Linacre Lectures

Book your free space at this lecture here.

The role of women in historical events is often forgotten, covered up, or ignored. Comparatively female-authored sources are considerably fewer than male-authored and agency is attributed only exceptionally to women in events in the public masculine sphere described and documented by men. Such biases are fundamentally problematic for any attempts to obtain gender equality. But how do we re-inscribe the women missing from history if they are not in the sources?

Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, Lyndal Roper, deals with such questions as a part of her examinations of the German Peasant’s War for the inaugural lecture in our ‘Uncovering Women’s History’ series. ‘Did brotherhood include women? Was its radical egalitarianism just for men as peasants called for lords to get off their horses (which literally raised them above their peasants) or insisted they address each other as brothers? Did its idealisation of manhood exclude women, who do not seem to have joined in the ‘circles’ where men took counsel together and who did not swear the oaths which bound the rebels together?’

The second lecture in the ‘Uncovering Women’s History series’ is entitled ‘Writing Medieval Economic History during the Interwar Years’ and will be delivered by Professor Maxine Berg.

Maxine Berg FBA is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Warwick, Honorary Fellow of Balliol College and Associate Member of the History Faculty, Oxford.  She has researched and written about many areas of economic and social history including women’s history. Maxine has also published several books, including ‘A Woman in History: Eileen Power 1889-1940 (1996)’ which will be the focus of her fascinating lecture.

Eileen Power ranked among the most well-known medieval historians of the interwar years. She developed the women’s history and social history she was famed for through the 1920s as part of her activism in the peace and suffrage movements.  As war loomed again in the later 1930s she greatly extended her comparative social/economic history into world history.  As Professor of Economic History at the LSE from 1931 until her death in 1940 she was the second woman to hold this chair and among the handful of women who held chairs in history in Britain until after the 1980s.

Book your free space at this fascinating lecture here.

To build a career in academia, you need talent, creativity, exceptional skills, expertise, and intelligence. However, for women, these qualities alone are not enough. They face additional demands and adversities their male counterparts don’t have to deal with. This makes the academic career path unfairly challenging for women. To achieve real equality, we need to understand the unique struggles that women face and how we can address them.

In the third lecture of the series, Amrei Bahr will aims to shed light on these issues. She is a junior professor of philosophy of technology and information at the University of Stuttgart and, together with Kristin Eichhorn and Sebastian Kubon, she initiated the #IchBinHanna campaign, which has sparked an ongoing influential debate on working conditions in German academia.

Book your free space here.

Book your space at the fourth and final lecture on our ‘Uncovering Women’s History’ series here.

Barbara D. Savage is an historian from the University of Pennsylvania and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought in the Department of Africana Studies. In 2018-19, she was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford.

Her most recent book ‘Merze Tate:  the Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar’ won the 2024 Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s Best Book Award and the 2024 Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians for the Best Book in Black Women’s History.

In this lecture, Professor Barbara Savage will explore Merze Tate and modern black womanhood. She says;

“In the 1930s, the black woman scholar Merze Tate began to develop her ideas about modern black womanhood.  In the 1970s, nearing the end of her career, Tate served as both an interviewer and an interviewee for Harvard’s Black Womens Oral History Project, a still-invaluable resource in African American and women’s history.  That work brought full circle Tate’s ideas about black women’s lives.  Looking at her life and those of the women she interviewed raises questions about the ways that intellectual biography can trouble and unsettle prevailing historical narratives, including about modern black women.”