Reconstructing locomotion in the human lineage: integrating new morphological and biomechanical approaches
Seminar
At some point in our evolutionary history, we transitioned from being an ape-like arboreal species to becoming a committed terrestrial biped. However, the mode and timing of this change is not well understood, and it is becoming increasingly evident that fossil human ancestors were highly varied in…
Shameful Material: HIV/AIDS and Shame in North American Gay Short Fiction from the 1980s to 1990s
Lecture/seminar
North American gay short fiction from the 1980s to 1990s offers insight into the underexamined ways that shame is relieved and communicated relationally, within sexual practices, heterosocial friendships, and queer friend groups and literary networks. Authors such as David Leavitt, Stephen Greco,…
“Fighting not sinking”: How emotions impact Pacific diplomacy, geopolitics and climate security
Lecture/seminar
Emotions impact Pacific diplomacy, causing ripples and rifts in regional geopolitics and climate security. Islands, and atolls in particular, are often constructed by Western science as locations of vulnerability. Sinking islands have become a fatalistic visage that looms over Pacific islands in…
Special Event: 'The corporeal archive of Cold War infrastructure: Affect, embodiment, and Beijing's civil defence shelters'
Seminar
Cold War heritage scholarship has long privileged material remains—bunkers, silos, ruined infrastructures—while overlooking the living bodies through which such landscapes were produced and remembered. This lecture examines Beijing's Mao-era civil defence shelters, built through mass urban…
'Ut pictura poesis': Text, Image, and Intermediality in Roman Receptions of the Trojan War
Seminar
Roman practices of reading were deeply embedded within a broader culture of viewing. While scholarship has long recognised the close relationship between Roman visual and literary cultures, textual and visual representations of myth are still frequently studied in isolation. This seminar presents…
Credit as care and financial frontier. An ethnography of predatory inclusion under Brazil’s ‘fintech revolution’
Lecture/seminar
In Brazil, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a rise in poverty and accelerated the already ignited ‘fintech revolution,’ pushing a policy agenda of financial inclusion that has been transforming Brazilian society for more than a decade. In the aftermath of the pandemic, indebtedness was at a record…
Exploring Indigenous histories and cross-cultural collecting encounters in German art, archival and material culture collections: The Agnes S Schulz and Frobenius Expedition to Arnhem Land, Australia 1954-1995
Seminar
In June 1954, Agnes Susanne Schulz, a member of the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travelled to the Northern Territory, where, over a period of nearly two years, she recorded rock art, cultural knowledge and practices, and collected material culture of local Aboriginal peoples…