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EMBO Rep. 2023 Dec 15. doi: 10.1038/s44319-023-00008-2. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Mechano-immunity, the intersection between cellular or tissue mechanics and immune cell function, is emerging as an important factor in many inflammatory diseases. Mechano-sensing defines how cells detect mechanical changes in their environment. Mechano-response defines how cells adapt to such changes, e.g. form synapses, signal or migrate. Inflammasomes are intracellular immune sensors that detect changes in tissue and cell homoeostasis during infection or injury. We and others recently found that mechano-sensing of tissue topology (swollen tissue), topography (presence and distribution of foreign solid implant) or biomechanics (stiffness), alters inflammasome activity. Once activated, inflammasomes induce the secretion of inflammatory cytokines, but also change cellular mechanical properties, which influence how cells move, change their shape, and interact with other cells. When overactive, inflammasomes lead to chronic inflammation. This clearly places inflammasomes as important players in mechano-immunity. Here, we discuss a model whereby inflammasomes integrate pathogen- and tissue-injury signals, with changes in tissue mechanics, to shape the downstream inflammatory responses and allow cell and tissue mechano-adaptation. We will review the emerging evidence that supports this model.

PMID:38177903 | DOI:10.1038/s44319-023-00008-2

Worlds Turned Upside Down: Quiet Revolutions in Art

The argument of my lecture is that a series of revolutions, mostly in opposition to the dominance of the Western European tradition, have marked modern and contemporary art, as experienced here in Britain, but taking into account the wider European context. However, what is being turned upside down is not on the scale implied by this phrase when it was first used of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century. Instead this scatter or vein of revolutions has challenged the parameters associated with the older tradition in large and small ways. An instance of this is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 by African Carvings at the Chelsea Book Club in London (and echoed in 1923 by another exhibition of the same subject in the Brooklyn Museum, New York). At this time, you could find African carvings in the British Museum, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overcrowded cases, jumbled with objects from Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. But at the Chelsea Book Club exhibition the critic Roger Fry saw clearly the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling of three dimensions. Earlier, in 1910 and 1912, Fry had mounted two exhibitions of French Post-Impressionist paintings which revolutionised modern art in Britain. In 1919 in the Chelsea Book Club exhibition he discerned what seemed to him things greater than any other sculpture produced in this country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum, his review was afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influenced the exhibition of African art shown at Brooklyn in 1923, as it replaced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused attention on art not anthropology.

This revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library, as an art student, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this same book. The year before, Moore had himself started writing, for his own benefit, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ Soon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921, he embarked on an intensive study of world sculpture, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.

This lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. E.H. Gombrich provides one answer to this question in his The Story of Art (1950), with reference to the restlessness within Western culture in comparison with some Eastern cultures that have lasted almost unchanged for a thousand years. His own book has done much to promote the Western view of art, having now reached its 16th edition, been translated into 30 languages, and sold 8 million copies. When Gombrich tried in the twelfth edition to take the story of art up to the present day, he admitted some discomfort. Art veined with the revolutionary spirit had aligned itself more easily with progressive developments, with ‘primitivism’, modernism and modernity. Admittedly, modernism, modernity and even postcolonialism, with its reaction against Western Cultures, although moving towards globalisation, remain inextricably tied to the West, even during recent years when its socio-economic power has been challenged by global financial crises and troubled by the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this country admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art, more revolution is needed. More cross-cultural exchange, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library exhibition, Chinese and British; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hindu delight; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down.

• Speaker: Professor Frances Spalding
• Friday 23 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Worlds Turned Upside Down: Quiet Revolutions in Art

The argument of my lecture is that a series of revolutions, mostly in opposition to the dominance of the Western European tradition, have marked modern and contemporary art, as experienced here in Britain, but taking into account the wider European context. However, what is being turned upside down is not on the scale implied by this phrase when it was first used of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century. Instead this scatter or vein of revolutions has challenged the parameters associated with the older tradition in large and small ways. An instance of this is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 by African Carvings at the Chelsea Book Club in London (and echoed in 1923 by another exhibition of the same subject in the Brooklyn Museum, New York). At this time, you could find African carvings in the British Museum, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overcrowded cases, jumbled with objects from Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. But at the Chelsea Book Club exhibition the critic Roger Fry saw clearly the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling of three dimensions. Earlier, in 1910 and 1912, Fry had mounted two exhibitions of French Post-Impressionist paintings which revolutionised modern art in Britain. In 1919 in the Chelsea Book Club exhibition he discerned what seemed to him things greater than any other sculpture produced in this country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum, his review was afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influenced the exhibition of African art shown at Brooklyn in 1923, as it replaced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused attention on art not anthropology.

This revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library, as an art student, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this same book. The year before, Moore had himself started writing, for his own benefit, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ Soon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921, he embarked on an intensive study of world sculpture, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.

This lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. E.H. Gombrich provides one answer to this question in his The Story of Art (1950), with reference to the restlessness within Western culture in comparison with some Eastern cultures that have lasted almost unchanged for a thousand years. His own book has done much to promote the Western view of art, having now reached its 16th edition, been translated into 30 languages, and sold 8 million copies. When Gombrich tried in the twelfth edition to take the story of art up to the present day, he admitted some discomfort. Art veined with the revolutionary spirit had aligned itself more easily with progressive developments, with ‘primitivism’, modernism and modernity. Admittedly, modernism, modernity and even postcolonialism, with its reaction against Western Cultures, although moving towards globalisation, remain inextricably tied to the West, even during recent years when its socio-economic power has been challenged by global financial crises and troubled by the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this country admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art, more revolution is needed. More cross-cultural exchange, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library exhibition, Chinese and British; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hindu delight; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down.

• Speaker: Professor Frances Spalding
• Friday 23 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Res Sq. 2023 Dec 13:rs.3.rs-3627471. doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3627471/v1. Preprint.

ABSTRACT

It has been known for decades that the DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK) is only an active serine/threonine protein kinase when it is bound to a DNA double-stranded end; still, the molecular details of how this activation is achieved have remained elusive. The recent surge in structural information for DNA-PK complexes has provided valuable insights into the process of DNA end recognition by DNA-PK. A particularly intriguing feature of this kinase is a region of the protein that can transition from a seemingly structurally disordered state to a single alpha-helix that traverses down the DNA binding cradle. The DNA-PK bound DNA end of the DNA substrate engages with and appears to split around this helix which has been named the DNA End Blocking helix (DEB). Here a mutational approach is utilized to clarify the role of the DEB, and how DNA ends activate the enzyme. Our data suggest two distinct methods of kinase activation that is dependent on the DNA end chemistry. If the DNA end can split around the helix and stabilize the interaction between the DNA end and the DEB with a recently defined Helix-Hairpin-Helix (HHH) motif, the kinase forms an end-protection monomer that is active towards DNA-PK's many substrates. But if the DNA end cannot stably interact with the DEB [because of the DNA end structure, for instance hairpins, or because the DEB has been disrupted by mutation], the kinase is only partially activated, resulting in specific autophosphorylations of the DNA-PK monomer that allows nucleolytic end-processing. We posit that mutants that disrupt the capacity to stably generate the DEB/HHH DNA end-interaction are inefficient in generating the dimer complex that is requisite for NHEJ. In support of this idea, mutations that promote formation of this dimer partially rescue the severe cellular phenotypes associated with mutation of the DEB helix.

PMID:38168382 | PMC:PMC10760257 | DOI:10.21203/rs.3.rs-3627471/v1

Are Revolutions Justified?

Authors who think about the justifiability of revolution, are often divided between those who criticise it on grounds of institutional legalism and those who endorse it on grounds of idealist moralism. Moralists think that since the ends of revolution are right, revolution can never be wrong. Legalists think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolution can never be right. In this lecture Lea Ypi revisits their arguments and offers an alternative that tries to cut across the divide. She examines revolution not in relation to the justice of individuals but grounded on a philosophical theory of history that focuses on collective progress. She suggests that revolutions (including failed revolutions) enlarge the frame of political judgment, change feasibility constraints, and help develop the learning processes that future generations need to continue to emancipate.

• Speaker: Professor Lea Ypi, London School of Economics
• Friday 02 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Are Revolutions Justified?

Authors who think about the justifiability of revolution, are often divided between those who criticise it on grounds of institutional legalism and those who endorse it on grounds of idealist moralism. Moralists think that since the ends of revolution are right, revolution can never be wrong. Legalists think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolution can never be right. In this lecture Lea Ypi revisits their arguments and offers an alternative that tries to cut across the divide. She examines revolution not in relation to the justice of individuals but grounded on a philosophical theory of history that focuses on collective progress. She suggests that revolutions (including failed revolutions) enlarge the frame of political judgment, change feasibility constraints, and help develop the learning processes that future generations need to continue to emancipate.

• Speaker: Professor Lea Ypi, London School of Economics
• Friday 02 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

A Revolution in Thought? How hemisphere theory helps us understand the metacrisis

It is often remarked that though it may seem that we face numerous global crises of different kinds – environmental, social, political, cultural, economic, psychological, and so on – these crises are interrelated. The term ‘metacrisis’ has been invented to describe this predicament. However these crises are not merely adventitiously interrelated because each has an impact on and reinforces each of the others – though that may be true – but because they share roots at a deeper level in a way of thinking about ourselves and the world. What are these roots? Hemisphere theory, deeply grounded as it is in Darwinism and subsequent neuroscientific research, shows us that a new, far more complex, and more nuanced, appraisal of the bipartite brain – the product of the last 30 years of research – brings new insights into the human condition. There are vitally important clues to the understanding of human cognition and motivation embodied in the structure of the brain. These clues help explain why certain apparently unrelated phenomena tend to occur together, why outcomes that appear paradoxical are in reality predictable, and why many attempts to remedy them will prove inadequate since they are tackling only the manifestations of a problem that we need to address at its root – both in the psyche of the individual and that of a civilisation viewed as a whole. ‘Know thyself’ commanded the Delphian oracle: we need urgently to learn to do so, and this synergy of philosophy and neuroscience appears to offer the most promising way.

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009); and his book on neuroscience, epistemology and ontology called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva 2021). He has two daughters and a son, and lives on the Isle of Skye.

• Speaker: Dr Iain McGilchrist
• Friday 09 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

A Revolution in Thought? How hemisphere theory helps us understand the metacrisis

It is often remarked that though it may seem that we face numerous global crises of different kinds – environmental, social, political, cultural, economic, psychological, and so on – these crises are interrelated. The term ‘metacrisis’ has been invented to describe this predicament. However these crises are not merely adventitiously interrelated because each has an impact on and reinforces each of the others – though that may be true – but because they share roots at a deeper level in a way of thinking about ourselves and the world. What are these roots? Hemisphere theory, deeply grounded as it is in Darwinism and subsequent neuroscientific research, shows us that a new, far more complex, and more nuanced, appraisal of the bipartite brain – the product of the last 30 years of research – brings new insights into the human condition. There are vitally important clues to the understanding of human cognition and motivation embodied in the structure of the brain. These clues help explain why certain apparently unrelated phenomena tend to occur together, why outcomes that appear paradoxical are in reality predictable, and why many attempts to remedy them will prove inadequate since they are tackling only the manifestations of a problem that we need to address at its root – both in the psyche of the individual and that of a civilisation viewed as a whole. ‘Know thyself’ commanded the Delphian oracle: we need urgently to learn to do so, and this synergy of philosophy and neuroscience appears to offer the most promising way.

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009); and his book on neuroscience, epistemology and ontology called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva 2021). He has two daughters and a son, and lives on the Isle of Skye.

• Speaker: Dr Iain McGilchrist
• Friday 09 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Are Revolutions Justified?

Those who think about the justifiability of revolution, are often divided between those who criticise it on grounds of institutional legalism and those who endorse it on grounds of idealist moralism. Moralists think that since the ends of revolution are right, revolution can never be wrong. Legalists think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolution can never be right. In this lecture Lea Ypi revisits their arguments and offers an alternative that tries to cut across the divide. She examines revolution not in relation to the justice of individuals but grounded on a philosophical theory of history that focuses on collective progress. She suggests that revolutions (including failed revolutions) enlarge the frame of political judgment, change feasibility constraints, and help develop the learning processes that future generations need to continue to emancipate.

• Speaker: Professor Lea Ypi, London School of Economics
• Friday 02 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Are Revolutions Justified?

Those who think about the justifiability of revolution, are often divided between those who criticise it on grounds of institutional legalism and those who endorse it on grounds of idealist moralism. Moralists think that since the ends of revolution are right, revolution can never be wrong. Legalists think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolution can never be right. In this lecture Lea Ypi revisits their arguments and offers an alternative that tries to cut across the divide. She examines revolution not in relation to the justice of individuals but grounded on a philosophical theory of history that focuses on collective progress. She suggests that revolutions (including failed revolutions) enlarge the frame of political judgment, change feasibility constraints, and help develop the learning processes that future generations need to continue to emancipate.

• Speaker: Professor Lea Ypi, London School of Economics
• Friday 02 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Are revolutions justified?

Those who think about the justifiability of revolution, are often divided between those who criticise it on grounds of institutional legalism and those who endorse it on grounds of idealist moralism. Moralists think that since the ends of revolution are right, revolution can never be wrong. Legalists think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolution can never be right. In this lecture Lea Ypi revisits their arguments and offers an alternative that tries to cut across the divide. She examines revolution not in relation to the justice of individuals but grounded on a philosophical theory of history that focuses on collective progress. She suggests that revolutions (including failed revolutions) enlarge the frame of political judgment, change feasibility constraints, and help develop the learning processes that future generations need to continue to emancipate.

• Speaker: Professor Lea Ypi, London School of Economics
• Friday 02 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Are revolutions justified?

Those who think about the justifiability of revolution, are often divided between those who criticise it on grounds of institutional legalism and those who endorse it on grounds of idealist moralism. Moralists think that since the ends of revolution are right, revolution can never be wrong. Legalists think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolution can never be right. In this lecture Lea Ypi revisits their arguments and offers an alternative that tries to cut across the divide. She examines revolution not in relation to the justice of individuals but grounded on a philosophical theory of history that focuses on collective progress. She suggests that revolutions (including failed revolutions) enlarge the frame of political judgment, change feasibility constraints, and help develop the learning processes that future generations need to continue to emancipate.

• Speaker: Professor Lea Ypi, London School of Economics
• Friday 02 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

In a report just published in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers argue that tackling inequality is vital in moving the world towards Net-Zero – because inequality constrains who can feasibly adopt low-carbon behaviours.

They say that changes are needed across society if we are to mitigate climate change effectively. Although wealthy people have very large carbon footprints, they often have the means to reduce their carbon footprint more easily than those on lower incomes.

The researchers say there is lack of political recognition of the barriers that can make it difficult for people to change to more climate-friendly behaviours.

They suggest that policymakers provide equal opportunities for low-carbon behaviours across all income brackets of society.

The report defines inequality in various ways: in terms of wealth and income, political influence, free time, and access to low-carbon options such as public transport and housing insulation subsidies.

“It’s increasingly acknowledged that there’s inequality in terms of who causes climate change and who suffers the consequences, but there’s far less attention being paid to the effect of inequality in changing behaviours to reduce carbon emissions,” said Dr Charlotte Kukowski, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Cambridge Departments of Psychology and Zoology, and first author of the report.

She added: “People on lower incomes can be more restricted in the things they can do to help reduce their carbon footprint, in terms of the cost and time associated with doing things differently.”

The researchers found that deep-rooted inequalities can restrict people’s capacity to switch to lower-carbon behaviours in many ways. For example:

Insulating a house in the UK can be costly, and government subsidies are generally only available for homeowners; renters have little control over the houses they live in.

The UK has large numbers of old, badly insulated houses that require more energy to heat than new-build homes. The researchers call for appropriate government schemes that make it more feasible for people in lower income groups to reduce the carbon emissions of their home.

Cooking more meat-free meals: plant-based meat alternatives currently tend to be less affordable than the animal products they are trying to replace.

Eating more plant-based foods instead of meat and animal-derived products is one of the most effective changes an individual can make in reducing their carbon footprint.

Buying an electric car or an electric bike is a substantial upfront cost, and people who aren’t in permanent employment often can’t benefit from tax breaks or financing available through employer schemes.

Other low-carbon transport options - such as using public transport instead of a private car - are made less feasible for many due to poor services, particularly in rural areas.

Sometimes the lower-carbon options are more expensive - and this makes them less accessible to people on lower incomes.

“If you have more money you're likely to cause more carbon emissions, but you're also more likely to have greater ability to change the things you do and reduce those emissions,” said Dr Emma Garnett, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford and second author of the report.

She added: “Interventions targeting high-emitting individuals are urgently needed, but also many areas where there are lower-carbon choices - like food and transport - need everyone to be involved.”

The researchers say that campaigns to encourage people to switch to lower-carbon behaviours have tended to focus on providing information. While this is important in helping people understand the issues, there can still be many barriers to making changes.

They suggest a range of policy interventions, such as urban planning to include bus and bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly routes, progressive taxation rates on wealth and income, and employer-subsidised low-carbon meal options.

The research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and Wellcome.

Reference: Kukowski, C.A. & Garnett, E.E.: ‘Tackling Inequality is Essential for Behaviour Change for Net Zero.’ Nature Climate Change, December 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-023-01900-4

Promoting climate-friendly behaviours will be more successful in societies where everyone has the capacity: financially, physically, and timewise, to make changes.

People on lower incomes can be more restricted in the things they can do to help reduce their carbon footprint.Charlotte KukowskiRgStudio / GettyBusinesswoman commuting on electric bike

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Worlds Turned Upside Down: Quiet Revolutions in Art

The argument of my lecture is that a series of revolutions, mostly in opposition to the dominance of the Western European tradition, have marked modern and contemporary art, as experience here in Britain, but taking into account the wider European context. However, what is being turned upside down is not on the scale implied by this phrase when it was first used of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century. Instead this scatter or vein of revolutions has challenged the parameters associated with the older tradition in large and small ways. An instance of this is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 by African Carvings at the Chelsea Book Club in London (and echoed in 1923 by another exhibition of the same subject in the Brooklyn Museum, New York). At this time, you could find African carvings in the British Museum, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overcrowded cases, jumbled with objects from Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. But at the Chelsea Book Club exhibition the critic Roger Fry saw clearly the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling of three dimensions. Earlier, in 1910 and 1912, Fry had mounted two exhibitions of French Post-Impressionist paintings which revolutionised modern art in Britain. In 1919 in the Chelsea Book Club exhibition he discerned what seemed to him things greater than any other sculpture produced in this country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum, his review was afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influenced the exhibition of African art shown at Brooklyn in 1923, as it replaced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused attention on art not anthropology.

This revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library, as an art student, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this same book. The year before, Moore had himself started writing, for his own benefit, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ Soon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921, he embarked on an intensive study of world sculpture, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.

This lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. E.H. Gombrich provides one answer to this question in his The Story of Art (1950), with reference to the restlessness within Western culture in comparison with some Eastern cultures that have lasted almost unchanged for a thousand years. His own book has done much to promote the Western view of art, having now reached its 16th edition, been translated into 30 languages, and sold 8 million copies. When Gombrich tried in the twelfth edition to take the story of art up to the present day, he admitted some discomfort. Art veined with the revolutionary spirit had aligned itself more easily with progressive developments, with ‘primitivism’, modernism and modernity. Admittedly, modernism, modernity and even postcolonialism, with its reaction against Western Cultures, although moving towards globalisation, remain inextricably tied to the West, even during recent years when its socio-economic power has been challenged by global financial crises and troubled by the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this country admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art, more revolution is needed. More cross-cultural exchange, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library exhibition, Chinese British; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hindu delight; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down.

• Speaker: Professor Frances Spalding
• Friday 23 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Worlds Turned Upside Down: Quiet Revolutions in Art

The argument of my lecture is that a series of revolutions, mostly in opposition to the dominance of the Western European tradition, have marked modern and contemporary art, as experience here in Britain, but taking into account the wider European context. However, what is being turned upside down is not on the scale implied by this phrase when it was first used of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century. Instead this scatter or vein of revolutions has challenged the parameters associated with the older tradition in large and small ways. An instance of this is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 by African Carvings at the Chelsea Book Club in London (and echoed in 1923 by another exhibition of the same subject in the Brooklyn Museum, New York). At this time, you could find African carvings in the British Museum, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overcrowded cases, jumbled with objects from Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. But at the Chelsea Book Club exhibition the critic Roger Fry saw clearly the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling of three dimensions. Earlier, in 1910 and 1912, Fry had mounted two exhibitions of French Post-Impressionist paintings which revolutionised modern art in Britain. In 1919 in the Chelsea Book Club exhibition he discerned what seemed to him things greater than any other sculpture produced in this country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum, his review was afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influenced the exhibition of African art shown at Brooklyn in 1923, as it replaced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused attention on art not anthropology.

This revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library, as an art student, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this same book. The year before, Moore had himself started writing, for his own benefit, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ Soon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921, he embarked on an intensive study of world sculpture, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.

This lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. E.H. Gombrich provides one answer to this question in his The Story of Art (1950), with reference to the restlessness within Western culture in comparison with some Eastern cultures that have lasted almost unchanged for a thousand years. His own book has done much to promote the Western view of art, having now reached its 16th edition, been translated into 30 languages, and sold 8 million copies. When Gombrich tried in the twelfth edition to take the story of art up to the present day, he admitted some discomfort. Art veined with the revolutionary spirit had aligned itself more easily with progressive developments, with ‘primitivism’, modernism and modernity. Admittedly, modernism, modernity and even postcolonialism, with its reaction against Western Cultures, although moving towards globalisation, remain inextricably tied to the West, even during recent years when its socio-economic power has been challenged by global financial crises and troubled by the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this country admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art, more revolution is needed. More cross-cultural exchange, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library exhibition, Chinese British; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hindu delight; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down.

• Speaker: Professor Frances Spalding
• Friday 23 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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Professor Dame Carol Black DBE is awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) for public service. Black was Principal of Newnham College from 2012-2019 and formerly a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

She said: “I am absolutely delighted to have been made a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. This award comes almost 20 years after I received a DBE for services to medicine and recognises the progress being made to tackle some of the most entrenched and interrelated problems in society – poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and drug dependency. My heartfelt thanks go to everyone who has helped and supported me, and to those individuals doing great work on the frontline to change culture and practice.”

Composer Judith Weir CBE, Honorary Fellow and alumna of King’s College, Cambridge, is also awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (GBE), for services to music. Weir is Master of the King’s Music, having been appointed by Queen Elizabeth II in 2014, and has twice written a specially-commissioned carol for the college’s A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.

GBE is the highest rank in the Order, and rarely awarded, to recognise the most exceptional and sustained service to the UK. Since its creation in 1917, fewer than 80 women have been awarded a GBE.

Organist, conductor and broadcaster Anna Lapwood, Janeway Director of Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge, is awarded Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to music. Lapwood reaches a huge audience through her concerts and via social media with over 1 million followers across all platforms. Her passion for the organ is matched by her mission to support girls and women in music.

She said: “When you work as a musician, so much of what you do isn't quantifiable or finite - your work on a certain piece is never 'finished', and your playing is always changing and developing. Receiving this award feels like something concrete - a deeply significant moment in my musical journey.” 

Gerard Grech, former CEO and Founder of Tech Nation, is awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to the technology sector. He joined Cambridge Enterprise this year to lead a new flagship ‘Founders Initiative’ that will support University founders to make an even greater impact on the world in the technology and software sectors.

Grech said: “I’m honoured to have been recognised for my contribution to the growing success of the UK’s tech and startup sector which is increasingly creating globally important tech and science-backed companies, from my time at Tech Nation. This honour is also recognition of the founders, ecosystem experts, investors, policy makers, and my colleagues who generously shared their knowledge and insights to support the UK’s most ambitious tech entrepreneurs. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to them all for all their hard work.”

Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan, Enterprise Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, and former student in the University’s Department of Engineering, is awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to innovation technology. As Founder & President of PervasID he pioneered the world’s most accurate battery-free, real-time location tracking technology which is now in use by several NHS trusts, the largest aircraft manufacturers, airlines and blue-chip retailers.

He said: “I am absolutely delighted; this is a great honour and testament to the hard work and innovation of the entire team at PervasID. Our products offer a national and international benefit and we will continue to pioneer technology that has a wider value to society as a whole.”

Professor Ann Prentice OBE, Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at the University’s MRC Epidemiology Unit, is awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to British and Global Public Health Nutrition. A former director of the MRC Elsie Widdowson Laboratory (previously MRC Human Nutrition Research) at Cambridge, and programme leader of the MRC Nutrition and Bone Health Research Group at Cambridge, she was also head of the calcium, vitamin D and bone health research team at MRC Unit The Gambia. Her research is focused on life-course nutritional requirements for population health, with an emphasis on calcium and vitamin D, and encompasses the nutritional problems of both affluent and resource-limited societies.

She said: “I am delighted to receive this honour on behalf of all the people, in this country and worldwide, who have worked with me to improve our understanding of the links between nutrition and health.”

Dr Gillian Tett, Provost at Kings College, Cambridge, is awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to Economic Journalism. Tett, a former student at the University, is currently Chairman of the US Editorial Board and America Editor-at-Large of the Financial Times.  She became the 45th Provost at King’s College in October 2023, and is renowned for her warnings ahead of the financial crisis of 2008.

Tett said: “I am deeply honoured to receive an OBE - and hope this helps to champion the importance of British intellectual capital, both in journalism and higher education. Thank you to everyone who has helped me in my career!”

Joan Winterkorn is awarded Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to heritage and culture. She is an expert on archives and literary and historical manuscripts, and was formerly in the antiquarian and rare book trade. In Cambridge she played a vital role in enabling the Churchill Archive Centre to acquire the papers of Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Thatcher and the University Library to gain those of Siegfried Sassoon and Dame Margaret Drabble. In 2019 she received the honorary degree of Master of Arts from the University.

Academics and staff associated with the University of Cambridge feature in the 2024 list, which recognises the achievements and service of people across the UK, from all walks of life.

Senate house

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Yes

Revolutions in Art: Turning the World Upside Down

The topic of my lecture is not a large and noisy revolution but a revolutionary vein that, in Britian, has infiltrated itself variously into modern and contemporary art, and, in doing so, has challenged the parameters identifying the tradition of Western European art. A simple example of what I mean is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 and again 1923 by two exhibitions of African carvings, the first held in London at the Chelsea Book Club, and the second in New York, in the Brooklyn Museum. At this time, you could find African carvings in the British Museum, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overcrowded cases, jumbled with objects from Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. But at the Chelsea Book Club the critic Roger Fry recognised great art and praised the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling of three dimensions. Some of the things he saw seemed to him greater than anything produced in this country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum, his review was afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influenced the American exhibition of African art in 1923, as it replaced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused attention on art not anthropology.

This revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library in 1921, as an art student, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this same book. The year before, Moore had started writing, for his own benefit, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ Soon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921, he embarked on an intensive study of world sculpture, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.

This lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. Some answers can be found in E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950). Now in its 16th edition, translated into more than 30 languages and with 8 million copies sold world-wide, it has become itself a major vehicle for promoting the Western view of art. When Gombrich tried to take the twelfth edition up to the present day, he admitted in his final chapter, titled ‘The Changing Scene’, some discomfort, whereas the more progressive revolutionary spirit aligned itself more with the avant-garde, with ‘primitivism’ and modernism, the latter encouraging fresh interest in modernity. Modernism, modernity and even postcolonialism, with its reaction against Western Cultures, although moving towards globalisation, remain inextricably tied to the West. Its socio-economic power has in recent years been troubled by global financial crises and the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet at a time when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this country admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art, more revolution is needed. More cross-cultural exchange, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library exhibition, Chinese British, where the content was free of the Western gaze; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hindu delight; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down.

• Speaker: Professor Frances Spalding
• Friday 23 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Revolutions in Art: Turning the World Upside Down

The topic of my lecture is not a large and noisy revolution but a revolutionary vein that, in Britian, has infiltrated itself variously into modern and contemporary art, and, in doing so, has challenged the parameters identifying the tradition of Western European art. A simple example of what I mean is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 and again 1923 by two exhibitions of African carvings, the first held in London at the Chelsea Book Club, and the second in New York, in the Brooklyn Museum. At this time, you could find African carvings in the British Museum, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overcrowded cases, jumbled with objects from Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. But at the Chelsea Book Club the critic Roger Fry recognised great art and praised the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling of three dimensions. Some of the things he saw seemed to him greater than anything produced in this country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum, his review was afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influenced the American exhibition of African art in 1923, as it replaced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused attention on art not anthropology.

This revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library in 1921, as an art student, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this same book. The year before, Moore had started writing, for his own benefit, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ Soon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921, he embarked on an intensive study of world sculpture, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.

This lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. Some answers can be found in E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950). Now in its 16th edition, translated into more than 30 languages and with 8 million copies sold world-wide, it has become itself a major vehicle for promoting the Western view of art. When Gombrich tried to take the twelfth edition up to the present day, he admitted in his final chapter, titled ‘The Changing Scene’, some discomfort, whereas the more progressive revolutionary spirit aligned itself more with the avant-garde, with ‘primitivism’ and modernism, the latter encouraging fresh interest in modernity. Modernism, modernity and even postcolonialism, with its reaction against Western Cultures, although moving towards globalisation, remain inextricably tied to the West. Its socio-economic power has in recent years been troubled by global financial crises and the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet at a time when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this country admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art, more revolution is needed. More cross-cultural exchange, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library exhibition, Chinese British, where the content was free of the Western gaze; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hindu delight; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down.

• Speaker: Professor Frances Spalding
• Friday 23 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

A Revolution in Art: Turning the World Upside Down

The topic of my lecture is not a large and noisy revolution but a revolutionary vein that, in Britian, has infiltrated itself variously into modern and contemporary art, and, in doing so, has challenged the parameters identifying the tradition of Western European art. A simple example of what I mean is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 and again 1923 by two exhibitions of African carvings, the first held in London at the Chelsea Book Club, and the second in New York, in the Brooklyn Museum. At this time, you could find African carvings in the British Museum, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overcrowded cases, jumbled with objects from Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. But at the Chelsea Book Club the critic Roger Fry recognised great art and praised the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling of three dimensions. Some of the things he saw seemed to him greater than anything produced in this country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum, his review was afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influenced the American exhibition of African art in 1923, as it replaced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused attention on art not anthropology.

This revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library in 1921, as an art student, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this same book. The year before, Moore had started writing, for his own benefit, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ Soon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921, he embarked on an intensive study of world sculpture, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.

This lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. Some answers can be found in E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950). Now in its 16th edition, translated into more than 30 languages and with 8 million copies sold world-wide, it has become itself a major vehicle for promoting the Western view of art. When Gombrich tried to take the twelfth edition up to the present day, he admitted in his final chapter, titled ‘The Changing Scene’, some discomfort, whereas the more progressive revolutionary spirit aligned itself more with the avant-garde, with ‘primitivism’ and modernism, the latter encouraging fresh interest in modernity. Modernism, modernity and even postcolonialism, with its reaction against Western Cultures, although moving towards globalisation, remain inextricably tied to the West. Its socio-economic power has in recent years been troubled by global financial crises and the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet at a time when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this country admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art, more revolution is needed. More cross-cultural exchange, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library exhibition, Chinese British, where the content was free of the Western gaze; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hindu delight; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down.

• Speaker: Professor Frances Spalding
• Friday 23 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

A Revolution in Art: Turning the World Upside Down

The topic of my lecture is not a large and noisy revolution but a revolutionary vein that, in Britian, has infiltrated itself variously into modern and contemporary art, and, in doing so, has challenged the parameters identifying the tradition of Western European art. A simple example of what I mean is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 and again 1923 by two exhibitions of African carvings, the first held in London at the Chelsea Book Club, and the second in New York, in the Brooklyn Museum. At this time, you could find African carvings in the British Museum, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overcrowded cases, jumbled with objects from Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. But at the Chelsea Book Club the critic Roger Fry recognised great art and praised the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling of three dimensions. Some of the things he saw seemed to him greater than anything produced in this country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum, his review was afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influenced the American exhibition of African art in 1923, as it replaced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused attention on art not anthropology.

This revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library in 1921, as an art student, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this same book. The year before, Moore had started writing, for his own benefit, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ Soon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921, he embarked on an intensive study of world sculpture, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.

This lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. Some answers can be found in E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950). Now in its 16th edition, translated into more than 30 languages and with 8 million copies sold world-wide, it has become itself a major vehicle for promoting the Western view of art. When Gombrich tried to take the twelfth edition up to the present day, he admitted in his final chapter, titled ‘The Changing Scene’, some discomfort, whereas the more progressive revolutionary spirit aligned itself more with the avant-garde, with ‘primitivism’ and modernism, the latter encouraging fresh interest in modernity. Modernism, modernity and even postcolonialism, with its reaction against Western Cultures, although moving towards globalisation, remain inextricably tied to the West. Its socio-economic power has in recent years been troubled by global financial crises and the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet at a time when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this country admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art, more revolution is needed. More cross-cultural exchange, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library exhibition, Chinese British, where the content was free of the Western gaze; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hindu delight; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down.

• Speaker: Professor Frances Spalding
• Friday 23 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list