For the Love of Learning since 1597

Gresham provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on the Gresham website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come. 

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    Monogamy

    Monogamy is a hotly contested practice. In many cis-gender marriages, engaging in sexual intercourse with a non-spouse is regarded as a serious betrayal. But during some periods in history, it was not only accepted but expected. 'Philanderers' are now portrayed as suffering from 'sex addiction'. What do these shifts reveal about gender and sexual relations? Has the proliferation of sexualities and genders, together with rapidly changing sexual mores, dealt a death blow to monogamy? Or is it stronger than ever?

    abstract image - two exotic flowers with stamens touching

    Pornography

    Pornography reflects as well as creates sexual norms and practices. The period from the 1960s to the mid-1980s has been called the 'Golden Age of Porn'. An unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover was openly published in the UK and Linda Lovelace’s pornographic film Deep Throat (1972) went mainstream. Vigorous debates about morality, consent, and feminism erupted. The “porn wars” continue in popular culture and academic debates today. How has mainstream pornography changed? What is the role of technology and social media?

    Perversion

    What is a perversion? This talk starts by exploring psychiatric and sexological debates about perverted sexual desires from the late nineteenth century textbooks to diagnostic manuals in the twenty-first century. It looks at the role of law, morality, and medicine. Who has the power to decide what sexual acts are 'normal' or 'abnormal'? By what mechanisms do sexual practices move from one category to the other? How have people labelled 'perverse' effectively challenged their status in society?

    Sex Work

    In the late nineteenth century, highly contentious debates about prostitution were central to broader questions about women’s status within society, including their rights to property, entitlement to suffrage, and claims over their own bodies. Political scandals such as those over the 1860s Contagious Diseases Acts (which criminalized sex workers, not their customers) and the 1885 Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (which was the first expose of child prostitution in the UK) not only reveal attitudes towards the commercialization of the body but have left a legacy that we live with today.

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    Did Sir Walter Scott Invent Scotland?

    This lecture will explain why Scott’s romanticised representations of Scotland were such a hit, and how his enduring legacy has helped or hindered Scotland as it seeks to define its place in Britain today.

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