The Oxford Graduate Conference in Intellectual History will take place on Thursday, 28 May 2026 at The New Space, New College, University of Oxford. This year our theme is After Empire: Intellectual History in a Post-Imperial World and the keynote speech will be given by Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton). For this year’s conference, we invite reflection on intellectual life after empire.

Abstract : This talk examines examples of North African literature, from early twentieth-century texts to more recent works. These writings question forms of female emancipation associated with Western norms and imaginaries, while opening space for alternatives rooted in affects and collective experience. The talk will also reflect on the methodological approaches — particularly spatial ones — that may help us read and understand these literary representations. Bio : Farah Ben Jemaa is a professeure agrégée of French literature at the University of Tunis.

Dark Concrete is about how the Black Power movement reshaped urban politics in the United States—from expectations to practices. Although the national and international dimensions of the Black Power movement are often focused on, Kimberley Johnson looks at the movement at the local level, highlighting Newark and East Orange, New Jersey, and Oakland and East Palo Alto, California, and three policy areas: housing, education, and policing.

AI governance is often framed as a top-down problem: write better rules, infer better preferences, and train better models. This talk offers a different starting point. Drawing on Taiwan’s experience with digital democracy, Audrey Tang shows how Civic AI can strengthen collective self-government when it is bounded by local accountability and community needs. Audrey introduces the 6-Pack of Care — six design principles for Civic AI: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, solidarity, and symbiosis.

Join author Ning Leng, Assistant Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, in conversation with Yeling Tan, Professor of Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, to discuss her new book Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China. In Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China, Professor Ning Leng offers an in-depth examination of the relationship between the Chinese government and Chinese firms, both private and state-owned.

The lecture will take place at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. No registration required.