The St. Clare's Seminar Series has provided an opportunity for students to explore a stimulating range of issues and ideas. Each semester the series is linked by a common theme. Themes in previous years have included: Death and Love; Dreams and Nightmares; Creation and Inspiration; Tragedy and Love; Cultural Contests; The Sense of Place; Representing Childhood; The City and Modern Life.

Boundaries and Borders - ‘The only truly serious questions are ones … with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, and describe the boundaries of human existence' (Milan Kundera). The world is defined by all kinds of boundaries and borders: geographical, psychological, political, historical, philosophical and cultural. Are these dividing lines a part of nature or are they artificial constructs? Do we need boundaries and borders to define our existence, or can we dispense with some of these limits? This interdisciplinary series will explore this topic from a variety of critical and cultural perspectives.

Seminar title	Speaker
Boundaries and Borders in Literature: The Strange Case of Flann O'Brien	Keith Hopper - Kellogg College, Oxford
Boundary Objects: On things becoming lighter than air	Dr Derek McCormack - Mansfield College, Oxford
Social Psychology of Group Boundaries: ‘We' and ‘They' or is it ‘Us'?	Huseyin Cakal - St. Cross College, Oxford
‘Beating the Bounds': creating and contesting boundaries in the Middle Ages	Paul Sinclair - St. Clare's, Oxford
What is Partition?	Dr Maurice Walsh - Kingston University, London
Boundaries and Borders in the Psychotherapeutic Space	Niamh Moriarty - PPC Worldwide, Oxford
Bipolar Disorder: the illness that crosses all boundaries	Dr Anna Scarna - Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford
Dispatches from the Border: religion, altered states, and near-death experience	David Chaplin - St. Clare's, Oxford
‘Sundry strange things': Renaissance transgressions	Victoria Staveley - St. Clare's, Oxford