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Jonathan Sumption & Catharine Titi – Pharos Conversations: The Elgin Marbles

To Be Confirmed Oxford, United Kingdom

In the first ever Pharos Conversation, a range of distinguished scholars, intellectuals, and commentators will debate the future of the Elgin Marbles.

Jonathan Sumption KC is a distinguished historian and one of Britain's leading jurists, serving on the UK Supreme Court (2012-2018) after a prodigious career as a barrister. He is also the author of a five volume history of the Hundred Years' War, and a prominent commentator on legal issues. His inaugural Pharos Lecture is available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiM1EYlQgzg .

Catharine Titi is a professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Her specialisms include public international law, the settlement of international disputes, international investment law, international arbitration, and cultural heritage law. Her latest book is The Parthenon Marbles and International Law, which was published by Springer in 2023.

Tiffany Jenkins is a British sociologist and writer, who currently serves as the culture editor for the journal Sociology Compass. She has written extensively on the controversies surrounding the Elgin Marbles and wider issues around the restitution of cultural heritage. Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums – and Why they Should Stay There was published by Oxford University Press in 2016.

Alexander Herman is the Director of the Institute of Art and Law. He has written, taught and presented on an array of topics in relation to art, law, and cultural property, often appearing in the national press and international journals. His most recent book is The Parthenon Marbles Dispute: Heritage, Law, Politics, published by Hart in 2023.

Mario Trabucco della Torretta is a classical archaeoloist trained in Sicily and in Athens. His expertise covers classical Greek architecture and sculpture, Ancient Athens, and the Elgin Marbles. He is a prominent commentator and contributor to many journals, and tweets at @Marrio_Trabucco.

Nigel Spivey is Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Classics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a leading authority on Greco-Roman art - particularly of the Etruscans. He is the author many works, including Etruscan Art (1997), Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude (2001), and Greek Sculpture (2013).

Free

Postponed Nicholas Rodger – Book Launch: A Naval History of Britain

To Be Confirmed Oxford, United Kingdom

The final instalment of N.A.M. Rodger’s definitive, authoritative trilogy on Britain’s naval history. At the end of the French and Napoleonic wars, British sea-power was at its apogee. But by 1840, as one contemporary commentator put it, the Admiralty was full of ‘intellects becalmed in the smoke of Trafalgar’. How the Royal Navy reformed and reinvigorated itself in the course of the nineteenth century is just one thread in this magnificent book, which refuses to accept standard assumptions and analyses. Rodger sets all this in the essential context of politics and geo-strategy. The character and importance of leading admirals – Beatty, Fisher, Cunningham – is assessed, together with the roles of other less famous but no less consequential figures. Based on a lifetime’s learning, it is the culmination of one of the most significant British historical works in recent decades.

Naval specialists will find much that is new here, and will be invigorated by the originality of Rodger’s judgements; but everyone who is interested in the one of the central threads in British history will find it rewarding.

Free

Elizabeth Roberts – Montenegro: Realm of the Black Mountain

Old Dining Hall St Edmund Hall, Queen's Lane, Oxford, United Kingdom

Montenegro was admitted to the UN as its 192nd member in June 2006, thus recovering the independence it had lost nearly ninety years earlier at the Versailles Peace Conference. Realm of the Black Mountain is the first full-length history of the country in English for a century, tracing the history of the tiny Balkan state from its earliest roots in the medieval empire of Zeta through its consistently ambiguous and frequently problematic relationship with its larger neighbour Serbia, the emergence of a priest/warrior ruler in the shape of the Vladika and its emergence from Ottoman suzerainty state at the Congress of Berlin. More recently, the book focuses on its troubled twentieth century history, its prominent role in the Balkan wars, its unique deletion from world maps as an independent state despite being on the winning side in the Great War, its ignominious role in the wars leading to the disintegration of Yugoslavia and its final reemergence as a member of the international community on the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 2006.

Lady Elizabeth Roberts is a Balkan scholar and former diplomat. She has taught Southeast European History at universities in the United States and Ireland. Roberts is also the co-author, with Kenneth Morrison, of The Sandžak: A History (2013)

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