Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Nina Laurie, "Geographies of return, identity and development"

Professor Nina Laurie of the Department of Geography and Sustainable Development, School of Geography and Geosciences, will deliver her Inaugural Lecture "Geographies of return, identity and development" in School III, St Salvator's Quadrangle on Wednesday 23 November 2016, 5.15pm. All are welcome.

Geographies of return, identity and development 

We are all ‘returnees’. Across our lifetimes we return at different moments to places, homes, communities, friendships, families, value sets and ways of being. Such movements change us. We carry into new spaces where and what has gone before. These geographical echoes help frame our understandings of where we arrive and what we feel we can do when we get there. This lecture explores how the experiences and knowledges of those who return influences the form and success of sustainable development in diverse settings. It draws on three decades of fieldwork in the global South and new research in coastal Scotland in order to emphasize the need for development policy makers to value the common experience of return. I highlight research on some of the globe’s most marginalised groups, indigenous people and women who have experienced trafficking, and examine how their experiences of return have shaped their rights based development demands. I explore how return can involve valuing traditional ways of knowing and doing, generating new collective group identities as development actors. As an example, I use this framework to introduce a new research agenda on sustainable development in Scotland through a new project ‘Rowing the Waves’ being conducted in partnership with St Andrews Coastal Rowing Club and the Scottish Coastal Rowing Association.

List of inaugural lectures for the academic year 2016-17

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Elspeth Graham

Professor Elspeth Graham, of the Department of Geography and Sustainable Development, School of Geography and Geosciences, will deliver her Inaugural Lecture "Population Change in South-East Asia: Questions of Scale and Difference" in School III, St Salvator's Quadrangle on Wednesday 12 March, 5.15pm – 6.30pm.
All are welcome.

In the last few decades there have been important population changes in South-East Asia, which are influencing many other aspects of society. Fertility has declined, life expectancy has increased and new mobilities are impacting on families in ways that are poorly understood. In this lecture, Elspeth Graham uses two case studies that link data at different geographic scales – fertility decline in Singapore and transnational migration from Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam – to explore the determinants and consequences of contemporary population change in the region.

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Richard English

Professor Richard English, of the School of International Relations and Director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, will deliver his Inaugural Lecture, "Does Terrorism Work?” in School III, St Salvator’s Quadrangle on Wednesday, 10 April 2013 at 5.15 p.m. All are welcome.

Terrorism, and responses to terrorism, remain central problems for states and citizens alike in the post-9/11 twenty-first century. Despite the huge literature now generated on the subject, more has been written on definitions of terrorism, and on the causes behind it, than on whether it actually works. In this Lecture, Richard English attempts to assess the question, Does Terrorism Work?, as seen historically, and with an eye to closely-focused, first-hand research on the detailed ways in which terrorism has (and has not) worked in practice.

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Berys Gaut

Professor Berys Gaut, of the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies, will deliver his Inaugural Lecture, "Educating for Creativity” in School III, St Salvator’s Quadrangle on Wednesday, 14 November 2012 at 5.15 p.m. All are welcome.

In this talk Professor Gaut examines whether it is possible to teach people to be creative. We often feel hesitant to say that we can do so, talking instead of 'nurturing' or 'fostering' creativity. A source of this reluctance is traced to two seminal 18th century works on creativity: Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition and Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement. Two arguments against the view that creativity can be taught, concerning the role of imitation and rules in learning, are extracted from these works, but both arguments are shown to be unsound. Professor Gaut then develops a positive argument for the claim that creativity can be taught, and illustrates how to do so with examples drawn from mathematics, philosophy and creative writing.

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Aaron Quigley

Professor Aaron Quigley, of the School of Computer Science, will deliver his Inaugural Lecture, "Human Computer Interaction: Bridging the digital physical divide” in School III, St Salvator’s Quadrangle on Wednesday, 31 October 2012 at 5.15 p.m. All are welcome.

Professor Quigley's talk will be framed around three interrelated topics: Ubiquitous Computing, Novel Interfaces and Visualisation. Ubiquitous Computing is a model of computing in which computation is everywhere and computer functions are integrated into everything. Everyday objects are sites for sensing, input, processing along with user output. Novel Interfaces, which draw the user interface closer to the physical world, both in terms of input to the system and output from the system. Finally, the use of computer-supported interactive visual representations of data to amplify cognition with visualisation. In this talk, Prof Quigley will demonstrate that advances in human computer interaction require insights and research from across the sciences and humanities if we are to bridge the digital-physical divide.

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Don Paterson

Professor Don Paterson, of the School of English, will deliver his Inaugural Lecture, “I know what I have given you;  I do not know what you have received”:  Poetry, Paranoia and Errors in Transmission, in the Buchanan Lecture Theatre on Wednesday, 9 May 2012 at 5.15 p.m. All are welcome.

Don has published five collections of poetry, two books of aphorism, a number of edited anthologies, and a commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He is currently working on a new collection of poetry, a lengthy technical manual on ars poetica, and a prose book about music.

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Anne Fuchs

Professor Anne Fuchs of the School of Modern Languages, will deliver her Inaugural Lecture 'The Dreadful Wreckage of History: Cultural Memory and the Bombing of Dresden’ in School III, St Salvator’s Quadrangle on Wednesday, 11 April 2012 at 5.15 p.m. All are welcome.

Professor Fuchs’ fields of research span various aspects of the literatures and cultures of the German speaking countries from the late 18^th century to the present day. Nationally and internationally, she is renowned for her work on German cultural memory since 1945. For a number of years, her research has been particularly concerned with 'German memory contests', i.e. a series of intensely fought public debates about German cultural identity in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II. Her latest monograph investigates these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective with reference to the local, national and global memory of the bombing of Dresden. She is author of five monographs, amongst them After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present (2012), the award-winning Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse (2008, 2nd ed. 2010), Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte: Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Prosa (2004), and has co-edited nine volumes. Her latest research project concerns cultural responses to the experience of acceleration in the age of the World Wide Web. At St Andrews, she intends to build up a cross-disciplinary research network with colleagues from cognate disciplines to explore 'modes of temporality in the age of acceleration', the topic of her next book.

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Lars Olsen

Professor Lars Olsen, of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, will deliver his Inaugural Lecture on Fractals, Multifractals and Dimensions in School III, St Salvator’s Quadrangle on Wednesday, 14 March 2012 at 5.15 p.m. All are welcome.

Professor Olsens’ research centres around fractal and multifractal geometry and its applications within number theory, ergodic theory and dynamical systems.

Fractals are geometric figures that have a very irregular and intricate structure and contain many copies of themselves at different scales. Similarly, multifractals are highly irregular distributions also containing many copies of themselves at different scales

Fractals/multifractals are not easily described using classical Euclidean geometry and so a new theory of fractal/multifractal geometry has been developed. Such sets and distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years, partly due to the development of striking computer graphics and partly due to a realisation that many natural phenomena such as cloud boundaries or the distribution of rainfall are best approximated by fractals and multifractals.

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Frances Andrews

Professor Frances Andrews, of the School of History, will deliver her Inaugural Lecture ‘Building Trust in the Italian Middle Ages’ in School III, St Salvator’s Quadrangle on Wednesday, 15 February 2012 at 5.15 p.m. All are welcome.

Professor Andrews’ research centres on the history of Italy and on religious, social and urban history in the middle ages more widely. She is currently working on relations between men of the church and the booming cities of the later middle ages. Driven in part by a search for modernity, historians long viewed these interactions as fundamentally hostile, but much recent work has tended instead to emphasise harmony, portraying the Italian cities as single, living, religious entities. The lecture will test some of the implications of this shift, focusing on ideas and practices of trust. 

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Simon Dobson

Professor Simon Dobson, School of Computer Science, will deliver his Inaugural Lecture 'The Computer is the New Microscope' in the Lecture Theatre, Medical and Biological Sciences Building on Wednesday, 7 December 2011 at 5.15 p.m. All are welcome.

Professor Dobson's research centres around building software for adaptive sensor-driven systems. These are found in applications as diverse as environmental monitoring to study climate change and assisted living for supporting the elderly or infirm in their homes. Simon's work aims to span both theory and practice, improving foundational understanding while being demonstrated in practical applications.

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Julie Harris

Professor Julie Harris, School of Psychology will deliver her Inaugural Lecture, "Seeing, in depth", in Old Library, School of Psychology, St Mary's Quadrangle on Wednesday 23 November 2011, at 5.15pm. All are welcome. 

Prof. Harris is interested in visual perception, with particular interests in how binocular vision and eye movements are used for the perception of shape and depth and the control of action in 3-D space. Current projects include how binocular information is used for shape perception, and how we perceive motion in three dimensions.

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Tom Wright

Professor Tom Wright, School of Divinity, will deliver his Inaugural Lecture, "Imagining the Kingdom: Mission and Theology in Early Christianity", in School III, St Salvator’s Quadrangle on Wednesday 26 October 2011, at 5.15pm. All are welcome.

Professor Wright's research continues the project of understanding the early Christians and their writings within the matrix of first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman history and culture. His present work focuses on Paul, as he works towards a major book on the apostle. His inaugural lecture looks beyond that, both to further work on the four gospels and to an investigation of the philosophical and cultural roots of the modern movement of biblical scholarship and the ways in which fresh historical study can overcome some of the residual weaknesses in that movement.

Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Peter Cawood

Professor Peter Cawood, School of Geography and Geosciences, Department of Earth Sciences, will deliver his Inaugural Lecture “Pulse of the Earth”, in School III, St Salvator’s Quadrangle on Wednesday 12 October 2011 at 5.15-6:30 pm. All welcome.
Professor Cawood’s research is concerned with field-based studies of mountain belts, including their mineral deposits, and the insight they provide into Earth processes. His work ranges in scale from global reconstructions to microscopic examination of mineral grains. He has worked in mountain belts ranging in age from Archean (>2500 million years) to Recent, and from many disparate geographic areas around the globe. He is currently studying the generation and preservation of continental crust and, in particular, is concerned about potential bias in the geologic record and the implications this has for understanding the origin of the crust and its mineral deposits.