Climate change and the Irish Revolution explored in upcoming lecture series

Throughout April, Northumbria’s programme of public lectures includes a broad range of engaging topics from climate change to the Irish Revolution and the English-Scottish borders to the significance of gender in disasters. The lectures are delivered by leading Northumbria professors, key public figures and prominent scholars.

In the first of this month’s series – on Wednesday April 15 – Ulrich Salzmann, Professor of Paleoecology at Northumbria, will discuss how vegetation and climate changed during selected time periods over the last 50 million years. In the lecture, entitled ‘Vegetation and Climate Change – Lessons from the Past’, Professor Salzmann will present examples from ongoing research of gradual shifts of vegetation zones and collapses of entire ecosystems. 

The following Wednesday, on April 22, Ysanne Holt, Professor of Art History at Northumbria, will present ‘Performing the Border’ – a look at the cultural and creative significance of the English-Scottish border territory. Professor Holt’s research focuses on themes relating to the experience and representation of the UK north, in particular the shifting historical and present-day identities of marginal sites such as borders.

Next, Northumbria’s Maureen Fordham, Professor of Gender and Distance Resilience, will discuss  ‘What’s Gender got to do with it? Effecting Change through Gendered Disaster Risk Reduction’.  In this presentation – which will be held on Wednesday April 29 – Professor Fordham will review the most recent outcomes of the post-2015 global disaster and development policy agendas in relation to gender and disaster resilience.

Finally this month, on Thursday 30 April, Northumbria will welcome Roy Foster - Professor of Irish History at Oxford University and one of the most distinguished historians of his generation. In a lecture entitled ‘The Lives of Others: Biography, Hagiography and the Irish Revolution’, Professor Foster will look at the argumentative, exciting and subversive lives of the people who made the revolution – a topic covered in his most recent book Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890 – 1923 .

Each lecture begins at 6.30pm in Lecture Theatre 002, Business and Law Building at Northumbria’s City Campus East. Pre-lecture refreshments will be available from 6pm.

For more information or to book a place, please click here.