Past Pudding Seminars

Programme Easter Term 2024

3 May: Amelia Platt (JCR), '‘Quite human really:’ The detective and the ‘crisis of authority’ in 1930s detective fiction'

This seminar explores the representation of the figure of the detective in 1930s ‘Golden Age’ crime fiction, focusing on Dorothy L. Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), as well as Ngaio Marsh’s Artists in Crime (1938) and Death in a White Tie (1938). Literary criticism has often tended to see the genre of crime fiction as upholding the status quo. A crime is committed, and the detective solves it, restoring society to its previous state of normality. This seminar will aim to show that in the texts being discussed, the detective’s authority is upheld. However, it is an authority that has been thoroughly interrogated by the texts, and thus likely compromised in the minds of readers. The detectives featured in these texts (Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn and Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey) both experience a ‘crisis of authority’ relating to their detecting, compromising the justice they administer. These ‘crises of authority’ manifest themselves in different ways and reveal the influence of contemporary social issues, including growing opposition to capital punishment, the legacy of WWI and changing gender relations. This seminar will also hope to explore the ‘crisis of authority’ happening at the level of genre, with the texts pushing back against genre boundaries and reader expectations.

Amelia is a third-year English student at Newnham, and an avid reader of crime fiction.

10 May: Laura Dennis (Curator), 'Ruby Lustre: Ceramics by William De Morgan at Newnham College'

17 May: Mahera Sarkar (MCR), 'Reframing safety metrics: enhancing public trust in autonomous vehicles'

Public engagement is a broad term that encompasses the various ways in which members of the general public can be brought together to engage with issues that are of public importance. In the context of technological innovation, it describes the involvement of diverse groups of people in discussions about potential applications of new and emerging technologies, their governance, regulation, and the wider issues that could arise from the way that they are developed and adopted. Policymakers are increasingly recognising this principle as an important mechanism to ensure transparency and accountability in regulation as well as a method of addressing public mistrust in science. Despite this, innovators’ genuine interest in understanding what the public might accept frequently slips into a normative project of seeking to build acceptance, thereby reinforcing technocratic bias. 

Notable literature on this topic includes Stirling’s article ‘Towards Innovation Democracy? Participation, Responsibility and Precaution in Innovation Governance’, which argues that the most powerful market actors often fail to fully prioritise the wider public good. Additionally, Stilgoe and Cohen’s piece ‘Rejecting Acceptance: Learning from Public Dialogue on Self-Driving Vehicles’, has been particularly inspirational for this paper as it highlights the tendency for institutions to problematise the public rather than reflect on the technology itself. Since their work is mainly concerned with drawing attention to this issue, this paper expands on this topic by proposing mechanisms for meaningful public engagement in the innovation process. It uses AVs as a case study to scrutinise the limitations of existing initiatives and guidelines before suggesting ways to refine these procedures to ensure public interests and opinions are prioritised. 

As AVs may be viewed as disruptive technologies – they promise to significantly uproot established infrastructure – ensuring their governance is responsive to public values is crucial. By creating a framework to achieve this, it is this paper’s ambition that its recommendations could be used as a starting point for the regulation of similarly radical technologies in the future.

24 May: Jerome Viard (Staff), on his Penguin Adventures in Antarctica

Jerome Viard is a gardener here at Newnham, who has just come back from a very exciting trip to Antarctica. He spent the austral summer living and working on a tiny Antarctic island named Goudier Island, the site of the very first British Antarctic Base: Port Lockroy Base A. This is not only the southernmost public post office in the world but also home to a 600-breeding pair strong Gentoo penguin colony. During his time in Antarctica, Jerome worked for the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, a charity that aims to preserve historic buildings and artefacts in Antarctica for future generations. In his seminar, Jerome will share his experience of living with four other people on a very remote island with no running water; he will talk about the history of Port Lockroy; and he will explain his work as the Wildlife Monitor on the island. Every year since 1996, a survey is conducted at Port Lockroy to assess the long-term breeding success of the resident Gentoo penguins; this season, as the Wildlife Monitor, it was Jerome’s job to collect that data. He will talk about his experience living and working amongst the penguins but also talk about all the other wild animals that were part of his daily life.

Newnham College has been very supportive in facilitating Jerome’s extraordinary polar experience and he is very much looking forward to sharing his story with colleagues, fellows and students.

Come along this Friday 24th of May for a relaxed Pudding Seminar about Antarctica, history, penguins and remote living!

Programme for Lent Term 2024

19 January 2024: Suri Li (PhD, History of Art), ‘The Poor Clares and the Meditations on the Life of Christ’

26 January 2024: Constanza Leeb (MCR),’Me, myself and AI: AI-Augmentation at the workplace’

2 February 2024: Vaidehi Roy Chowdhury (MCR, Centre for Misfolding Diseases), ‘Mechanisms of aggregation and pathogenesis of the amyloidogenic peptide medin’

9 February 2024: Miranda Evans (PhD, Archaeology), ‘The Proteomics of Pottery: What can dirty dishes tell us about ancient cuisine?’

16 February 2024: Eve Canning (JCR, Linguistics), ‘The stories of our lives: Evidence from linguistic phylogenetics, syntax, and language contact’

23 February 2024: Nikita Jha (MCR), ‘Looking for Windmills: What Can the ‘Invisible’ Schools of India Teach Us About Evolving from Crisis?’

1 March 2024: Isobel Ackerman (MCR), ‘Secret Cities: publishing ‘unusual guidebooks’’

8 March 2024: Emma Arnold (JCR, Classics), ‘Loving Animals: Pastoral, Politics, and the Representation of Animals in Daphnis and Chloe’

Programme for Michaelmas Term 2023

13 October: Juliette Limozin (PhD), ‘Unravelling Cause and Effect: Exploring Causal Inference and Trial Emulation’

20 October: Saleyha Ahsan (MCR), on the impact of attacks against healthcare in armed conflict

27 October: Yana Stoykova (MCR), ‘Is Consent Necessary for Ethical Sex?’

3 November: Sangeet S. Jain (MCR), ‘Industrial policy in crisis: India’s COVID-19 innovation ecosystem’

10 November: Shona Brophy (Part III Maths), on the history of mathematics

17 November: Jasmine Crosbie (JCR), ‘Asexuality and Mental Health’

24 November: Linh Nguyen (MCR), ‘The Epistemology of Heartbreak’

Programme for Easter Term 2023

28 April: Aneira King (JCR), ‘Creating writers: an exploration of women’s religious spaces and the development of authors in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Antonia White’s Frost in May’

5 May: Ranjini (PhD),’ From Bayadere to Classical Dancer: Aesthetics and Politics in the making of dance in independent India ‘

12 May: Leah Brainerd (PhD), ‘Is it the Tools or the Fields that make us? Modelling the Ecological Niche for Rice during the Yayoi Period in Japan’

19 May: Samantha Huston (PhD), ‘Playful edits: young children’s use of play after storytime to change stories’

Programme for Lent Term 2023

• 27 January 2023: Esme Ashe-Jepson (MCR), ‘Thermoregulatory ability versus thermal tolerance in tropical butterflies: alternative strategies to cope with climate change’
• 3 February 2023: Tasnuva Ferdous Ming Khan (MCR), ‘Under the sea: Ecosystem structure of Antarctic seafloor invertebrates in the modern oceans and in the fossil record’
• 10 February 2023: Mahera Sarkar (JCR), ‘Should a different approach be permitted for people who do not recognise brainstem death as death for religious reasons?’
• 17 February: Keir Hesse and Jude Taylor (JCR), ‘Spaces within Spaces: Gender Non-Conformity at a Women’s College’
• 24 February 2023: Karinder Brar (PhD, UK Dementia Institute), Mechanisms to Medicines in Neurodegeneration
• 3 March 2023: Florence Harry (MCR), “Anthropology and Theology: an ‘Awkward’ – or ‘Transformative’ – Relationship?”
• 10 March 2023: Shaaroni Wong (PhD), ‘Nothing and Everything: Turning to the Void as Research Methodology’

Programme for Michaelmas Term 2022

• 21 October 2022: Laura Dennis (Curator), on Newnham’s Portrait Collection
• 28 October 2022: Milena Ivanova (Special Supervisor), ‘What makes an experiment beautiful?’
• 4 November 2022, Margarida Dias Rodrigues (Special Supervisor), on new tools for the early diagnosis of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s
• 11 November 2022, Rose Frith (JCR), on Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? Oder Theater?
• 18 November 2022: Mollie Etheridge (MCR), ‘Feminist refusal in the care-full obfuscations of UK-based doctoral students’ [CANCELLED]

Programme for Easter Term 2018

27 April: Bijun Tang (MPhil), ‘Seeing Plant Hormone in Action’
4 May: Chrystel Papi (MPhil), ‘‘Tracing the roots of a Globalisation backlash in American political outcomes of the early interwar period (1919–30)’
11 May: Tanya Paes (MCR) will present her research on the relation between play and children’s development
18 May: Erika Teichert (PhD), ‘Difficult Histories: Representing Memory and Human Rights in Argentina’

Programme for Lent Term 2018

• 9 February: Bao Nguyen Nguyen Thi (PhD), ‘Supramolecular Cages as Membranes for Chemical Separations’
• 16 February: Samatha Leggett (PhD), ‘Food and Faith in Anglo-Saxon England, the challenges of multi-disciplinary research’
• 23 February: Artricia Rasyid (MCR), ‘Anthropologist, Quo Vadis? Deriving Private-Public Sector Knowledge from Multi-Modal Ethnography in Indonesia’s Chinese Mosque (2018), Bali “Aga” Village (2017) and Urban Slums (2015)’
• 2 March: Elizabeth Campion (LLM) on her experience advocating in disability benefits tribunals pro bono.

Programme for Michaelmas Term 2017

27 October: Dr Emma Wild-Wood (SCR), ‘Mobile Religion and a Holy City: Refashioning Sacred Space in West Africa’
3 November: Zsofia Szlamka, ‘Interning with the World Health Organisation’
10 November: Panayiota Katsamba (MCR), ‘A tale of spaceship-looking viruses: Migration of phages along bacterial flagella’
17 November: Constanza Toro-Valdivieso, ‘Conservation genetics: The microbiome as an indicator of population stability in fur seals populations’
24 November: Juliette Losq, Newnham alumna and artist

Programme for Easter term 2017

28 April: Dror Sharon (MPhil in Political thought and Intellectual History)
5 May: Vera Chapiro (JCR, Sociology), ‘The Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration: a museum for immigrants?’
12 May:  Holly Corfield Carr (PhD English), ‘Readings in depth: Thomas Hardy’s ‘double-eyed’ vision’
19 May: Artist Cathy de Moncheaux will talk about her new public art works for Newnham

Programme for Lent Term 2017

27 January: ‘Extraordinary’ Pudding Seminar with Mike Levy, ‘We must save the children’.
10 February: Dr Alexandra Vukovich, ‘Demystifying the Land of Darkness’
17 February: ‘Form and Place’, A Poetry Reading by John Greening (RLF Fellow)
24 February: Jessie Fyfe (PhD, Architecture), ‘Legacies of witness testimony on physical and memorial landscapes in Croatia’
3 March: Henrietta McBurney Ryan (Advisor on Valuable Possessions) ‘Hidden Treasures from the Newnham College Collections’

Programme for Michaelmas Term 2016

28 October, ‘Extraordinary Pudding Seminar’: Professor Michael. H. Allen (Harvey Wexler Chair in Political Science at Bryn Mawr College), ‘Reluctant Consent: Changing Postures of Obligation in International Law within the Globalizing World Economy’
4 November: Dr Úna Monaghan (SCR), ‘Contemporary Irish Traditional Music: New Technologies, Improvisation and Experimental Practices’
11 November: Natasha Crosby (JCR), ‘The Divine Woman: Visualising Beatrice in Dante’s Vita Nuova‘
18 November: Callie Vandewiele (MCR), ‘Our Grandmothers’ looms: Q’eqchi’ weavers, museum textiles and the repatriation of lost knowledge’
25 November: Dr Maria Matos (SCR), ‘Developing cancer therapeutics: modification of a unique lysine residue on native proteins and antibodies’

Programme for Michaelmas Term 2015

6 November 2015: Lydia Hamlett (SCR, Art History), ‘Pandora and her pithos at Petworth House’
13 November 2015: Amanda Aldercotte (MCR, Psychology)
20 November 2015: EXTRAORDINARY PUDDING SEMINAR given by invited speaker Paul Mylrea, the University’s Director of Communications
27 November 2015: Becky Kershaw (MCR, Nanoscience), ‘Nanomedicine in diagnostics: a ‘plastic antibody’ for preclinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease? ‘

Programme for Easter Term 2015

24 April 2015: Professor Terence Doyle,’Thinking in Pictures; Leonardo da Vinci as a Physiologist’
1 May 2015: Veronica Wong (MCR): ‘Chemistry Sugar Rush: The chemistry behind wrinkling and ageing’
8 May 2015: Kaylan Schwartz (MCR): ‘Authenticity and the international volunteer excursion: What constitutes a ‘real’ Kenyan experience?’
15 May 2015: Katherine Olley (MCR): ‘The End in the Beginning: Continuing Without Closure in the Hildr Legend’

Programme for Michaelmas Term 2014

• 31 October 2014: Christina Koning (Royal Literary Fund Fellow) ‘Getting the past in your sights’: some thoughts on writing and research’
• 7 November 2014: Riamsara Kuyakanon Knapp (MCR) ‘Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tunnelling through to Sustainable Development? Examining the bonds of conservation-culture-development in the Bhutan Himalaya’
• 14 November 2014: Emma Troop (JCR) ‘An innovative approach to tackling education poverty in Kenya: Impact investing and social entrepreneurship’
• 21 November 2014: Dr Kumar Aniket (SCR) ‘Microfinance: The Economics of buying a buffalo’
• 28 November 2014: Professor Rae Langton (SCR) ‘Authority in sexual speech’

Programme for Easter Term 2014

Friday 25 April 2014: Peng Zhang (MCR), ‘A Tale of Two Classes: Intergenerational Occupational Choice in Contemporary China’
Friday 2 May 2014: Susan Haines (SCR), ‘Where has all the antimatter gone? Probing matter-antimatter asymmetries at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider’
Friday 9 May 2014: Birgitta Olofsson (SCR), ‘From metabolism to behaviour: what a tiny worm can tell us about foraging decisions’
Friday 16 May 2014: Jenna Dittmar (MCR), ‘A microscopic analysis of human dissection techniques across England from 1700-1900’

Programme for Lent 2014

• Friday 7 February 2014: Magali Krasny (MCR), ‘Sharing economic knowledge after 2008: case studies in France’
• Friday 14 February 2014: Sertaç Sehlikoglu (MCR), ‘Becoming fit in “Men-Free” Spaces: Desirious Subjects in Istanbul’
• Friday 21 February 2014: Grace Copplestone (JCR), ‘Learn to code – An insight into the workings of the world wide web with tips about how to make a website of your own’
• Friday 28 February 2014: Alex Da Costa (SCR), ‘Impairment and Disability in Medieval Literature’
• Friday 7 March 2014: Claire Nichols (JCR), ‘Magnetism of Meteorites: Clues to Planetary Formation in the Early Solar System

Programme for Michaelmas 2013

• 1 November 2013: Zoe Wyatt (JCR) – Network Analysis: Facebook graph search and making sense of Big Data
• 8 November 2013: Hannah Marshall (JCR) – Absenteeism in rural Ugandan schools
• 15 November 2013: Jenny Reid (Alumna; NC 2007) – Therapeutic hypothermia for traumatic brain injury, too cool to be true?
• 22 November 2013: Jennifer Bishop (MCR) – Silver mining projects in mid-16th-century England and Ireland: foreign expertise and the early modern state
• 29 November 2013: Professor Dame Carol Black (Principal) -Sickness absence: policy into practice