Gresham College Lectures

This lecture was recorded by Dr Di Wang on the 8th of June 2026 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London

Dr Di Wang is an art historian and curator. Her work focuses on art and culture of East Asia from the late-nineteenth century to the present.

Following her doctorate at the University of Oxford, she has taught as a departmental lecturer and research associate at the Department of History of Art at Oxford. Her first book project reveals the surprising entanglement of medicine, science, and revolutionary politics in the genesis of a socially engaged modern art and visual culture in China, offering the first inter-disciplinary history on how science and medicine shaped the contours of avant-garde thinking in China during the modern period.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/nude-china

Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/

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This lecture was recorded by Chris Lintott on the 3rd of June 2026

Professor Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College.

Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve, to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He was the founder of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, 'The Crowd and the Cosmos’. His latest book is ‘Our Accidental Universe’. 

Professor Lintott is best known for presenting the BBC's long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer. Away from work, he cooks, suffers through being a fan of Torquay United and Somerset cricket, and spends time with a rescued lurcher, Mr Max. He can often be found at the helm of Oxford’s science comedy night, ‘Huh, That’s Funny’.

The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/pluto-planet

Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham College's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today
 
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This lecture was recorded by Melissa Lane on the 28th of May 2026 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, Princeton University and is also Associated Faculty in the Department of Classics and Department of Philosophy. Previously she was Senior University Lecturer at Cambridge University in the Faculty of History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

She studied for her first degree in Social Studies (awarded summa cum laude) at Harvard University, and then took an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where she was a student at King’s College, supported by appointments as a Marshall Scholar, Truman Scholar, and Mary Isabel Sibley Fellow of Phi Beta Kappa.

Professor Lane is an author, lecturer and broadcaster who has received major awards including being named a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Lucy Shoe Meritt Resident in Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome. She has published widely in journals and authored or introduced nine major books including Greek and Roman Political Ideas; Eco-Republic; and most recently, Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political, which was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Professor Lane is the only person ever to have delivered both the Carlyle Lectures and the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at the University of Oxford.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/plato-polybius

Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/

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This lecture will focus on independently produced Chinese documentary cinema as it has entered the Anglophone industry market. Using “Plastic China” by the award-winning director Wang Jiuliang as a case study, I will explore what the implications of cross-border collaborations are for documentary form and content, and how this may encourage a particular set of viewer responses. This will allow me to locate the documentary form in relation to broader liberal arguments over China’s place in the world system and assess the limitations of this approach to “going global” for independent Chinese documentary.

This lecture was recorded by Luke Robinson on the 27th of May 2026

Luke Robinson is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Film Studies in the Faculty of Media, Arts, and Humanitiies, University of Sussex.
He is the author of Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street, and the co-editor of two further collections on Chinese film culture: (with Chris Berry) Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation and (with Chris Berry, Lydia Wu and Sabrina Yu) Chinese Independent Cinema: Past, Present, and a Questionable Future.
His writing has appeared in books and journals including DV-made China, The New Chinese Documentary Movement, Vocal Projections, Screening China’s Soft Power, positions: Asia cultures critique, Film Studies, Screen, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas.
Between 2019 and 2025 he was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project, “Independent Cinema in China: State, Market, and Film Culture”. One of the outcomes of this grant was the establishment of the Chinese Independent Film Archive, located at Newcastle University.

The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/chinese-documentary

Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham College's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today
 
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This lecture was recorded by Robin May on the 20th of May 2026 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London

Professor of Infectious Disease at the University of Birmingham, and (interim) Chief Scientist at the UK Health Security Agency, Robin May was appointed Gresham Professor of Physic in May 2022. Between July 2020 and September 2025 he served as Chief Scientific Adviser at the Food Standards Agency (FSA).

Professor May’s early training was in Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford, followed by a PhD on mammalian cell biology at University College London and the University of Birmingham. After postdoctoral research on gene silencing at the Hubrecht Laboratory, The Netherlands, he returned to the UK in 2005 to establish a research program on human infectious diseases. He was Director of the Institute of Microbiology and Infection at the University of Birmingham from 2017-2020. 

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/peoples-emotions

Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/

Website:  https://gresham.ac.uk
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/greshamcollege
Facebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollege

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