In this talk, Ato Quayson shares insights drawn from his book Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature. He argues that disputatiousness is one of the starting points that connects Greek and postcolonial tragedy. Speaker: Professor Ato Quayson FBA, Professor of English, Stanford University Image: Tragic mask in hand of greek statue of Melpomene. Via Getty Images

In this talk, Georgina Waylen discusses hypermasculine leadership within the context of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaker: Professor Georgina Waylen FBA, Professor of Politics, University of Manchester Image: Donald Trump Holds Rally At Iowa State Fairgrounds. © photo by Scott Olson via Getty Images

The modern history of humiliation is different from the history of public shaming; both share certain features and practices, but differ as to intentions and goals. In this talk, Ute Frevert argues that liberal societies have made some progress in abolishing public shaming. But they have failed to bring about “decency“ in Avishai Margalit’s terms – a general refusal to humiliate others. She is the author of The Politics of Humiliation. A Modern History. Speaker: Professor Ute Frevert FBA, Director, Max Planck Institute for Human Development Image: Daniel Defoe in the Pillory. Credit duncan1890 via Getty Images.

In this talk, Professor Kathleen Coleman FBA highlights certain paradoxes at the root of Roman civilisation, specifically those related to the staging of violent displays in the arena. Virtually everything that fueled Roman society can be implicated: ideology, religion, class structure, environment, economy. The Romans, evidently, tolerated these paradoxes. Can we learn anything from them? Speaker: Professor Kathleen Coleman FBA, James Loeb Professor of Classics and the Departmental Chair, Harvard University Image: The Colosseum in Rome. Credit Anna Kurzaeva via Getty Images

In this talk, Professor Julian Hoppit FBA introduces his new book, The Dreadful Monster and its Poor Relations. Taxing, Spending, and the United Kingdom, 1707-2021, which explores the geography of public finances in the United Kingdom over the last three centuries. Why do some places feel they pay too many taxes and get too little public expenditure? Public finances have been at the heart of the making and the unmaking of the United Kingdom, but without much of a clear plan, allowing opposing caricatures of arrangements to become politically powerful. Speaker: Professor Julian Hoppit FBA, Astor Professor of British History, University College London Image: The Chancellor Of The Exchequer Delivers The 2021 UK Budget. © photo by Chris J Ratcliffe via Getty Images

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) is, in terms of sheer achievement, the greatest English commoner of all time and yet remains a deeply controversial figure. He represented himself, apparently compellingly, as an honest, pious, modest, and selfless servant of God and his nation, and yet most of his contemporaries found him ruthless, devious, and self-promoting. In this talk, Ronald Hutton sums up the findings of his latest book, The Making of Oliver Cromwell, which examines his actions and words in full context up until the end of the English Civil War in 1651, and proposes an answer to this apparent paradox. Speaker: Professor Ronald Hutton FBA, Professor of History, University of Bristol Image: Statue of Oliver Cromwell in front of the Palace of Westminster, London, UK. Via Getty Images

In this talk, Derek Attridge addresses the question: "What is a poem's mode of existence?" Using a poem by William Wordsworth as an example, he argues that poems are not fixed lines of words but human experiences of language and the power of language. He is the author of The Experience of Poetry. From Homer's Listeners to Shakespeare's Readers. Speaker: Professor Derek Attridge FBA, Professor Emeritus of English, University of York Image: William Wordsworth engraving, 1873. Credit traveler1116 via Getty Images

In this talk, Jane Lightfoot considers what a particular corner of the classical world, astrology, thought about disease – how it classified it, what mental models it built around it, and how it might have coped, or failed to cope, with the situation that is facing us today. Speaker: Professor Jane Lightfoot FBA, Professor of Greek Literature; Charlton Fellow and Tutor in Classics, New College, University of Oxford Image: Waning gibbous moon and Mars. © photo by japatino via Getty Images

In this talk, Peter Gatrell discusses the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, signed in Geneva on 28 July 1951. He explains the circumstances leading up to the Refugee Convention and considers what it was designed to achieve: a commitment to recognise and protect refugees who have a well-founded fear of persecution. At present, although many of the world’s refugees live in non-signatory states, the Refugee Convention remains a crucial element of international refugee law. His latest book is The Unsettling of Europe: the Great Migration, 1945 to the Present (Penguin, 2021). Details of his current collaborative research project, "Reckoning with refugeedom: refugee voices in modern history, 1919-75" are also available. Speaker: Professor Peter Gatrell FBA, Professor of Economic History, University of Manchester Image: New Temporary Refugee Camp In Lesbos Island. © Photo by Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto via Getty Images

Syntax is the cognitive system that underlies the patterns found in the grammar of human languages. In this talk, David Adger explains what syntax as an area of study is, why he finds it important and fascinating, and why it is central to what it means to be human. The paperback edition of his book, Language Unlimited. The Science behind our most creative power was published in July 2021. His British Academy article, What is linguistics? is also available. Speaker: Professor David Adger FBA, Professor of Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London

This talk introduces research on the sign languages of deaf communities: natural, complex human languages, both similar to and different from spoken languages. It includes discussion of sign language and the evolution of human language; sign language and the brain, and sign language acquisition by young children, as well as the history and future of British Sign Language (BSL). Speaker: Professor Bencie Woll FBA, Professor of Sign Language and Deaf Studies, University College London 10-Minute Talks are a series of pre-recorded talks from Fellows of the British Academy screened each Wednesday on YouTube and also available on Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast... Subscribe to our email newsletter: https://email.thebritishacademy.ac.uk...

Over the winter of 1610-11, a magnificent telescope was built in London. It was almost two metres long, cast in silver and covered with gold. This was the first telescope ever produced in such an extraordinary way, worthy of a great king or emperor. Why was it made, what was its political significance and who was it going to? In this talk, Timon Screech explores why the East India Company, which became the world's biggest trading organisation until the 20th century, prepared this special gift to court favour with the Shogun of Japan, how the Japanese viewed Europeans during this time and the impact on England’s maritime rivalry with Portugal and Spain. His most recent books are The Shogun’s silver Telescope; God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625 and Tokyo before Tokyo; Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo (both published in 2020). Speaker: Professor Timon Screech FBA, Professor of the History of Art, SOAS University of London

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur (1735-1813) was a farmer as well as a complex thinker of the contradictions of American identity as described in his famous Letters from an American Farmer and, more strikingly, in his French texts which develop his description and analysis of the New World and its peoples. Many readers of his English work have focused on his wishful story of the land of the free, a hospitable refuge to the dispossessed of Europe, a glorious melting pot where the American is born: a man who works hard, who can provide for his family, and be treated with respect whatever his origins and whatever his religious beliefs. Yet, as Judith Still discusses in this talk, Crèvecœur reveals in his French work the original sins of British colonization and of the new United States, sins which still haunt us today: genocide of indigenous peoples, enslavement of Africans and environmental devastation. She is the author of Derrida and Other Animals: The Boundaries of the Human (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and ‘Slavery in Enlightenment America – Crèvecœur's Bilingual Approach’, Journal of Romance Studies (2018) 18:1, 103-29.

Goods and possessions offer us ways into understanding how late medieval people saw the world and their position in it. In this talk, Christopher Woolgar discusses objects of daily life, their significance and the meaning of material culture (what we might understand as ‘people’s stuff') in late medieval England, to reveal changes in mentality that came with a long-term social revolution, in the quantities and types of goods people had, and the lengths to which elites in particular went to ensure continued possession of prestigious items within their families. Speaker: Professor Christopher Woolgar FBA, Emeritus Professor of History and Archival Studies, University of Southampton

The British Academy is the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences and was founded in 1902. In this talk, Professor Sir David Cannadine discusses undertaking the task of writing the history of the Academy and why it is worth doing so, the importance of engaging with the challenging moments it has faced and how these were navigated, and if the history of the Academy is merely the history of a single institution or if it sheds light on how institutions more widely can enhance public understanding of people, cultures and societies. Speaker: Professor Sir David Cannadine PBA, President, the British Academy; Dodge Professor of History, Princeton University

In this talk Stuart Elden discusses his new book, The Early Foucault and the research he did on the first period of Michel Foucault’s career. In particular, he highlights what Foucault did before the History of Madness in 1961 and how he came to write that book as well as the way newly available archival materials help to make sense of the period. His book, The Early Foucault, was published in June 2021. Speaker: Professor Stuart Elden FBA, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, University of Warwick

George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover from 1727-60, was considered short-tempered and uncultivated, but during his reign presided over a great flourishing in his adoptive country - economic, military, and cultural. In this talk, Norman Davies places George II in the unfamiliar framework of a composite state, stressing the monarch's conviction that his native German possessions were no less important than his British ones, together with the unfamiliar story of how his German Electorate was governed from St. James’s Palace in London. He also discusses his book, George II: Not Just a British Monarch, and its use of unconventional terminology, calling the monarch 'George Augustus' (not just George II), insisting that he was 'King-Elector' not just a mere King, that he belonged to the dynasty of Von Welf (the Guelphs) not to the invented tribe of 'Hanoverians', and that his coat-of-arms, which, inter alia, bore the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, was 'royal and electoral', not just, as the British always say, 'royal'. Speaker: Professor Norman Davies FBA, Professor Emeritus of History, University of London; Honorary Fellow, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford; Honorary Fellow, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge

Why was there no alliance to block Hitler from launching aggression in Europe? The usual explanation given is that the British led by Neville Chamberlain were so averse to the thought of war that appeasement had no alternative. In this talk, Jonathan Haslam argues that the real reason was that they - as did the Poles and the Czechs - feared communism more than fascism and that an alliance with Stalin's Russia against Germany would bring the Reds into Central Europe. As Moscow supported Communist efforts in France, Spain, China, and beyond, opponents such as the British feared for the stability of their global empire and viewed fascism as the only force standing between them and the Communist overthrow of the existing order. His book, The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II is published in May 2021. Speaker: Professor Jonathan Haslam FBA, George F. Kennan Professor, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study Image: Photograph of German soldiers advancing on Poland during World War II.

During the COVID-19 pandemic women’s mental health has been a topic of concern as women have disproportionately carried the burden of care. In this talk, Lynn Abrams explores the links between a revolution in feelings amongst women in the 1960s and today’s mental health crisis. She shows how talking about feelings and self-help were alternatives to the ‘little yellow pill’ for many women struggling with loneliness and stress. Speaker: Professor Lynn Abrams FBA, Professor of Modern History, University of Glasgow

Napoleon had no religion, but he spent much of his career dealing with it. In this talk to mark the bicentenary of his death, William Doyle discusses how Napoleon saw that the upheavals of the French Revolution could never be ended unless its quarrel with the Catholic Church could be settled. This meant negotiating with the pope. Most of Napoleon's henchmen opposed the concordat which he concluded with Rome in 1801, but most French people welcomed it. Later, emperor and pope fell out, but public worship was never threatened again, as the pope always acknowledged with gratitude. He is the author of The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Speaker: Professor William Doyle FBA, Professor Emeritus of History and Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol