Slade Lecture 2026: Urban Change and Representation - Lecture 5

18th February 2026, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Brasilia: Planned Exclusion

Esther da Costa Meyer

5pm Wednesday 18 February

Auditorium, St John's College, University of Oxford

(Free Admission)

Inaugurated in 1960, the new capital of Brazil was designed by architects Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa. While the elegance of Niemeyer’s concrete shells elicited admiration, the workers who built Brasília were exiled in shantytowns far from the city.

Slade Lecture 2026: Urban Change and Representation - Lecture 4

11th February 2026, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Accra and Kumasi: Architecture and Decolonization

Esther da Costa Meyer

5pm Wednesday 11 February

Auditorium, St John's College, University of Oxford

(Free Admission)

After the election of Kwame Nkrumah as president of the Republic of Ghana in 1960, Ghanaian architects explored new building models that were both modern and culturally sensitive, alongside foreign architects attracted to the vibrant cosmopolitan environment.

Slade Lecture 2026: Urban Change and Representation - Lecture 3

4th February 2026, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Colonial Algiers: Architecture and Segregation

Esther da Costa Meyer

5pm Wednesday 4 February

Auditorium, St John's College, University of Oxford

(Free Admission)

A look at the architecture of Algiers in the 1950s when the French tried to counter the calls for independence by erecting housing projects, often by excellent architects. The Algerians reacted to these top-down initiatives, often using buildings against the grain.

Slade Lecture 2026: Urban Change and Representation - Lecture 2

28th January 2026, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Shanghai

Esther da Costa Meyer

5pm Wednesday 28 January

Auditorium, St John's College, University of Oxford

(Free Admission)

An overview of Shanghai during the 1920s and 30s, when Chinese architects responded forcefully with alternatives to the models of modern architecture promoted by the Western and Japanese occupying powers, a formidable but minuscule minority of the population.

Slade Lecture 2026: Urban Change and Representation - Lecture 1

21st January 2026, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Nineteenth-Century Paris: Memories and Counter-Memories

Esther da Costa Meyer

5pm Wednesday 21 January

Auditorium, St John's College, University of Oxford

(Free Admission)

The radical urban transformation of Paris under Napoleon III left a swath of destruction to make way for new boulevards and upscale buildings. Demolitions also uncovered archaeological ruins and other disquieting finds that challenged the city’s views of itself and of its history.

 

 

Head and shoulders shot of Shaw Worth

Shaw Worth

BA, MSt
Examination Fellow since 2025

My research concerns the courtly arts of England, France, and Burgundy in the period c. 1380–1500. Primarily, I work on poetry, and fifteenth-century developments in both the formal technique and transmission patterns of Anglophone and Francophone love-lyric: authors of particular interest include Charles d’Orléans, John Lydgate, Alain Chartier (and the querelle of the Belle dame sans mercy), Richard Roos, Michault Taillevent, Jacques Legrand, Christine de Pizan, and collected (pseudo-)Chauceriana. I am interested in shifting attitudes to artworks in this period, and reassessing the changes in procedures of representation they brought about, particularly the advent of naturalism and physiognomic likeness in the visual arts and literature. To do so, my research attempts to embrace a range of interaesthetic standpoints taken from, among others, bibliography and codicology, literary criticism and theory, rhetorical treatises and codifications, and art-historical method. More broadly, I am interested in the vernacular allegorical and lyrico-narrative literary traditions in England and France from the turn of the thirteenth century onwards; I am also preparing an edition of the Middle French apocalyptic treatise in Bodleian Library, MS Douce 134.

Head and shoulders photograph of Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa

Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa

Examination Fellow since 2025

My research examines the global intellectual history of “mystical India.” I reconstruct how India came to be identified with mysticism and spirituality between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries—at once to sustain the mandates of imperial power and to formulate alternative universalisms that reimagined the social and political order. More broadly, I am interested in the intellectual and cultural history of Enlightenment and empire, as studied through a series of exceptions, limit-cases, and denied possibilities that invite us to re-theorize our generalizations. Ongoing projects include the circulation of early modern Jesuit missionary writings to Enlightenment and colonial contexts, citizenship debates and personal status law in British and French India, and the political thought of twentieth-century Indian feminists. 

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