Past Events › Lunar Lecture Series
Lectures held on the night of the full moon
December 2022
18th Century Playbills by Professor Nick Seager
This interactive lecture is a chance to learn about and to work with playbills from Georgian England. These documents advertised the performance of plays and provide a fascinating window onto theatrical culture in the second half of the eighteenth century. Together, we'll think through how these ephemeral documents were used, their value as historical evidence, and the things they don't quite say. This lecture will be held at Erasmus Darwin House and can also be viewed on zoom. Please select…
Find out more »February 2023
The Notebooks of Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) by Professor Sharon Ruston
Tickets now available for zoom option only. This first Lunar Lecture of 2023 will explore the notebooks of the early nineteenth-century chemist Sir Humphry Davy, best known for his miners’ safety lamp, known as the Davy lamp. Professor Sharon Ruston is leading a research council funded project to transcribe all of Davy’s 75 surviving notebooks, which reveal that he wrote poetry as well as science: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/humphrydavy/davy-notebooks-project/. After discussing Davy’s career and life briefly, and considering the notebooks as a…
Find out more »March 2023
The Linguistics of Humour by Dr Alice Haines
Humour plays a big part in how we communicate with each other and is an important way in which we form and maintain relationships. In this lecture I will draw on some key ideas in linguistics to explore how the language of comic literature interacts with our knowledge of the world. This in turn enables us to develop relationships with narrators and characters, and to find amusement (or not!) in what they say and how they say it. Alice Haines…
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