The Universe’s 100th Birthday: Galactic Fireworks and Little Red Dots - Chris Lintott

In this lecture, Professor Marion Turner explores ‘ordinary women’ in English literature, arguing that Chaucer’s 14th-century Wife of Bath was the first such woman: a middle-aged, sexually active working woman who tells the outrageous story of her own life. Zadie Smith’s 21st century translation of her story demonstrates the ongoing relevance of thinking about the space we have for women’s voices in theatre, poetry and public life. This lecture discusses the historical context for the emerg...

AI systems are increasingly positioned as supports for anxiety, loneliness, and distress. This lecture examines large language models trained to simulate therapeutic dialogue alongside biofeedback systems that modulate physiological states. We distinguish responsiveness from empathy, asking where AI may scaffold reflection and where automated comfort subtly displaces responsibility. This lecture was recorded by Professor Matt Jones on the 29th of September 2026 at Barnard’s Inna Hall, London...

Where are the stories of great queer love in the Shoah? There are almost none. Anna Hájková explains why the history of same-sex desire in the Shoah, that is, queerness among Jews persecuted by the Nazis for their race, has been excluded and marginalised, and how its return to our understanding of the Holocaust can offer an inclusive and feminist history of this genocide. Based on original and extensive archival research, this lecture offers a concise insight into the queer history of the Ho...

Carbon used to be something that was only mentioned in school chemistry classes, but now it seems to be everywhere: on the news, in political debate, in discussions on health, and as a framework for thinking about our civilisation’s future. But the carbon that’s the focus of most of that debate is what’s in the atmosphere, and that’s only about 2% of the accessible carbon on Earth. This lecture puts that 2% in context, showing how the whole carbon cycle works, how we’re affecting it, and lo...

Our expanding Universe only makes sense if, early on, it expanded rapidly in a period of cosmic inflation. In this lecture, we consider the evidence for this apparently arbitrary idea, and asks whether we are on the brink of finding inflation’s signature in our observation. As the story moves from theorist's blackboards to desert observatories, and from the cosmos’s first moments to the far future, we question the nature of the Universe, its eventual fate and even the form of scientific enqu...