A gateway to civilisation
Pharos Studies is a library of short courses and study materials given by leading academics and practitioners, freely available to students and the general public. The library is constantly growing, and covers a wide range of contemporary, historical, cultural, and philosophical issues. If you would like to watch the lectures live, tickets can be booked below.
Contemporaries
Interpreting Iran
Ali M. Ansari
Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews & Associate Fellow, Chatham House
In this series of Pharos Monday Lectures, Prof Ali Ansari looks at the way the West reads and interprets Iran. Western perspectives, he will argue, have been misshaped by an over-reliance on abstract theories drawn from international relations and political science, a corresponding failure to pay attention to culture and historical experience, and a willingness to sacrifice a deep understanding for foreign policy imperatives and comparative modelling. Discarding the red-herrings of social science, Prof Ansari will develop a new interpretation of modern Iran and its future relations with the West.
The first lecture will look at the tools of scholarship, the impact of historiography, the dangers of ideology, and the consequences of social scientific methodology, not least the development of a culture of 'metrics' and its consequences for our understanding of sources. Lecture Two will look at particular case studies with particular reference to the ideas that underpinned the nuclear negotiations and the 'theory' of authoritarian resilience. The final two lectures will seek to construct an alternative narrative from the ground up through the application of historical methods and analysing the state from within, drawing on Iran's historical experience and political culture.
Ali Ansari is one of the pre-eminent historians of modern Iran, its relationship with the West, and the nexus of myth, ideology, and nation-building. He has also written extensively on the history of the Anglo-Scottish union.
The Great Powers
Brendan Simms
Professor of the History of International Relations & Director of the Centre for Geopolitics, University of Cambridge
Upcoming: Summer 2025
The ‘Great Powers’ are back. They were long thought superseded by the forces of globalisation and interdependence and made irrelevant by the challenges of civil wars, complex emergencies, and global threats such as climate change. Now, though, traditional great power rivalry between the most important states in the global system has returned with a vengeance. Today, as the world watches these tensions play out in Ukraine, and contemplates possible escalation in the Indo-Pacific, Prof Brendan Simms takes a fresh look at who the great powers are, what makes them what they are, where they came from, and how they shape the world we live in.
Brendan Simms is the founder and Director of the Centre for Geopolitics. He works on European geopolitics, past and present, and his principal interests are the German Question, Britain and Europe, Hitler’s global anti-semitism, Humanitarian Intervention and state construction. He teaches at both undergraduate and graduate level in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS); he also supervises history undergraduates at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His MPhil courses on the History of European Geopolitics use scenarios as part of the teaching and learning process. He has supervised PhD dissertations on subjects as diverse as Intervention and State Sovereignty in the Holy Roman Empire, Sinn Fein, the American colonists and the eighteenth-century European state system, the Office of the UN High Representative in Bosnia, and German Civil-Military relations. Prof Simms is a frequent contributor to print and broadsheet media. He has advised governments and parliaments, and spoken at Westminster, in the European Parliament (Brussels) and at think-tanks in the United Kingdom, the United States and in many Eurozone countries. The Centre for Geopolitics is designed to draw together all these interests.
A Shameful Conquest? Britain Before and After Brexit
Robert Tombs
Professor Emeritus of French History, University of Cambridge
When Robert Tombs was invited to speak to Pharos, it was suggested he could speak on Brexit, Franco-British relations, or the culture wars. He decided to try all three. In this series, Prof Tombs analyses Brexit, why it happened, and what it means; how different policies towards European integration taken in Britain and France tell us much about the direction Europe has taken; and how Brexit’s diplomatic and economic impact may be small next to the cultural, social, and political consequences.
Filmed in St Edmund Hall's Old Library in November 2023, this series of lectures will be published online in May 2024.
Prof Robert Tombs is a distinguished historian, specialising in the history of Britain and France. He is Professor Emeritus of French History at Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College. His published works include The War Against Paris, 1871 (1981), That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (2006, with Isabelle Tombs); The English and Their History (2014), and This Sovereign Isle (2020). His writing appears regularly in The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, and The Times, and he is the editor of Briefings for Britain and History Reclaimed. In 2007, the French Government awarded Tombs the prestigious Ordre des Palmes Académiques 'for services rendered to French culture'. He was appointed to the Franco-British Council the following year.
Histories
Renaissances: Past, Present, and Future
David Starkey
Historian & Broadcaster
“The Renaissance” (or “Rebirth”) is conventionally defined as the two centuries, from about 1350 to 1550, which saw a comprehensive re-engagement with the culture of the Graeco-Roman world: with its philosophy, literature, art, architecture, history, science and politics. The movement started in Italy. But it was a much-travelled Englishman, Geoffrey Chaucer, who first captured its essence.
For out of old fields, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from year to year;
And out of old books, in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men learn.
This idea, of the old fructifying the new, is also the definition of a Classic. In these lectures, I want to argue that the Classic, in both its senses of an age and of specific works, is the key to Western Civilisation. And that its Twentieth Century rejection in the form of Modernism is the cause of our present discontents.
Born in Kendal, David Starkey read history at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD on Henry VIII's household under the supervision of Geoffrey Elton, before teaching at Cambridge and LSE. His many publications include seven major studies of the Tudor period, most recently Henry: Model of a Tyrant, which was published by Harper Collins in 2020. Dr Starkey redefined public history in the 1990s and 2000s, including the landmark series Monarchy, commissioned by Channel 4 in 2002, and has been a frequent commentator in the media. He was awarded a CBE in 2007.
The Emergence of Homosexuality in the Early Modern Period
Sir Noel Malcolm
Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford
In a famous statement, published before almost any serious scholarly work had been done on the history of same-sex relations in pre-modern Europe, Michel Foucault said that the homosexual, as a distinct type of person, was a purely modern phenomenon: in the past, people thought only in terms of sexual acts, not sexual identities. This lecture series tests the truth of that assertion, which has exerted such a strong influence on the whole historiography of the subject, and lays the ground work for a revisionary understanding of the history of sexuality in Europe.
The first lecture discusses the rich evidence which emerged, in the decades after Foucault wrote, from the archives of Italy and Spain. In many ways this seemed to prove him right. It revealed a world of activity by men who were happy to have sex with boys as well as women; generally, their behaviour carried no ‘identity’ implications, and it was unlike modern homosexuality in other ways too, not least the lack of sexual interest in other adult males. The second lecture investigates how such same-sex acts were conceptualised and dealt with by the religious and legal norms of the period; it does so not only for these Christian Mediterranean countries, but also for the Islamic societies of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. The third lecture turns to northern Europe, including England, and finds some significant divergences from the Mediterranean pattern. It also looks at European colonial societies, especially in the Americas, where some contrasts can be found between the colonies of the northern and southern European powers. The final lecture puts the evidence together, considers what it tells us about identities and subcultures, and offers a new account of what has been called the ‘emergence of modern homosexuality.
Recorded at Magdalen College in February-March 2024, this inaugural series of Pharos Monday Lectures will be published in May.
Sir Noel Malcolm FRSL FBA is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, a Founding Fellow of the Pharos Foundation, and one of the country's pre-eminent intellectual historians. He was foreign editor for The Spectator and a columnist for The Daily Telegraph before returning to academia. He is the author of twelve books, and the editor of the Clarendon edition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, for which he was awarded a British Academy medal. His latest work, Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Desire, 1400-1750 was published by Oxford University Press in November 2023.
Jewish Histories in Medieval Europe
Anna Sapir Abulafia
Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions
Upcoming: Summer 2025
These lectures will focus on significant points in the history of the Jews from the destruction of the second Temple in 70 CE to 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Christian Spain, demonstrating the importance of understanding Jewish history as an integral part of the history of the European West. Just as the unfolding of Jewish history cannot be assessed without appreciating the contexts in which Jews participated in their host societies, so the history of medieval Europe is much better understood if account is made of the role played by Jewish communities, as well as evolving Christian attitudes towards Jews and Judaism.
Anna Sapir Abulafia was born in New York, moving with her family to The Netherlands in 1967 where she completed her schooling and studied History at the University of Amsterdam. She gained her Candidaats Examen and Doctoraal Examen in History and her doctorate in Theology at the University of Amsterdam and a higher doctorate, LittD, at Cambridge in 2014. After moving to the UK she became a Research Fellow at Clare Hall and Laura Ashley Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, where she later became College Lecturer, Director of Studies in History, Senior Tutor (1996 - 2002), and Vice-President (2002 - 2010). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society 1998. In April 2015, she took up the Chair of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford, becoming a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. In July 2020 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
The main focus of her research is the interaction of medieval Christianity and Judaism within the broad context of twelfth and thirteenth-century theological and ecclesiastical developments. Prof. Abulafia’s current research concerns the study of medieval Canon Law through the lens of Christian-Jewish relations, centring on Gratian’s Decretum, the mid-twelfth-century collection of canons which systematized many thousands of ecclesiastical and theological texts spanning more than 1000 years of Christianity. The aim of her project is to discover more about the role canon law played in the dissemination of Christian ideas about Jews and Muslims in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as well as shedding further light on the twelfth-century evolution of the Decretum into the text which was disseminated throughout Latin Christendom.
Greece & Rome at War
Adrian Goldsworthy
Historian & Writer
Upcoming: Autumn 2024
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.
Arts
How The Classics Became Classic
David Butterfield
Professor of Classics, University of Cambridge
What made the Greek and Roman Classics “classic”? Who decided? Was a decision even made? Are the surviving Classics “good”? Have we lost the best books ever written? Who decide what’s worth knowing? What makes something worth reading? And how can we avoid forgetting everything?
In the inaugural Pharos @ the Lamb & Flag event, classicist David Butterfield presents the a series of talks on how the classics of European literature became classic.
Filmed in February-March 2024, recordings will be released in May
The four lectures span these topics:
The birth of writing and the dawn of 'literature'
The birth of the library and the idea of the 'canon'
The birth of the monastery and the advent of 'universities'
The re-birth of Classicism and the crisis of 'modernity'
Dr David Butterfield is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University Cambridge, editor of the Classics journal Antigone, and literary editor of The Critic.
Romance and Reality in French Culture
Marie Kawthar Daouda
Lecturer in French Literature, University of Oxford
From the French Revolution to the aftermath of the Second World War, French literature appears as a field of tension between Romance and Reality. Marie Kawthar Daouda discusses the continuity and rifts between the main aesthetic currents of French contemporary literature, their connection with French and European politics, and how authors from Chateaubriand to Camus have endeavoured to distinguish permanent truth behind ever-changing circumstances.
How did the Romantic movement echo the philosophical issues raised by the French Revolution? Can literature describe the world as it is? How do symbols and language work together in poetry? Does the evil of the war make beauty irrelevant? Marie Kawthar Daouda discusses these questions by engaging with relevant passages of the novels, poems, and essays that shaped French literature from 1789 to the 1940s.
Filmed in the Old Library at St Edmund Hall and in the Ursell Room at Pusey House in November 2023, this series of lectures will be released online in May.
Modernism and its Memers
Curtis Winter
Award-winning director
Upcoming: Summer 2025
Art & Wit in the Renaissance: Holbein, Erasmus, & More
Alexander Marr
Professor of Art History, University of Cambridge
Upcoming: Autumn 2024
From the satirical barbs of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1511) to the urbane games of Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (1528), wit was a serious subject in the Renaissance, addressed in natural philosophy and medicine as the intellective part of the human soul, in artistic theory as the wellspring of creativity, and in criticism as one of the most important markers of authorial voice. Yet wit’s visual fortunes in the period have barely been explored.
Visual wit was a kind of pictorial ingenuity, through which artists sought to rebut the humanist claim that by imitating nature they were merely replicators, not inventors. Hans Holbein the Younger, in particular, engaged in a kind of guerilla warfare with the humanists he knew and portrayed, including Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, appropriating their ingenious techniques of ambiguity, self-contradiction, and disguise in a playful contest between painting and poetry.
This series of lectures will trace visual wit in Holbein’s hands, as he evoked breath, voice, and brain through cunning conceits such as More’s ambivalent half-smile and Erasmus’s keen nose. In so doing, we will touch on some major themes in sixteenth-century culture: the complex nature of ‘character’; disputes over biological and artistic parentage; the paradox of lively death; and the vexed relationship between the thinking mind and skilled hand.
Ideas
On Just War
Nigel Biggar
Professor of Theology, University of Oxford
Upcoming: Spring 2025
Freedom of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Freedom
Reidar Due
Professor of Film Aesthetics, University of Oxford
In this inaugural Pharos Tuesday Seminar, philosopher Reidar Due explores the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Icons of the so-called ‘culture war’, this series of discourses takes the two thinkers out of the fire of contemporary debate, seeking to understand their place in a longer tradition of French philosophy as a precursor to a better understanding of their contemporary relevance.
Geopolitics & Political Thought in the Twentieth Century
Samuel Garrett Zeitlin
Professor of the History of Political Thought, University College London
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.