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.

This semester the Seminar Series is focussed on 'Culture and Power'. As the social theorist David Swartz has observed, ‘Culture provides the very grounds for human communication and interaction; it is also a source of domination. The arts, science, religion, indeed all symbolic systems – including language itself – not only shape our understanding of reality and form the basis for human communication; they also help establish and maintain social hierarchies' (Culture and Power, 1998). This interdisciplinary series will explore the complex relationship between culture and power from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives.

Seminar title	Speaker
Nation and Narration: The Irish Literary Revival	Keith Hopper - Kellogg College, University of Oxford
Cultural Geographies of Power	Dr Derek McCormack - Mansfield College, University of Oxford
Portraying the Power and Persona of the Monarch, 1603-1830	Daniel Jordan - Hertford College, University of Oxford
The Symbolism and Ritual of Kingship in Medieval England: Exercising Power through Culture	Paul Sinclair - St. Clare's, Oxford
The Power Behind the Purchase: Using Neuroscience in the Marketplace	Anna Scarna - Dept of Psychiatry, University of Oxford
The Power of Culture in Psychotherapy	Niamh Moriarty - PPC Worldwide, Oxford
Feminism and Media Representations of Women	Kate Kirkpatrick - St. Cross College, University of Oxford
Blood and Matzo: the Middle East, Myth and Historical Anti-Semitism	Peter Claus - Pembroke College, University of Oxford
Composition and Performance in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction	David Chaplin - St. Clare's, Oxford