Medieval History, Hilary 2025, Week 6: Economic and cultural connections within Mediterranean ecosystems

24th February 2025, 5:00 pm

Speaker: Alexandra Sapoznik (KCL)

Location: Wharton Room, All Souls

 

The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: mailto:medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk

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Medieval History, Hilary 2025, Week 5: Re- and mis-gendering St Marina*us in high medieval Italy

17th February 2025, 5:00 pm

Speaker: Michael Eber (Oxford/Cologne)

Location: Wharton Room, All Souls

The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: mailto:medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk

 

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Medieval History, Hilary 2025, Week 4: Visualising the Lateran Patriarchium: Recent research by the Rome Transformed Project

10th February 2025, 5:00 pm

Speaker: Ian Haynes (All Souls)

Location: Wharton Room, All Souls

 

The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: mailto:medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk

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Medieval History, Hilary 2025, Week 3: Twelve migrant women and the history of early medieval Europe

3rd February 2025, 5:00 pm

Speaker: Alice Rio (KCL)

Location: Wharton Room, All Souls College

The Teams session can be accessed by logging in to Teams with your ox.ac.uk account and joining the group “Medieval History Research Seminar” (team code rmppucs). If you have any difficulties please email: mailto:medhistsem@history.ox.ac.uk

 

 

 

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French Graduate Seminars, Hilary 2025

Events in this series

French Graduate Seminars, Hilary 2025, Seminar 3

25th February 2025, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Holly Rowe (Lincoln) - Baron d’Holbach and the essai form as political satire

Abstract
Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach (1723-1789) was a German-born, French-naturalised philosopher, salon host, and prolific writer of materialist, political, and antitheological treatises. The majority of his works were published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the limits of his vast literary output therefore remain indistinct.

D’Holbach is now recognised as the author of five facéties philosophiques, or short, comic anti-religious and polemical writings. These include the sardonic Essai sur l’art de ramper, à l’usage des courtisans (1790), which caricatures the figure of the courtier and satirises the moral and physical qualities required to advance at court. The Essai appeared posthumously in the Correspondance littéraire, a confidential manuscript newsletter circulated among secret subscribers who included European heads of state. However, there is no record of whether d’Holbach saw the Essai as a finished piece of writing or whether it was prepared – or even intended – for publication during his lifetime.

D'Holbach’s Essai criticises a self-serving system of court politics that lacks any regulatory influence on the exercise of monarchical power. Yet it was circulating among European royal courts at a divisive moment in French revolutionary politics. This paper considers the apparent disconnect between d’Holbach’s envisaged audience and the Essai’s actual readers. It examines what this suggests about the way the Essai was understood and organised for publication by d'Holbach’s editors, and considers how this can inform our understanding of the essai’s function as a form of writing in eighteenth-century France.

Biography
Holly Rowe is a second-year DPhil candidate in French at Lincoln College, Oxford. Her research explores the ways in which the essai as a category of writing was defined, used, and understood by Enlightenment thinkers in eighteenth-century France. Holly holds a BA in Modern Languages and History from Durham University and worked in the charity sector for several years before completing an MSt in Modern Languages (European Enlightenment) at Oxford in 2023. Her DPhil is co-funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP, the Lincoln College Kingsgate Scholarship, and the Clarendon Fund.

 

 

Sasho Pshenko (Magdalen) - ‘Moving Constellations: Gilles Deleuze's Conceptual Transition’

Abstract
At the start of the 1970s, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze underwent a transition, under the influence of the social theorist and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. He substituted a more classical approach to writing with a more experimental one; he substituted a philosophy which seeks to combine immanence and transcendence with a purely immanent theory.

This transition, perhaps, is most clearly to be seen in the way in which Deleuze reshuffled a constellation of several conceptual components. At first, these components were organised into two distinct groups, two constellations: on the one hand, the binary pairing Sadistic institution-Masochistic contract, and on the other hand, the concept of the differenciator. After the transition, these two constellations were dissolved and regrouped into two new concepts: on the one hand, the concept of the signifying State, and on the other hand the concept of desire.

The new concept of the signifying State was comprised of several elements which previously were associated with the Sadistic institution, as well as others which were associated with the differenciator. The remaining elements of the differenciator went on to form the other new concept, that of desire. In my presentation, I aim to demonstrate, in detail, the particular ways in which this deconstruction and reconstruction of concepts occurred. Through this, I aim to show how exactly this transition signified the advent of a new direction in Deleuze's thought and why it was necessary to take place.

Biography
Sasho Pshenko is a 28-year-old DPhil researcher, currently in the second year of his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford. Pshenko was born in Skopje, North Macedonia, where he completed his undergraduate education in General and Comparative Literature. In 2020 he obtained his master's degree in Film Aesthetics from the University of Oxford. Since then, Pshenko has published academic articles, and has held seminars and tutorials at the University of Oxford. His interests range across comparative literature, film studies and continental philosophy. He is currently working on his doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

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French Graduate Seminars, Hilary 2025, Seminar 2

11th February 2025, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Location: Hovenden Room, All Souls

Speakers: Nicolas Duriau (Wolfson) and Lou Khalfaoui (Leeds)

 

Nicolas Duriau (Wolfson) - ‘(Un)Voicing Male Prostitution during the First Empire and the Bourbon Restoration: “Riéniste[s]”, “parasite[s]" and “nulliste[s]” characters in Cuisin’s work’

Abstract
According to the conclusions of my doctoral dissertation, which dealt with long-19th-century French literature (1783-1922), there is a significant decline in the number of novels depicting male prostitution from 1800 to 1830. It seems that the then ‘prostitué’ appeared under the guise of less conspicuous figures, such as the ‘greluchon’, the ‘sigisbée’, or the ‘parvenu’ – who would implicitly engage in sexual activity with women, either for money, or for social prestige – to evade the First Empire’s and the Bourbon Restoration’s censorship. By considering little-known novels by J. P. R. Cuisin, a now forgotten writer of the early 19th century, I intend to better understand how the representations of male prostitution evolved from the libertine fiction of the late 18th century to the realist novel of the 1830s. As Andrew Counter (The Amorous Restoration. Love, Sex, and Politics in Early-Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford University Press, 2016) and Alain Viala (La Galanterie. Une mythologie française, Seuil, 2019) suggest, extramarital and commercial sex remained ubiquitous in the 1800-1830 literary production, but aligned with a poetics of ‘silence’, or ‘refoulement’. My aim is to demonstrate that the ‘Riéniste[s]’, ‘parasite[s] et ‘nulliste[s]’ who merge into Cuisin’s novels not only embodied the Empire/Restoration style ‘prostitué’, but also allegorised an ideological context in which ‘sexual deviances’ appear through text blanks, or figures of avoidance.

Biography
A former research fellow of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS), Nicolas Duriau is now a Postdoctoral Researcher in Languages, Literatures and Translation Studies (specialised in French Literature and Romance Languages) at the University of Oxford/Université libre de Bruxelles. Following on from his PhD thesis, which focused on literary representations of male prostitutions from 1783 to 1922, he is particularly interested in long-19th-century literatures of French expression, studied in light of Gender, Queer and Sex Work History.

 

Lou Khalfaoui (Leeds) - ‘Franco-Algerian relations: hopes for “reconciliation” in the face of memories of colonialism in official discourses (1999-2005)’

Abstract
In this paper, I aim to explore a period of hope for reconciliation between France and Algerian, which have long been studies as an example of dissonant colonial memories plaguing modern state and cultural relations. In the aftermath of the Algerian civil War and Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s ascension to power in April 1999, French and Algerian officials made clear attempts to redefine bilateral relations through greater cooperation. However, as is well established, relations took a turn for the worse in 2005 when France passed the controversial Repatriates’ law, which included an article about French colonialism’s “positive legacy”. I argue that not only did the incident involving local, national and transnational actors precipitate a significant cool down in diplomatic relations, it fundamentally changed the discursive construction of colonial violence in both French and Algerian official narratives. From 2005, impassioned engagement with colonial violence featured growinly in official Algerian discourse, especially around the Massacres of Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata, whose anniversary became the National Memory Day in 2020. This both had concrete implications for whom and how episodes of colonial violence were remembered, given growing state control over commemorations, as well as their broader national and international audiencing. On the French side, colonial violence in Algeria was was most frankly alluded to in the direct aftermath of the law with Hubert Colin de Verdière, the French ambassador, describing the repression of May 8th, 1945 as an “inexcusable tragedy”, just as the event was becoming the embodiment of colonial violence in Algerian discourse. I hope to show how discourses about the past have an impact on the viability of memory policies, which profess to help appease and reconcile.

Biography
After graduating from the University of Cambridge, Lou went on to complete a master's program at the University College London (UCL). Before starting a PhD working across the School of History and the School of Languages at the University of Leeds in 2022, she was a research assistant at the Institute of Race Relations, the London-based antiracist think tank. Her current research focuses on the construction of colonial violence in official discourses of the French and Algerian state. Lou analyses speeches and public statements of state actors to highlight the maintenance and disruption of particular

framings, as they serve to contextualise contemporary memory policies seeking ‘reconciliation’. Lou also works with civil society actors, to illustrate the reception of official discourses and their contestation.

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French Graduate Seminars, Hilary 2025, Seminar 1

28th January 2025, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Location: Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Speakers: Jodie Miller (UCLA) and Adam Husain (Christ Church)

 

Jodie Miller (UCLA) - ‘A Fox and a Jackal at Court: The Trickster’s Trial in the Roman de Renart and Kalila and Dimna’

Abstract

The Old French literary cycle, the Roman de Renart, and the Kalila and Dimna fables of the Arabic and Persian literary traditions both tell the tale of a small canine-like trickster who is put on trial for the crime of trickery at the lion king’s court. The Roman de Renart is composed between the late-twelfth century and the mid-thirteenth, whereas Kalila and Dimna stems back to antiquity with the Panchatantra (c. 200 BCE). Although no direct contact is attested between these traditions until at least a century after the composition of the first Renardian branches, both feature a trickster’s trial scene with striking similarities. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the fox and jackal’s trials to better understand the convergences between the Roman de Renart and the Kalila and Dimna fables. In what ways do these trial scenes stem from a global circulation of similar ideals dealing with justice and ethics? 

The analysis of this paper focuses on the following aspects of the trial scene: the depiction of the crime of trickery, the juridical structure of the trials, and the trials’ verdicts. Both texts portray trickery through the subversion of ethical ideals leading to social chaos. Renart is gluttonous and lustful, unable to stop himself from tricking to find a meal or from satisfying himself sexually. Dimna, on the other hand, is greedy and prideful in search for political prestige. Both Renart and Dimna advocate for themselves at trial and manipulate a weak king, albeit within different juridical structures. Kalila and Dimna features a disputational defense-and-response structure, whereas Renart’s trial is based on customary law and the medieval “ordeal.” Various forms of evidence are brought forth during the investigation of their crimes (i.e., physiognomic proof and testimony), however only Dimna is found guilty and punished. Renart escapes at the end of his trial. 

Biography

Jodie Miller is a Ph.D. Candidate in French at the University of California-Los Angeles. Her research focuses on medieval French literature, and her dissertation project looks at its broader relationship to other regions of the globe during the medieval period. Her dissertation explores the philosophical, moral, and juridical underpinnings of the portrayal of trickery in the Roman de Renart and its connections to the Kalila and Dimna fables of the Arabic and Persian literary traditions. Her presentation today considers trickery in its juridical context through a comparison of the trial scenes of Renart, the fox, and Dimna, the jackal. 

Adam Husain (Christ Church) -  Le Temps retrouvé : An Apology for Lost Time?

Abstract

À la recherche du temps perdu finishes with a very long rant. The narrator, buoyed up by a fresh injection of epiphany, rattles off a whole new philosophy, which is centred around the odd claim that, as Empson once put it: “sometimes when you are living in one place you are reminded of living in another place, and [thus] you are outside time”. Is there any way of making such an idea believable or interesting? Should we instead treat the narrator as “mad”?  In this talk, I outline a new way of reading the closing pages of the Recherche as the culmination of a contradiction developed throughout the novel, and a true apology for lost time.   

Biography

Adam Husain is a stipendiary lecturer and doctoral student at Oxford. He researches Proust and contemporary French thought. His article “Unpruned: Re-reading Proust’s translations of Ruskin” is forthcoming in MLN 

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The UK Public Sector productivity collapse: How to manage public services better.

21st February 2025, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm

Speaker: Sir John Redwood

Location: The Old Library

 

All welcome to attend in-person or via Zoom.

Meeting ID: 968 9416 0680

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Getting faster growth in the UK by Sir John Redwood

24th January 2025, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm

Speaker: Sir John Redwood

Location: The Old Library

The lecture will welcome the government policy aim for the UK to be the fastest growing economy of the G7 and work from the target to grow living standards. It will look at the current mixture of business taxes, subsidies and proposed public capital investment and suggest changes. It will examine a number of sectors to show how changes to regulation, licences, specific charges and taxes and to government procurement could make a difference. It will consider why the USA has had faster growth than the EU this century so far, and will compare President Trump's proposals with EU and UK approaches to growth. 

 

See below for the details of the Zoom meeting:

Topic: Getting faster growth in the UK by Sir John Redwood
Time: Jan 24, 2025 11:00 
https://zoom.us/j/92191517246
Meeting ID: 921 9151 7246

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