Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

List of events in Photo View

Latest Past Events

Elizabeth Roberts – Montenegro: Realm of the Black Mountain

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

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)

Free

Adrian Goldsworthy – Greece & Rome at War

Robert Beddard Room Oriel College, Oxford

There are traces of violence and warfare from the earliest periods of human history, and by the Classical era wars were common events and, along with politics, became the major concern of historians. Greeks defeated Persian invasions, then fought each other. Alexander swept through the Persian empire. Rome and Carthage waged war on an immense scale, and at the end of it the Carthaginian Republic was eradicated. Rome created and maintained through military force an empire embracing much of the known world.

Wars were important and shaped the development of the ancient world, but how should we understand them? Battles were major events, sometimes deciding wars, and were clearly important and need to be understood. Yet there was a lot more to ancient warfare than pitched battles, and it is vital to look at the attack and defence of fortified settlements and strongholds, and at lower level raids and skirmishes. The story of warfare in the Greek and Roman worlds is not simple, but remains of fundamental importance for understanding the era.

Adrian Goldsworthy is an historian and novelist who specialises in ancient Roman history. His most recent work is The Eagle and the Lion: Rome, Persia and an Unwinnable Conflict, which was published in 2023

Free

Samuel Zeitlin – Geopolitics & Political Thought in the Twentieth Century

Hinton Seminar Room Worcester College, Oxford

In the second Pharos Tuesday Seminar, Samuel Garrett Zeitlin shifts the focus to the liberal conservative political theorist Raymond Aron, examining his relationship with the German jurist Carl Schmitt to draw out two vastly contrasting perspectives on the international politics of the last century. The first lectures will examine Schmitt’s analysis of the First World War, his critique of the League of Nations, and his characteristic approach to the history of political thought. The final lecture will consider Raymond Aron’s response to Schmitt’s political thought, particularly on matters of foreign policy international affairs, in Aron’s studies of Clausewitz and of international relations. The lectures will also consider the Schmitt-Aron correspondence.

Samuel Garrett Zeitlin is a distinguished historian of political ideas at University College London. He has worked extensively on the thought of Sir Francis Bacon, alongside Continental theorists of the twentieth century.

Free