The following lectures, seminars, etc. will be open to members of the University and others who are interested:
Slade Lectures. The Slade Lectures for 2008-09 will be given by Professor Robert Hillenbrand, FBA, University of Edinburgh, under the title Early Islamic art between East and West, 650-750 AD. The lectures will take place on Thursdays at 5 p.m., in Mill Lane Lecture Room 3.
| 16 October | How Islamic art adapted the Mediterranean heritage. |
| 23 October | The Dome of the Rock: contested faiths in Jerusalem. |
| 30 October | The Great Mosque of Damascus: imperial symbol or foretaste of paradise? |
| 6 November | Royal frescoes: the good life in the Syrian desert. |
| 13 November | Islamic art looks east. |
| 20 November | Creating an Islamic identity: the role of coins. |
| 27 November | Early Islamic palaces: bottomless purse but dubious taste? |
| 4 December | What next? New approaches to early Islamic art. |
Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Hebrew Linguistics. Associate Professor Ghil'ad Zuckermann, of the University of Queensland, will give a seminar entitled Deifying Zionism and defying religion: defining ideological secularization of Hebrew terms within the Israeli language, at 5 p.m. on Thursday, 30 October, in Room 9, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Sidgwick Avenue.
Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. Seminars take place on Wednesdays in Lecture Theatre 1 (LT1), from 3.30 p.m. to 4.30 p.m. Tea and cakes are offered from 3.15 p.m. to 3.30 p.m. outside LT1. All are welcome to attend.
| 15 October | Research students' presentations. |
| 22 October | Extruding opals and other stories: the self-assembly of nanomaterials for light, by Professor Jeremy Baumberg, Cavendish Laboratories. |
| 29 October | Nanoporous solids: the confluence of heterogeneous and homogeneous catalysis, by Professor Sir John Meurig Thomas, Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. |
| 5 November | Self-organization of discrete fibre reinforcements in polymer flows, by Professor Stephen Bush. |
| 12 November | A chemical engineer's perspective on systems biology illustrated by a model-based analysis of eukaryotic protein synthesis, by Dr Stephen Wilkinson, University of Manchester. |
| 19 November | Direct synthesis and spinning of carbon nanotube fibres, by Professor Alan Windle, Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. |
| 26 November | Bioengineering and the skin. Transdermal technologies for drug delivery and clinical monitoring, by Professor Richard Guy, University of Bath. |
Divinity. Henry Martyn Centre. The Henry Martyn Centre Michaelmas Term Seminars 2008 will take place at Westminster College. All are welcome. For further information, contact Polly Keen, Administrator (tel. 01223 741088, email pk262@cam.ac.uk).
| 16 October | 2.15 p.m. | The visual culture of the juvenile missionary movement 1910-1960, by Professor Sandy Brewer, University of East London. |
| 30 October | 2.15 p.m. | Indigenizing Christianity: fantasy or possibility? Examples from Trinidad and South Africa, by Rev'd Canon Dr Adrian Chatfield, Ridley Hall, Cambridge. |
German. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, award-winning director of the film The Lives of Others, will give the inaugural Xchanging German Lecture on Friday, 10 October, at 5.30 p.m. at the Judge Business School. This is the first in a series of annual lectures organized by Judge Business School and the Department of German and Dutch and sponsored by Xchanging Plc. Those interested in attending should contact Jane Moorman (email do8@pem.cam.ac.uk) by 6 October, to book a place.
History of Art. Dr Berthold Kress will deliver a series of lectures entitled What art historians ought to know - short introductions into disciplines like palaeography, heraldry or liturgy. There will be eight classes, held on Tuesdays, normally from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., in the Department of History of Art, Lecture Room 2. The time and venue may have to change for some of the classes. The first class will take place on Tuesday, October 14, at 3.25 p.m. in the University Library. The classes are primarily intended for graduate students of the Department, but all are welcome.
Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit. Research Seminars will take place on Tuesdays from 4.30 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the Seminar Room, the Mond Building, Free School Lane.
| 21 October | Good Han, Bad Han: the moral parameters of ethnopolitics in China, by Uradyn Bulag, of the Department of Social Anthropology. |
| 4 November | Manchu sources on Xinjiang c. 1760-1912: a preliminary discussion, by Laura Newby, of the University of Oxford. |
| 18 November | Studies of women in the Mongol Empire: an historical approach, by Bruno de Nicola, of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. |
| 2 December | Trade, tolls, and tax evasion: Buddhist attitudes towards revenue collection, by Ulrich Pagel, of the School of Oriental and African Studies. |
MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit. The sixth Sir William Dunn Scholar, Professor David Palmer of Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand, will give a lecture entitled Neuropathology and therapeutic approaches to Batten disease at 3 p.m. on Thursday, 2 October. The lecture will take place in the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Lecture Theatre, Level 7, Wellcome Trust/MRC Building, Hills Road.
Plant Sciences. Seminars take place on Thursdays at 4 p.m. in the Large Lecture Theatre, Department of Plant Sciences, Downing Site. All are welcome to attend.
| 16 October | Blue light sensing in plants and bacteria: all you need is a little LOV, by Dr John Christie, of the University of Glasgow. |
| 23 October | Cajal bodies, the nucleolus, and fibrillarin are required for a plant virus systemic infection, by Dr Michael Taliansky, of SCRI Dundee. |
| 30 October | CPPS Seminar: New horizons of the domestication of crop plants, by Professor Wayne Powell, of IBERS Aberystwyth. |
| 6 November | Discovery and analysis of novel riboswitches, by Professor Ronald Breaker, of Yale University. |
| 13 November | Blackman Lecture: Getting to the root of developmental networks, by Professor Philip Benfey, of Duke University. |
| 20 November | Why equalizing trade-offs aren't always neutral, by Dr Lindsay Turnbull, of ETH Zürich. |
| Biodiversity loss: mechanisms and consequences, by Dr Andy Hector, of ETH Zürich. | |
| 27 November | Physical aspects of evolutionary transitions to multicellularity, by Professor Ray Goldstein, of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. |
| 4 December | The (micro)diversity of pollination systems in the genus Ceropegia (Apocynaceae: Asclepiadoideae): biogeographic and phylogenetic perspectives, by Dr Jeff Ollerton, of the University of Northampton. |
Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. The Kuwait Foundation Lectures for the academical year 2008-09 will take place at 5 p.m. in the Wolfson Room at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Wilberforce Road. Further information can be obtained from http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/. The lectures are promoted by a generous benefaction from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences.
| 14 October | A field-test of basic empirical bayes and bayes methodologies: in-season prediction of baseball batting averages, by Professor Lawrence D. Brown, of Pennsylvania University. |
| 28 October | Modular forms and Galois representations, by Professor Chandrashekhar Khare, of UCLA. |
| 11 November | On exchangeable random partitions, permutations, and fragmentation trees, by Professor Peter McCullagh, of Chicago University. |
| 18 November | Flat surfaces and dynamics in moduli spaces of curves, by Professor Anton Zorich, of the University of Rennes. |
| 25 November | Classification results in the theory of buildings, by Professor Richard Weiss, of Tufts University. |
| 27 January | Knots, 3-manifolds, and gauge theories, by Professor Tom Mrowka, of MIT. |
| 13 February | The structure of large graphs, by Professor Noga Alon, of Tel Aviv University. |
| 23 February | Bloom filters, related data structures, and their applications, by Professor Michael Mitzenmacher, of Harvard University. |
| 28 April | The tropical vertex, by Professor Mark Gross, of UCSD. |
| 5 May | Likelihood-based inference for complex data structures, by Professor Nancy Reid, of University of Toronto. |
| 12 May | Professor Andrew Granville, of Montréal University - title to be confirmed. |
| 11 June | The flow of information in complex networks, by Professor Jon Kleinberg, of Cornell University. |
Social Anthropology. Senior Seminars take place on Fridays at 2 p.m. in Seminar Room G2, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane. The common room (G1 ground floor) will be available for tea from 1 p.m. onwards.
| 17 October | World anthropologies, by Dr Aleksander Bošković, of the Institute of Social Sciences, Belgrade. |
| 24 October | Paired opposites: dualism in development and anthropology, by Dr Thomas Yarrow, of the University of Manchester. |
| 7 November | Resorting to violence: the repression of Buddhist lamas in 1930s Mongolia, by Dr Chris Kaplonski. |
| 14 November | Haunting Malayness, by Mr Nick Long. |
| 21 November | The state constructs the clan: anthropological imagination and the headless state in Inner Asia, by Dr David Sneath. |
| 28 November | Embodying the dead: war remembrance and materiality on the Western Front, by Dr Paola Filippucci. |
The Frazer Lecture entitled On the anthropology of the contemporary will be given by Professor Paul Rabinow, of the University of California, Berkeley, on Friday, 31 October at 5 p.m. The Lecture will take place in Lecture Room No. 3, 8 Mill Lane.