Many citizens of once stable democracies have become tolerant of oligarchy and autocracy because they feel betrayed by conventional political elites and disempowered by established political institutions. If we want to produce better leaders and create institutions truly conducive to the flourishing of democracies and their citizens, we must rebuild what I call deep trust in the human capacity for self-governance. Democratic deep trust demands, first, what Lawrence Becker calls noncognitive security regarding the motives of others.

The Data Engineers meeting seeks to connect data wranglers and professionals in related data engineering roles across the University. This group aims to provide a platform for individuals to share their expertise and interests, fostering a sense of community and encouraging knowledge exchange across research teams.

While primarily designed for those working at the intersection of data generation and analysis – covering areas such as data collection, wrangling, modeling, visualization, and communication – the group is inclusive and open to all members of the University.

When Valerie Solanas died in 1988 in a welfare hotel in San Francisco, she left a sharply polarised legacy: reviled by many as a demented groupie for her near-fatal 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol and revered by a few as a feminist visionary for her incendiary 1967 diatribe the _SCUM_ Manifesto. This paper explores Solanas's collisions with the art world and the women's liberation movement and asks how her ideas, actions, and experience of mental illness illuminate the shadows of feminist history.

_Songs of Seven Dials_ shares the untold story of a remarkable neighbourhood and the battle to define modern London. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Seven Dials was one of London's most diverse neighbourhoods, home to migrant and working-class communities, bohemian clubs and cafes. But business leaders and city planners had other ideas.

You are warmly invited to a *Lightning Round: Flash Discussions of Research* in Room 20.501, Schwarzman Centre.
The session will run in a “Hive” format, with participants working in small groups to share their projects briefly and explore core questions, themes, and challenges in a supportive and non-hierarchical setting.

Please come with *one research question or key theme* you would like to discuss. This is an opportunity to connect across career stages and to generate fresh insights in a friendly, low-pressure environment

The recently retired Regius Professor of History, *Lyndal Roper* has been foundational to the study of women and gender here in Oxford, including the creation of what is now WGQ. We explore Lyndal's work with Professor Hannah Skoda (about history and feminism), Professor Daniel Pick (Birkbeck, about history and psychoanalysis), and Professor Sarah Knott (about history and form).

Since its nineteenth-century rediscovery, the _Très Riches Heures_ has been endowed with mythic status, its cultural capital facilitated by serial reproductions. A 2025 exhibition in Chantilly, publicized as a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to see the manuscript in person, contributed further to this proliferation of replications and to the book’s attendant aura. One image looms especially large in this procession of fragmentary simulacra: the opening miniature, representing January, which has become a totem for the entire book.

This paper explores how solitude in early modern Britain was understood in gendered ways, focusing especially on women’s experiences of solitude. There has been much historical work on community and on networks, relationships, and friendships at all levels of early modern society. But in privileging these communal aspects of daily life, there has been a tendency to neglect those quieter and more transient moments that are often silenced and hidden from the historical record. What women did when they were out of company remains an overlooked topic.

Almost four decades ago, theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identified an epistemological tension between what she characterized as ‘minoritizing’ tendencies where conceptualizations of sexuality are concerned, and ‘universalizing’ ones. For historians of sexuality, this insight has been enabling in several ways, including helping to clarify the stakes in longstanding debates between those who are committed to historicizing the emergence of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer consciousness, including transgender consciousness, and those who remain suspicious of identitarianism as such.

Join for a panel discussion with H.E. Vikram Doraiswami, High Commissioner of India to the United Kingdom, and Mr. Sunil Kant Munjal, Chairman of Hero Enterprise, on 'Into India and South Asia: Culture, Commerce, and the Future of UK-India Relations'.

The discussion will be followed by a drinks reception.

Please register by 13th October 2025.

Sponsored by Mr. Sean Tiwari and Mr. Meenu Malhotra DL, Honorary Consul General of India and Chairman of Malhotra Group PLC.