2023 - 2024 Programme

Members’ Annual General Meeting followed by a Concert

2 October, 2023 @ 6:45 pm – 9:00 pm

The Members AGM will be followed by a concert given by the Chamber ensemble from the Bardi Wind Orchestra conducted by Mr David Calow. Non-members may also attend the concert.

Following the Members’ Annual General Meeting, to be held at 6:45 PM, there will be an interval with wine. After this there will be a concert at 8:00 PM given by the Chamber ensemble from the Bardi Wind Orchestra conducted by Mr David Calow. 

When Ruskin meets Thunberg: historic buildings in the age of climate crisis

9 October, 2023 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

The President’s Address, to be given by  Mr Michael Taylor, BA, DipTP, MA, MRTPI, IHBC.  Town planner and conservation specialist

The lecture will  trace the origins of British conservation philosophy in the work of John Ruskin and William Morris and the long shadow that they cast over practice to the present day. Can those ideas from the 19th century survive the challenges of the 21st, particularly the urgent imperatives of the climate crisis?

Michael Taylor is a town planner and building conservation specialist with many years’ experience in local government, English Heritage, freelance consultancy, teaching and lecturing.

British Travellers and the Discovery of the Alhambra, 1750-1830

23 October, 2023 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

A lecture to be given by Professor Rosemary Sweet, FSA, FRHistS. Professor of Urban History, University of Leicester

The ‘discovery’ of the Alhambra in Granada, and by extension the architecture and history of Islamic Spain, is usually ascribed to the Romantic writers and artists of the 1820s and 1830s. Anglophone scholars rarely look at preceding decades, focusing instead on the lure of Italy, on the assumption that Spain had little to offer the traveller or man of taste. However, as this paper will show, British knowledge of Al-Andalus and its remains was of much longer standing. In the 1760s and 1770s, peace with Spain encouraged growing familiarity with the country reflected in published and unpublished journals of tours to Spain, in which Al Andalus and its ‘Moorish’ antiquities featured prominently, creating an enthusiasm that continued through subsequent decades despite the advent of war.  This was not a question of British ‘discovery’ however, as their encounters with the Alhambra drew on Spanish scholarship at the court of Carlos III, which culminated in the Antigüedades árabes de España (1787, 1804).  Counter-intuitively, the advent of war in the Iberian Peninsula increased the number of civilian travellers to Spain, including the topographer and antiquary William Gell FSA (1808-10) whose illustrated journal, held by the British School at Rome, demonstrates the possible depth of engagement with Islamic interiors, Arabic inscriptions and Spanish histories by this period. At home and in translation, British writers such as Gell acted as vectors for the spread of Andalusian culture throughout Europe.

According to her website (https://le.ac.uk/people/roey-sweet): For most of her career, Professor Sweet has been a historian of eighteenth-century British urban and cultural history but recently she has begun to move into the nineteenth century. After studying History at Oxford where she was awarded my D Phil and held a junior research fellowship, she joined the Department of Economic and Social History at Leicester in 1998 and she has been there ever since, based in the Centre for Urban History where she is currently Director. From 2018-19 she was seconded to the AHRC as Director of Partnerships and Engagement. She is on the organizing committee of the Pre-Modern Towns Group and the Urban History Group and am a member of the International Commission for the History of Towns and a trustee of the Historic Towns Trust. Since 2002, She has been co-editor of the Urban History journal published by Cambridge University Press. Aside from urban history, she is also the academic director of the Bibliography of British and Irish History and is currently chair of the Faculty of Archaeology, Humanities and Letters for the British School at Rome and a member of Council for the Society of Antiquaries.

From fruitfly biorhythms to a weekend in Stockholm

6 November, 2023 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

A lecture to be given by Professor Charalambos P Kyriacou, FMedSci. Professor of Behavioural Genetics, University of Leicester

The lecture will outline how working in a very esoteric and rather obscure field that nobody really cares about led to unanticipated developments! But in more detail:

Endogenous ‘circadian’ (Latin circa-about, diem-day) 24 hour rhythms percolate through every aspect of behaviour, metabolism and physiology in all organisms that inhabit the surface of the planet, including bacteria. Whether you are an early morning lark, or a late-night owl, your genes encode your ‘chronotype’. The genetic analysis of biological rhythms began when clock mutations were identified in the fruitfly, Drosophila, that disrupted the fly’s 24 hour sleep-wake cycles. In 1978, as a young researcher at Brandeis University near Boston, Massachusetts, working with the geneticist, Jeff Hall, I started a side project using these mutants for studying how flies mate. This soon became my major project and I have worked on biological rhythms ever since. In 1981 before I left Boston for Edinburgh, I discussed the possibility of identifying clock genes at the molecular level with a friend of mine who also worked at Brandeis, Michael Rosbash, a well-known, then young, molecular biologist. He seemed interested, and together by the mid-1980s a group of us led by Hall and Rosbash, succeeded in isolated DNA sequences that encoded a 24 hour clock gene called ‘period’. Hall and Rosbash went on to identify other clock genes in flies until they had built a molecular model of how the clock works. Remarkably, this molecular timing mechanism is conserved in humans and over the decades it has become clear that normal circadian function is required for general health and well-being because disturbances of the 24 hour timer (as in shift workers) can lead to cardiovascular, metabolic, and mental health problems, cancer, and of course, poor sleep. In recognition of the general importance of their work, Hall and Rosbash, together with Michael Young at Rockefeller University in New York, were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for their genetic dissection of the circadian clock. The take home message of this story is that no matter how esoteric scientific research may seem at the time (ie. who in their right mind would care about how clock genes dictate the sex life of fruitflies?), this ‘useless’ piece of work led to bigger and better things.

Charalambos (Bambos) Kyriacou was born in Camden, London, in 1953 and was educated in North London, helping out during the week in his father’s restaurant in Finchley and during the summers working in the local graveyard. Bambos went to Birmingham University at 17 and read psychology where one of the lecturers sparked an interest towards behavioural genetics.

Graduating in 1973 he started a PhD on Drosophila genetics and behaviour in the Departments of Psychology and Genetics in Sheffield. In 1976 he spent a year as a demonstrator in psychology at the University of Edinburgh before moving to Brandeis University, Boston, MA USA, in early 1978 to work with Jeff Hall and, later, with Michael Rosbash. Whilst there Dr Kyriacou initiated a project on fly circadian rhythms and has been working in this field of chronobiology ever since.

In 1981 Dr Kyriacou moved back to the same department in Edinburgh as an independent SRC research fellow and then took a Lectureship in Genetics at Leicester in 1984. He was promoted in 1996 and elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2000, serving 18 months as interim Head of Department in 2000 and 2001. As HoD, and with his colleague Gabby Dover, Professor Kyriacou wrote and organised his department’s RAE 2001 submission, in which Genetics was awarded a 5*, the only Genetics department in the UK and the only department in Leicester University to achieve the highest ranking

(From: https://le.ac.uk/people/charalambos-kyriacou)-

Responding to David Attenborough’s Challenge  – a new view of economics

20 November, 2023 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

A lecture iven by Dr Bernard Greaves LLD, DipArch, BA

A transcript of this lecture is available by clicking here.

T he lecture will present a brief outline of the extent of the environmental crisis and the way in which it is driven by the consensus view of economic development. The presentation will provide an alternative view of sustainable economics and its implications both for political and social organisations and for individuals.

Dr Bernard Greaves has an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leicester. He has formerly held the positions of:

• Honorary Research Fellow, De Montfort University
• Chair Leicester West NHS Primary Care Trust
• Independent Member Leicestershire Police Authority
• Chair Voluntary Action Leicestershire.

Persian Tales of Love and Friendship

4 December, 2023 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

The Arthur and Jean Humphreys Lecture to be given by Professor Christine van Ruymbeke, Ali Reza and Mohamed Soudavar Professor of Persian Studies, University of Cambridge

This talk examines how medieval Persian authors and their patrons viewed the lure of friendship and the dangers of love. Intriguing, lively and attractive tales spin the magic that clothes grim warnings.

Christine van Ruymbeke is Professor of Persian Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge (UK). She has earned her PhD at Brussels University and moved to Cambridge after a few years of teaching at her Alma Mater. She is a literary critic of Persian literature, specialising in non-mystical  narratives (prose or verse) written in the Persianate world during the long medieval period.

Judges, Politics, and the Public: A Judge’s View from Inside Westminster

15 January @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

A lecture to be given by Sir Nicholas Green the Rt Hon Lord Justice Green, Former Chairman of the Law Commission for England & Wales (2018 – 2023); Lord Justice of Appeal, Civil and Criminal Appeals; President, The Council of the Inns of Court

Sponsored by the University of Leicester

The focus of the lecture is upon the role of the judge in Government, based upon Sir Nicholas Green’s 5 years’ experience as Chairman of the Law Commission of England and Wales, a body at the centre of Government, Whitehall, and Parliament.

Sir Nicholas Green started his professional life briefly as an academic at the University of Southampton and then the University of London. He was called to the Bar in 1986. He was appointed Queens Counsel in 1998 and a Recorder of the Crown Court in 2003. At the Bar he specialised in EU law, constitutional and public law, competition and economic regulatory law, and general civil and commercial law. He was Chairman of the Bar Council in 2010. He was appointed Chairman of the Advocacy Training Council in 2011.

He was appointed to the High Court in October 2013 (Queens Bench Division) and was made a Presiding Judge on the South Eastern Circuit in 2016. He was appointed Chairman of the Law Commission in August 2018 and a Lord Justice of Appeal in October 2018. He was also appointed as President to The Council of the Inns of Court (COIC) in May 2022. He is an Honorary Professor at the University of Leicester. He holds both a Ph.D. and a LL.D.

Extremism among us

29 January @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Sponsored by Loughborough University 

Dr Afzal Ashraf QCVS, CEng. Visiting Fellow in International Relations and Security, Loughborough University

For most living in western societies, extremism is assumed to be an external threat, which occasionally infects peripheral elements of our society. Such a conceptualisation is challenged by a historical and a wider understanding of the nature of extremism. The reality is that extremism has been a common response to social and political crises, which exploit existing prejudices and hatreds within mainstream society. There seems to be evidence that the very nature of western liberal democracy is increasingly vulnerable to extremist ideas and politics. This talk aims to provide a better understanding of extremism and its relevance to our society and politics.

Afzal Ashraf was a senior officer in the British Armed forces with operational experience in conflict.  He served in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and other government departments. Formerly a Consultant Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank and an Assistant Professor at Nottingham University, he is currently a Visiting Fellow at Loughborough University, where he previously taught international relations and security.  He is a frequent commentator on global TV and the press on international affairs and global security issues.

Green Energy Materials in 3D – Crystal Gazing on the Atomic Scale

12 February @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry  

Professor Saiful Islam FRSC, FIMMM. Professor of Materials Science, University of Oxford

The supply of low carbon energy is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Major breakthroughs in clean energy technologies require advances in new materials and underpinning science. With the aid of 3D glasses, this talk describes the materials science of lithium batteries in electric vehicles and the novel compounds for next-generation solar cells, as well as highlighting the use of materials modelling methods to gain atomic-scale insights.

Saiful Islam has been Professor of Materials Science at the University of Oxford since 2022, before which he was Professor of Materials Chemistry at the University of Bath for 16 years. He grew up in London and obtained his Chemistry degree and PhD from University College London followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Eastman Kodak Labs, New York, USA.

His research encompasses new materials for lithium and sodium batteries, and for perovskite solar cells. He has received several awards including the 2022 Royal Society Hughes Medal and the 2020 American Chemical Society Storch Award in Energy Chemistry.

Saiful presented the 2016 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for BBC TV on the theme of energy, which included a lemon battery world record. He is a Patron of Humanists UK and when not exploring new materials, he enjoys family breaks (as a dad of two), films and indie music.

Research website: https://bit.ly/327BgQr and Twitter @SaifulChemistry

Is Shakespeare’s language unlike that of his contemporaries?

26 February @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Sponsored by De Montfort University

Professor Gabriel Egan, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, De Montfort University   

Professor Gabriel Egan for Chris Thundow

Shakespeare is often credited with coining many of the familiar words and phrases now used in the English language. But he didn’t. Shakespeare is often supposed to have had an unusually large vocabulary. But he didn’t. Yet Alexander Pope wrote of Shakespeare’s plays that “had all the speeches been printed without the very names of the persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty to every speaker”. Is there something about how Shakespeare differentiated characters that is also true of how he differentiated himself from his fellow writers? What, if anything, is so special about Shakespeare?

Gabriel Egan is a General Editor of Oxford University Press’s landmark New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works and a Professor of Shakespeare Studies at De Montfort University. He specializes in the computational analysis of early modern language, particularly where this can help us figure out the authorship of works that were anonymously published or whose authorship is disputed. He teaches students these techniques and also the old-fashioned art of letter-press printing. His research and teaching build on the idea that letter-press printing gave us the first intellectual revolution and digital text the second.

Managing pest insects without pesticides

11 March @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Natural History Section Joint Lecture  Professor Rosemary Collier, FRES. School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick

Rosemary Collier (speaker, seated) with Hazel Greaves (Chair of the Natural History Section) and Michael Taylor (President)

Synthetic pesticides have been available to farmers and growers since the 1940s and their use has facilitated our food security and the high-quality food that we are used to.  However, it has been evident for some time that they, and the farming systems of which they are part, have been contributors to the loss of biodiversity in the UK and elsewhere.  The lecture will consider several approaches that can be used to manage pest insects without using pesticides and speculate about what it might take for the UK to manage without pesticides in the future.

Professor Collier has a BSc In Zoology, MSc in Applied Entomology and a PhD. She has been based at the same place for most of her working life, now called the Wellesbourne Campus of the University of Warwick, but when she started working there for her PhD, it was the National Vegetable Research Station. She is interested in food production and the natural environment and much of her research is focused on the management of pest insects in horticultural crops using approaches that minimise the impact on other species. She is also interested in the wider use of information by farmers, growers and gardeners, including novel technologies for monitoring and managing pests, and the use of information collected by citizen scientists.

Critical Technology Metals and Mining for the Green Transition

25 March @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Dr Philip Bird PhD, Senior Science Officer DESCYCLE, Research Associate in Mineral Processing Centre for Sustainable Resource Extraction University of Leicester

The Geology Section Joint Lecture

Life in the 21st century is intrinsically linked to the use of metals.  Common base metals such as copper weave through the structure of our homes as electrical wires and pipes, we carry gold and other precious metals with us as jewellery, and exotic technology metals lace the circuit boards of our phones, computers, and televisions; we live our lives surrounded by metal. Modern industry and technology now use a greater diversity of metals than at any other point in history, with over 60 metals being ‘critical’ to everyday life. Of these, the technology metals are perhaps the most urgent, possessing characteristics required for technologies including those vital to the low-carbon energy transition.

The security and sustainability of the supply of metals has become a key issue for governments, businesses and communities across the world. While the supply of base and precious metals is considered secure, the extraction of these commodities is energy and water intensive and produces significant rock waste and CO2 emissions. The supply of the vital technology metals is less certain. Many of these elements are produced only as by-products during the refining processes associated with the major base and precious metals, making their production dependent on demand for the related commodity. Even those with more robust supply chains, such as lithium and the rare earth elements (essential for electric vehicle and green energy technologies) are often geographically restricted in their distribution, making supply dependent on geopolitical conditions.

The talk will explore concepts around mining and resource extraction in the 21st century and the challenges of meeting long-term demand for metals in a sustainable way. With metal demand projected to peak in the 2040s, as the bulk of low emission infrastructure is constructed, we have a limited window to ensure the production of metal is done responsibly and to the benefit of all involved.

Biography

Dr Philip Bird is Senior Science Officer at DEScycle and holds a research associate position at the University of Leicester in the Centre for sustainable resource extraction.  Having begun his career as an ore deposit researcher, holding a degree in Applied and Environmental Geology from the University of Leicester and a Ph.D. in ore deposit geology from Kingston University, he now focusses on sustainability in the mining and metals industry.  This has included being part of the UK’s ‘Circular economy for technology metals’ (MET4TECH) research program and pioneering the application of new technologies for the sustainable extraction of primary raw materials.

Collaborating to conserve the natural world

8 April @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

The F. L. Attenborough Lecture

Dr Mike Rands, BSc, DPhil, DSc. Master Darwin College, and Founding Director, Cambridge Conservation Initiative, University of Cambridge  

Dr Mike Rands with Sir David Attenborough

Nature has never been under great threat and requires urgent and innovative responses from society if we are to halt and reverse the loss of species, habitats and ecosystems upon which our own survival and prosperity depend. In this lecture Dr Rands will outline the innovative work facilitated from Cambridge to respond to the ‘global biodiversity crisis’ drawing especially on the work of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative. This novel partnership brings together the biggest names in international biodiversity conservation with the University of Cambridge with the aim of transforming the global understanding and conservation of biodiversity to secure a sustainable future for all life on Earth.

Dr Rands is an environmental scientist and conservation biologist. Currently the Master of Darwin College at the University of Cambridge, he was the Founding Director of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative at the University of Cambridge where he led the creation of the David Attenborough Building as a centre of international collaboration for nature conservation. He was previously Director and Chief Executive of BirdLife International.

He is also a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, a Trustee of the Cambridge Commonwealth, European & International Trust and Conservation International UK and currently Chairs the Council of BirdLife International.

Sculpture and Geology: Modernism, Interdisciplinarity and the Museum Today

22 April @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Joint Lecture with the Museum and Art Gallery

Professor Jenny Powell, Director and Barber Professor, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham

In 1930 a reviewer of an Arthur Tooth’s exhibition, that included work by Barbara Hepworth, commented that from the catalogue ‘it sounds at first glance like a geological and forestry exhibition’. Like many of her peers, including Henry Moore, Hepworth was very particular about her choice of stones that she used for carving.  Some of these materials were increasing used in the built environment too. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts was constructed from Darley Dale stone in 1939, the same stone that Moore chose for his large-scale sculpture Three Standing Figures, 1947, first displayed in the open-air in Battersea Park a year later. This lecture will explore what a deeper exploration of the properties of stones in art and architecture can reveal about Hepworth and Moore’s practices. It also asks what interdisciplinary exhibitions can offer to the contemporary museum and its publics.

Jennifer Powell is Director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, and Barber Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham’s Department of History of Art, Curating and Visual Studies. Prior to this, she was Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge.

Jennifer begun her curatorial career with the V&A before taking up the post of Assistant Curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain in 2010. She was appointed Head of Collections, Programme and Research at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, in 2013, and played a key role in the gallery’s £11.5million redevelopment project.