As part of a visiting fellowship at Delhi University in the mid 1990’s the speaker set up seminars relating to nuclear power, one of which was attended by a Russian diplomat who offered payment in return for information about Britain’s nuclear waste disposal facilities.  On hearing about this unusual request MI6 informed the speaker that the Russian was a member of the former KGB (the SVR), and asked him to pass on such technical information as they gave him.  This continued for almost four years. These events took place shortly after Boris Yeltsin had disbanded the KGB, replacing it with the Sluzhba Vnesney Razvedki (Foreign Intelligence Service).  The priorities of this new agency were therefore of considerable interest to western intelligence.

Several encounters of volcanic ash (VA) with aircrafts over the last 30 years have proven that ingestion of these particulates can cause serious damage to jet engines, ranging from blockage of cooling channel to complete inhibition of air passage, becoming a real threat to the aviation safety. During the volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in 2010 in Iceland, air traffic was severely affected in Europe and globally for several days, causing millions of pounds worth of losses. This event forced aircraft manufacturers to work on the development of regulations on how to proceed when a volcanic eruption occurs and specify limits on how much ash is considered acceptable for a jet engine to ingest without damage. However, all these potential damaging events are strongly related to the actual amount of particulate adhering. In this talk, Dr Taltavull will explore the importance of understanding the likelihood of a certain VA adhering into a substrate by taking into consideration both ash properties and environmental conditions.

Elizabeth Garnsey is Emeritus Reader in Innovation Studies. This talk offers an introduction to technology enterprise in and around Cambridge for those unfamiliar with the Cambridge tech scene. We will examine ways in which scientific knowledge is translated into practice, with a focus on technology-based spin-out companies originating in the university. We will identify reasons why Cambridge scientists and engineers have chosen to start companies. In examining the types of business they have set up, we will see how business models in different sectors are a response to the distinctive challenges faced.   Has Cambridge become a victim of success? The dilemmas created by the growth of local tech industry will be a focus for discussion.

The talk will compare Japanese and English illustrations in various editions of Gulliver’s Travels published in Japan between 1880 and the early 1920s. I am interested in how the Western illustrations in the English editions influenced Japanese illustrators and also the reverse process, as Japanese arts and culture in turn influenced British illustrators’ work. In some cases the Japanese illustrators’ work is derivative and in others highly original. I will look at illustrations used in several different translations of Gulliver’s Travels in the late nineteenth century as well as two published in the 1920s. Mikiko Chimori is Professor of Comparative Literature Teikyo University, Tokyo and Life Member, Clare Hall. She gave this talk on 24 March 2015

Global recessions and structural economic shifts are motivating government and business leaders worldwide to increasingly look to “their” universities to stimulate regional development and to contribute to national competitiveness. The challenge is clear and the question is pressing: How will universities respond? The speaker will discuss case narratives of ten universities from Norway, Finland, Sweden, UK, and the U.S. that have overcome significant challenges to develop programs and activities to commercialize scientific research, launch entrepreneurial degree programs, establish industry partnerships, and build entrepreneurial cultures and ecosystems. The universities are quite diverse: large and small; teaching and research focused; internationally recognized and relatively new; located in major cities and in emerging regions. Each case narrative describes challenges overcome, actions taken, and resulting accomplishments. The talk will be of interest to policymakers and university administrators as well as researchers and students interested in how different programs and activities can promote university entrepreneurship while contributing to economic growth in developed and developing economies.

In a series of Riddles written in about the year 1000, animals, plants, and even ore from the earth complain about being torn from their homes and deprived of life so as to become things useful to humans – a book, a bow, an inkwell. These Riddling voices seem to answer back to Beowulf and similar heroes, who indiscriminately slaughtered animals and monsters alike with regard only for human priorities. We tend to think that early cultural formations gave humans more access and empathy for natural environments and that modern alienation from nature emerged as a result of the Industrial Revolution. However, the models articulated in Beowulf and the Riddles suggest that utilitarian ideas about nature existed 1000 years ago alongside a recognition that humans did not possess the only voices worth listening to. This talk took place in Clare Hall on 2 June 2015.

Yes: hard to believe as it may be, sexual education was taught in the Middle Ages throughout Western Europe. From the twelfth century on, a number of erotodidactic texts were written for the youth, following the steps of Ovidâs Ars Amandi. These works â whether by Ovid, or its quite different medieval sequels â were part of the syllabus for the elementary study of Latin grammar, apparently as a strong incentive for its advancement. They were given to very young schoolboys to prepare them for sex in puberty. No similar books are registered for girls. The purpose of these medieval books was to teach how to seduce maidens in a gentlemanly manner. Erotodidactic texts are related to courtesy texts. The medieval idea of sexual education was, of course, quite different from the contemporary one. No advice on contraception was given. Instead, a great deal of attention was paid to how a boy should verbally and physically prepare a girl for sex. Weâll see a panorama of these medieval texts, written in Latin as well as in the vernacular, and will consider particularly the detailed advice given in a Catalan fourteenth-century amplification of one of these handbooks: the Facetus. This talk took place on 19 May 2015

The recently completed Freedom Park is a national monument consisting of various elements, such as a memorial garden, a sanctuary, a wall of names, a sacred space and a museum. It provides a profound representation of South Africa’s troubled past, evoking memories of forgotten names and long suppressed South African identities. It attempts to establish parameters for ‘new’ cultural memories in a new South Africa. It provides a powerful contrast to the selective and violent views of South African history represented by many public monuments in South Africa, and the Park shapes meanings, values and identities appropriate to a struggling multi-cultural society. In the museum, religious and land motifs dominate the exposition of these cultural and collective memories. In the presentation, the ‘African land’ receives considerable symbolic significance. The evocations of ‘sacred land’ as a basis for identity should be seen against South African history where the identity of South Africans was over determined by religion. Racialised memory sets the context for almost every commemoration in South Africa, but the role of religion in these memories requires serious critical analysis. Discussion of the Park’s visual experience raises the question whether, contrary to intention, unavoidable selection and/or concentration on topics and exhibits do not give rise to further problematic versions of the past. This talk was presented by Pieter Botha on 12 May 2015.

Greek myths have always been powerful resources for thinking and feeling: they are ‘good to think with’. We shall illustrate this with the example of Polyphemus, the best known of the one-eyed, anthropophagous, pastoral giants known as the Cyclopes.   In the Odyssey Polyphemus is outwitted and blinded by Odysseus; in later Greco-Roman narratives he is the naive suitor of an unresponsive sea-nymph. Already in antiquity, myths about the Cyclopes raised issues relating to monstrosity, vision, and cannibalism. Cyclopean society was in part ‘ideal’, in part a negation of the values of culture. Since antiquity, the Cyclopes have been a continuing cultural presence, in grottoes, operas and films; in Hugo, Joyce and Walcott; in Moreau, Redon and Paolozzi. A modern tendency has been to focus exclusively on the image of the eye. But Cyclopean tradition is far richer than that.   Our talk will suggest some of the pathways and multiple meanings in that tradition. Mercedes Aguirre, Universidad Complutense, Madrid; and Richard Buxton, University of Bristol gave this talk on 28 April 2015.

How should humans define themselves in relation to other animals? This familiar question has recently attracted new attention in several disciplines, with some radical results. Jacques Derrida recreates a scene in which he stands naked before the gaze of a cat, experiencing both its ‘intolerable proximity’ and the ‘absolute alterity’ of its point of view. Animals, he argues, have been turned into a ‘theorem’, seen but not seeing. To be confronted by their gaze is to face up to ‘the abyssal limits of the human’. The talk will explore ways in which disciplines from ethology and cognitive neuroscience to biopolitics and the philosophy of mind are unsettling definitions of human subjectivity which, since the Enlightenment, have excluded other animals. The effect of this work has been the increasing erosion of the distinctions humans have awarded themselves (speech, reason, having a relation to death, etc.).  Examples from literature (EmilyDickinson, Kafka, J.M. Coetzee) will be included to illustrate the tensions and dislocations produced by the encroachment of other animals, with their uncanny proximity and alterity, upon the human domain. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas
 is Emeritus Professor, English Literature and Culture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and gave this talk for the Clare Hall Colloquium on 10 March 2015

I shall begin with the most obvious area of rapid change - vocabulary, looking at claims made for Shakespeare's vocabulary, the development of dictionaries, the diversification of English overseas and what's happening in England today.  Then we'll consider a few of the big grammatical changes which were already taking place in the 16th century, speculating on the reasons for some of these changes before moving on to note changes currently in progress, some of which appear to be influenced by current social attitudes. Since I'm particularly interested in sound change, I shall give a slightly more extensive overview of some major changes during the last 500 years before drawing attention to a few of the remarkable changes which are happening now. Gillian Brown, Professor of English Language & Director of the Research Centre in English & Applied Linguistics, 1988-2004, gave this talk on 24 February 2015.