Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
Examples of disease as shown in artworks will be examined, from the medical and surgical point of view as well as the historical and artistic ones, particularly visual loss as portrayed by artists from pre-historic times.
In this lecture, I look at what people from the late eighteenth century to the present thought they knew about toes, arches, heels, and ankles. What makes a beautiful foot? How have ideas of foot-beauty changed over time?
'When well-appareled April on the heel / Of limping winter treads'. A calendar month cannot dress, nor can a season walk. This lecture will explore the magic of personification in Shakespeare's poetry.
Organised disinformation about the Covid-19 crisis has degraded public understanding of the crisis and threatened the reputation of credible vaccines and health policy. This talk looks at the broad structures and recent history of computational propaganda - the use of algorithms, automation and human curation to distribute misleading information over social media. Dr Howard reviews the latest evidence about social media use during our current health crisis, and reports on the very latest themes in Russian information operations about its invasion of Ukraine. He discusses the opportunities for using social media to deepen democracy and 'build back better'.
The era of ‘megacities’ is already with us, and the pace of development is escalating. But what are the challenges of managing their living environments to ensure that they are fed, have water to drink, clean air to breathe, and can dispose of their waste? Is it a utopian or dystopian urban fut
Narrative, the way a tale is told, is less straightforward than we might suppose. Austen handled irony brilliantly and systematically exploited new ways of narrating, including free indirect discourse. This lecture explores why Austen's way of narrating are so compelling.