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.
How might the study of the first 1,500 years of London's port history (encapsulating profound changes ranging from location, infrastructure and technology to variations in river levels) help when making predictions for the future?
Sydney’s botanic garden, founded in the early nineteenth century, was expected to ship new plants 'home' to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from where they could be transplanted to other colonial gardens, to see if they could become valuable new crops to enrich the British Empire.
This lecture will begin with Bacon’s imagined garden, then consider the long-term promise of the experimental or scientific garden, which would eventually lead to today’s biotechnologies.
2019 marks 100 years since the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 when a woman was recognised as a ‘person’ in law. This groundbreaking Act enabled women to be awarded university degrees and to enter professions such as law and medicine from which they had been barred.
This lecture starts by looking at early-modern understandings of the nature of ‘animal’ and ‘human’ life, before turning to the rise of ‘rights of animals’.
2018 saw a seismic change in the willingness of women to speak out about sexual abuse. This lecture frankly confronts the anecdotal evidence and suggests ways in which we can learn from it.
Torture was officially outlawed in France in the 1780s and in Europe during the nineteenth century. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has returned as an instrument of state policy.
In this final lecture we will consider whether we can plot a more successful future than our recent history might suggest and what that implies for our economic and political institutions.
The experience of inter-mediation in the UK does not encourage the thought that long term finance can easily be located. Do we need a Development Bank?
We will carefully outline the categories of savings held by households and link that to the operation of financial intermediaries in providing loanable funds.