resistance pamphlets, translated from German into English by student members of the White Rose Project. Dr Alex Lloyd (Fellow by Special Election in German, St Edmund Hall) will give a short introduction to the pamphlets. The readers are current and former students and academics, mirroring the membership of the original group: Sophie Caws, Eve Mason, Adam Rebick, Elba Slamecka, Sam Thompson, Amy Wilkinson, and Taylor Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature, T.J. (Jim) Reed, FBA. The event will open and close with music by the award-winning vocal ensemble SANSARA, recorded on 22 February 2020. This event is supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the University of Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund. It is part of the White Rose Project, a research and public engagement initiative bringing the story of the White Rose resistance circle to English-speaking audiences.

Dr Alexandra Lloyd is Fellow by Special Election in German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has published widely on post-war Germany, most recently in her book Childhood, Memory, and the Nation: Young Lives under Nazism in Contemporary German Culture (Legenda, 2020). She is currently a Knowledge Exchange Fellow at TORCH working with the White Rose Foundation in Munich, and is Project Lead on a Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund project, ‘Resistance: The Story of the White Rose’, in collaboration with the award-winning vocal ensemble SANSARA.

Eve Mason is a final-year student of English and German at the Queen’s College, Oxford. Her passion for translation led her to the White Rose Project, where she was one of the original translators of the pamphlets for The White Rose: Reading, Writing, Resistance. She was awarded a prize for German in the Warwick Prize in Undergraduate Translation in 2019 and has gone on to self-publish A String of Pearls: A Collection of Five German Fairy Tales by Women Writers, for which she won the LIDL Year Abroad Project Prize 2019–20.

Sophie Caws is a final year student of French and German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. After taking German as a beginner’s language, she now studies modern German literature with Dr Lloyd, with a particular interest in Freudian psychology and the literature of the former GDR. She spent 9 months living in Leipzig, Germany, where she worked as an English Language Assistant with the British Council and a teacher of English as a Second Language. She was also involved in English-language community theatre with English Theatre Leipzig, with the aim of promoting intercultural linguistic and artistic exchange within the Leipzig community and beyond.

Sam Thompson is a fourth-year PhD student at King’s College London, where he is completing a thesis on Classical Reception in German-language exile literature, 1933-45. Sam previously studied Classics and German at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he also received an MSt in German (with a dissertation on Austrian memory literature). His recent research interests include the work of Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Anna Seghers, and Interbellum literature more broadly.

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TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

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Department: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)

Date Added: 01/03/2021

Duration: 01:22:45

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Lines by Alice Oswald

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Poetry with Alice Oswald

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It's fifty years since the publication of From the Life and Songs of the Crow (by Ted Hughes). This is a lecture about lines and other sound barriers and how Crow flies straight through them.

Alice Oswald is the current Professor of Poetry at the Faculty of English. She took up her post in September 2019.

Alice Oswald’s first two lectures as Professor of Poetry are available online: ‘The Art of Erosion’ and ‘An Interview with Water‘

Professor Ros Ballaster, Chair of the English Faculty Board at Oxford, said: ‘Poetry plays an important role in our universities and society. It is a place for reflection in language and about language.

‘The election of Alice Oswald sees the tenure of our first female Professor of Poetry. To adopt the words in her own poetry, it is the fulfilment of long balancing “the weight of hope against the light of patience”. Hers is a remarkable, resonant talent and we count ourselves privileged to host her for four years.

A new Oxford Professor of Poetry is elected every four years, and their responsibilities include giving a public lecture each term, as well as an oration at the University’s honorary degree ceremony every other year.

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Poetry with Alice Oswald

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Department: Faculty of English Language and Literature

Date Added: 01/03/2021

Duration: 01:05:10

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How to build a successful value-driven membership model

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Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

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In this episode of our 'Future of Journalism' podcast, we look at the values that drive a thriving membership model at an Argentinean news site

We talk to one of Latin America's most senior journalists Chani Guyot whose news website RED/ACCIÓN runs a successful membership model that goes beyond being a revenue stream. We look at how the news outlet engages with members as part of its journalistic mission, and how listening closely to the needs of their audience is a step towards building trust and empathy and bridging polarisation in society.
Find a full transcript and more information on our website: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review?review_types=14&filtered=Filter

Guest: Chani Guyot is the CEO and Publisher of Argentinean news site RED/ACCIÓN. He is former Editor-in-Chief of La Nación, one of the country's biggest newspapers.
Host: Federica Cherubini is the Head of Leadership Programmes at the Reuters Institute.

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Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

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Department: Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR)

Date Added: 26/02/2021

Duration: 00:26:27

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The Recognition of a Right to be Rescued at Sea

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Public International Law Part III

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Professor Seline Trevisanut, Utrecht University, gives a talk for the Public International Law discussion group series.

On 27 January 2021, the UN Human Rights Committee ascertained the responsibility of Italy for failing to protect the right to life of more than 200 migrants who were on board a vessel that sank in the Mediterranean Sea in 2013. The HR Committee adopted a clear functional approach to jurisdiction based on the ‘special relationship of dependency’ between the individuals on a vessel in distress and the SAR state(s). This decision was also met with criticism by some members of the HR Committee who clearly dissented with this functional approach and considered that the adopted functional approach ‘might disrupt the legal order which the SOLAS and the SAR Conventions attempted to introduce.’

The present talk will dissect the reasoning of the HR Committee in light of the SOLAS and SAR Conventions in order to highlight the law of the sea underpinnings of a functional approach to jurisdiction. It will also emphasize how the recognition of a right to be rescued at sea strengthens the legal order created by the SOLAS and SAR Conventions.

Seline Trevisanut (PhD, University of Milan; MA, Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne) is Professor of International Law and Sustainability at Utrecht University since 2018. Before joining Utrecht in 2012 as Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow, she taught and conducted research in various institutions, including Columbia University, the European University Institute, and UC Berkeley. Seline is a member of the Scientific Council of the Institut du droit économique de la mer and several editorial boards. Her publications include a monograph on Irregular migration by sea in international and EU law (Jovene 2012, in Italian), and edited volumes, inter alia, on Migration in the Mediterranean: Mechanism of International Cooperation (CUP 2015) and Regime Interaction in Ocean Governance: Problems, theories and methods (Brill 2020).

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Public International Law Part III

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Department: Faculty of Law

Date Added: 26/02/2021

Duration: 00:45:10

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Veridical Data Science for biomedical discovery: detecting epistatic interactions with epiTree

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Department of Statistics

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Bin Yu, Chancellor's Professor, Departments of Statistics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, UC Berkeley, gives a seminar for the Department of Statistics.

'A.I. is like nuclear energy - both promising and dangerous' - Bill Gates, 2019.
Data Science is a pillar of A.I. and has driven most of recent cutting-edge discoveries in biomedical research. In practice, Data Science has a life cycle (DSLC) that includes problem formulation, data collection, data cleaning, modeling, result interpretation and the drawing of conclusions. Human judgement calls are ubiquitous at every step of this process, e.g., in choosing data cleaning methods, predictive algorithms and data perturbations. Such judgment calls are often responsible for the "dangers" of A.I. To maximally mitigate these dangers, we developed a framework based on three core principles: Predictability, Computability and Stability (PCS). Through a workflow and documentation (in R Markdown or Jupyter Notebook) that allows one to manage the whole DSLC, the PCS framework unifies, streamlines and expands on the best practices of machine learning and statistics - bringing us a step forward towards veridical Data Science.
In this lecture, we will illustrate the PCS framework through the epiTree; a pipeline to discover epistasis interactions from genomics data. epiTree addresses issues of scaling of penetrance through decision trees, significance calling through PCS p-values, and combinatorial search over interactions through iterative random forests (which is a special case of PCS). Using UK Biobank data, we validate the epiTree pipeline through an application to the red-hair phenotype, where several genes are known to display epistatic interactions.

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Department of Statistics

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Bin Yu

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statistics

computing

artificial intelligence

Department: Department of Statistics

Date Added: 26/02/2021

Duration: 01:01:58

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The Place of Religion After the Uprisings

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Middle East Centre

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Dr. Shadi Hamid (Brookings Institution; contributing writer, The Atlantic) and Professor Nadia Oweidat (Kansas State University) give a talk for the Middle East Centre Friday seminar series. Chaired by Dr Usaama al-Azami (St Antony's College).

It is often noted that the Arab uprisings of 2011 were not started by Islamists, but that these groups were often their initial beneficiaries given their long-standing grassroots presence and their ability to effectively organise for elections. Yet ten years on from the initial openings, the political landscape has changed almost beyond recognition, with Islamists decidedly on the backfoot alongside the emergence of new secular voices that would like to see religious politics consigned to the history books.
Dr. Shadi Hamid (Brookings Institution; contributing writer, The Atlantic)
Professor Nadia Oweidat (Kansas State University)
Chair:
Dr Usaama al-Azami (St Antony's College)
Series: Middle East Centre Friday Seminar Series
It is often noted that the Arab uprisings of 2011 were not started by Islamists, but that these groups were often their initial beneficiaries given their long-standing grassroots presence and their ability to effectively organise for elections. Yet ten years on from the initial openings, the political landscape has changed almost beyond recognition, with Islamists decidedly on the backfoot alongside the emergence of new secular voices that would like to see religious politics consigned to the history books.

Speaker biographies:

Dr Shadi Hamid, senior fellow, Brookings Institution; contributing writer, The Atlantic

Dr. Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and founding editor of Wisdom of Crowds. He is the author of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize for best book on foreign affairs, and co-editor of Rethinking Political Islam. His first book Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East was named a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2014. In 2019, Hamid was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine. He received his B.S. and M.A. from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and his DPhil in politics from Oxford University.

Dr. Nadia Oweidat, as Assistant Professor at Kansas State University and Senior Middle East Fellow at New America Foundation

My research focuses on the history, culture, and politics of the modern Middle East and North Africa region as well as the intellectual history of Islamic thought.

My doctoral research examined obstacles to reforming Islamic thought in the second half of the twentieth century. While I include the arguments of various intellectuals and thinkers, my case study was the Egyptian scholar, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943-2010).

My current book project examines individuals who are attempting to challenge extremist thought and Islamic theology through social media. The rise of the internet and social media has made available information and texts, including historical texts not previously readily available . My book, in detailing these changes through case studies, narratives, and quantitative research, argues that the impact of these technological developments is analogous to that of the Reformation and the printing press in Europe.

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People

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Department: Middle East Centre

Date Added: 26/02/2021

Duration: 01:02:22

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Platforming Artists Podcasts: Simran Uppal

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TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

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Shivaike Shah hosts a podcast series with the artists and academics on the team in order to create a dialogue with potential audiences. The podcasts discuss the collaborations on Medea and explores the work of each guest beyond the ‘Medea’ project.

Supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme and the Arts Council England