Events

Date: Tuesday 7th February 2012
Location:: Windsor Building Auditorium
Description: Olympic Games provide unique opportunities for marginalised peoples to express their cultural traditions in pageants prepared for a vast media audience. This lecture will look at Opening Ceremonies in Canada, Australia and the USA with a specific focus on performances by Aboriginal/Native groups. The aim is to weigh the exoticising effects of spectacle against the benefits of global visibility while also paying attention to the protest movements that have accompanied such events.

Date: Thursday 9th February 2012
Location:: Windsor Building Auditorium
Description: Robin Lane Fox is Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at New College, Oxford and University Reader in Ancient History. His books and articles include major works on Alexander the Great and the relation between the pagan and early Christian religions of the Roman Empire.

Date: Monday 20th February 2012
Location:: Windsor Building Auditorium
Description: Dr Steve Peters works in Elite Sport and is resident with the British Cycling Team and Team SKY Pro Cycling. He works within the English Institute of Sport and has had involvements with a further twelve Olympic Sports as well as England Rugby and Premier League Football.

Date: Tuesday 21st February 2012
Location:: Windsor Building Auditorium
Description: Critics of religion argue that religion often serves to justify the status quo and that it fails to challenge – and is sometimes the cause of – injustice, exploitation and oppression. Professor Tina Beattie suggests that such criticisms are too simplistic, based more on social prejudice than on historical facts and philosophical insight. Using a range of historical and contemporary examples, she argues that religion can also be shown to be a powerful source of courage and inspiration for those who seek radical social changes in the interests of the poor and the powerless.

Date: Thursday 23rd February 2012
Location:: Windsor Building Auditorium
Description: In a wide-ranging lecture that draws its examples from Monteverdi to the persistence of modernism in the 21st century, Professor Julian Johnson considers how music has engaged with the experience of modernity.

Date: Saturday 25th February 2012
Location:: Windsor Building
Description: Talks, workshops, and hands-on activities for all ages. Come and crack codes, dig for fossils, program computer games consoles, and learn the fastest way to make ice-cream. The pills and potions of Royal Holloway's Founder, Thomas Holloway, will feature in a specially commissioned piece of art by Flora Parrott, with talks and exhibits about the history and future of medical and cosmetic pills and potions. Younger visitors can complete our Science Passport and win a prize!

Date: Tuesday 28th February 2012
Location:: Windsor Building Auditorium
Description: This lecture will review Saladin's career and look at how his reputation was formed and preserved over the centuries, considering the influences of his legacy in both the Islamic world and the West.

Date: Wednesday 29th February 2012
Location:: Royal Holloway, University of London
Description: Rare Disease Day 2012 will take place on 29 February 2012, a rare day itself as its a leap year, at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Date: Thursday 1st March 2012
Location:: Windsor Building Auditorium
Description: The development of our state system, like others before it, emerged from networks of trade and intercultural exchange. By tracing the history and development of these networks aspects of recent global history that Eurocentric and national historiography tend to obscure come more clearly into focus: the archipelago of cities in which both capitalism and 'nation'-states emerged, the forging of horizontal solidarities among groups of elites in different parts of the world, the expansion of capitalism through the disembedding of local economies side-by-side with the construction of 'vertically' bounded polities and cultural institutions; and the relevance of all of this for understanding contemporary processes of globalisation.

Date: Monday 5th March 2012
Location:: Windsor Building Auditorium
Description: This summer the eyes of the world will be fixed on the Games of the XXX Olympiad in London, a celebration of peace and friendship which peoples and nations are invited to join. This historic event offers an opportunity to reflect on the values, principles and institutions that gave rise to the Olympic spirit and ideals in ancient Greece, as expressed in the Olympic Games and the Olympic Truce, and ask to what extent these could help us solve internal and external conflicts and crises the modern world is facing today.