8 December – 17:00-18:00 – Portrait of a Lady: Image, space and identity in fifteenth-century Merano

Venue: Keynes Library, Gordon Square

Booking: no booking required

Dr Joanne Anderson, Portrait of a Lady: Image, space and identity in fifteenth-century Merano

The Department of History of Art at Birkbeck presents a new series of seminars on medieval and renaissance art, supported by the Bequest established in memory of Professor Peter Murray, the Department’s founder. In the first series, beginning this autumn, Birkbeck scholars present aspects of their research.

12 December – Birkbeck Early Modern Societ – Barry Coward Memorial Lecture –  Professor Bernard Capp – ‘My Brother’s Keeper?’: siblings and their families in early modern England’ 

Venue: Malet Street, room B36

Booking: Members free (membership £7), non-members £4

This year’s Barry Coward Memorial Lecture will be given by Professor Bernard Capp, University of Warwick on 12 December 2014.

Professor Capp’s lecture is entitled ‘My Brother’s Keeper?’: siblings and their families in early modern England’. For more information on Professor Capp please see http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/people/staff_index/bcapp/

The lecture will be held at Birkbeck, Malet Street, room B36 at 6:30 pm and will be followed by our Christmas party (room B19).

12 December – 18:00 – 21:00 – BEI Employability Event and Winter Networking: Insiders Guides to the Civil Service and NHS

Venue: B35 Malet Street

Booking: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bei-employability-event-and-winter-networking-registration-14190320631

The event will begin in Malet B35 with a talk from Pia Larsen, outlining her career and fielding questions on how to achieve your career ambitions within the NHS.

Following this, Professor Philip Powell – Pro Vice-Master (Enterprise and Innovation) and Executive Dean, School of Business, Economics and Informatics, Birkbeck – will introduce and engage in conversation with Bill Crothers about his successful career.

His career highlights include:

Executive Director and a member of the Identity and Passport Service Board

Senior Executive at Accenture for 21 years
Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants
Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply
Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society
After this talk, Bill will field some questions based on his career and points raised within the talk. Current Civil Service Fast Streamers will be identified to answer any questions based on graduate entry during the pursuant networking (B02).

Winter Networking:

Socialise with current Civil Service Fast Streamers and your fellow colleagues on the last evening of term. Drinks and a light Christmas-themed buffet will be served.

12 December – 18:00 to 21:00 – Pits and Perverts Revisited: ‘Pride’ the movie and politics now!

Venue: Room B01, Clore Management Centre

Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/pits-and-perverts-revisited-pride-the-movie-and-politics-now-tickets-13749851175

Enjoyed and inspired by ‘Pride’ the film? Come and see a short documentary about the real story and hear from two of the key people portrayed in the film. This will be followed by a panel discussion about its relevance for politics today. And stay on for drinks….

Speakers will include:

Mike Jackson- founder member of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners – LGSM (one of the main characters in the film)

Siân James – Member of Parliament for Swansea East (one of the main characters in the film)

Diarmaid Kelliher – University of Glasgow. Author of ‘Solidarity and Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners 1984–5’ (History Workshop Journal 2014)

Bev Skeggs – Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Daniel Monk – (Chair) Birkbeck, University of London & Director, BiGS

12 December – 18:00 to 20:30 – Leverhulme Lecture II: Post-Secular Constitutionalism

Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square

Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/leverhulme-lecture-ii-registration-13628666709

Post-Secular Constitutionalism

Professor Michel Rosenfeld discusses how modern constitutionalism based on the ideals of the Enlightenment favours secularism over religion, relegating the latter for the most part to the private sphere. In more recent times, constitutional secularism has been attacked as anti-religious rather than neutral, but arguably this objection can be overcome from a pluralist perspective that places secularism as an ideology alongside other religious and non-religious ideologies found within the polity.

The lecture is followed by a reception.

Michel Rosenfeld is Professor of Human Rights and director of the Program on Global and Comparative Constitutional Theory at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, New York; and the co-editor (with Susanna Mancini) of Constitutional Secularism in an Age of Religious Revival OUP (2014). His visit to Birkbeck School of Law is courtesy of a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, whose support is gratefully acknowledged.

 

1 December – 18:00-20:00 – The Business of Inclusion in Football

Venue: B20 Torrington Square

Booking: None rquired

Join the Birkbeck Sport Business Centre and a special panel of senior figures from professional football for an evening of discussion and debate on how football takes its next steps on its journey to be the game that is truly ‘for everyone’.

The panel consists of senior executives from organisations who have taken the lead on inclusion in football and who will be vital in maintaining the momentum and taking football into the next era.

The evening will take as its particular focus inclusion for people from the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender (LGB&T) communities.

1 December – 18:00-19:30 – [Oracle Talk] CSI Kernel: Finding a Needle in a Multiterabyte Haystack

Venue: B30 Malet Street

Booking: None required

In 1990, a typical Sun system had a single 10mhz cpu and 4MB of memory and might have run in the region of 30-50 processes. Today Oracle ships systems with 512 cpu’s and 4TB of memory and such systems have a few 100,000 processes at most. The roadmap suggests that by 2015 this will rise to cpu counts around 13,000 and 150TB of memory to serve workloads in excess of 1 million processes.

Like C.S.I., when a system fails a post-mortem is required.  A crash dump is the body, an image of the system memory at the time of failure. This talk looks at technical, logistical and tools challenges of diagnosing system failure after the fact when the body is 4TB in size and the challenges of scaling post-mortem failure diagnosis to ever larger configurations.

Dr Clive King is a Senior Staff Engineer in Oracle Solaris Engineering. He has worked for Sun — Oracle for 15 years in a variety of support, professional services and kernel engineering roles. His particular areas of focus are system performance, scalability and root causing system failures. He teaches problem solving, risk management and root cause analysis within Solaris Engineering.

He is a BCS examiner for a professional examination, a BCS academic panel member and has been a PhD external examiner. Outside work, he splits his time between family and mountain running.

There is an IEEE software paper on which the talk is based. Tim will give a few examples from his wider experience as well.

2 December – 09:15-17:30 – ‘On the Street Where you Live’: Bourdieusian analysis of socio-spatial hierarchy

Venue:  BSA meeting room in Imperial Wharf London

Booking: http://portal.britsoc.co.uk/public/event/eventBooking.aspx?id=EVT10395 – cost from £28

Key Note Speakers: Dr Paul Watt (Birkbeck) Dr Michaela Benson (Goldsmith) Dr Tracey Jensen (UEL) Dr Simon Harding (Middlesex University) and Stephen Crossley (Durham)

The relations between the social world and urban space have been of interest to sociologists since the Chicago School’s human ecology tradition. In today’s globalised world, urbanisation is increasingly manifesting itself in people’s everyday lives, expressed through the diverse social, cultural and political space in which class, cultural and gender differences are continuously produced, contested and reworked. The move towards austerity in UK government’s fiscal policy, the weakening of state planning for urban growth and changes in residences from state property to private property has resulted in escalating house prices and the gentrification of traditionally ‘no go’ areas for the middle-class. Social divisions and sociocultural relationships are becoming ever more spatially generated.

2 December – 13:00-14:30 – Studying Women’s Movements in Comparative Perspective: A New Measurement from the Research Network on Gender and Politics (RNGS) Project

Venue: Paul Hirst Seminar Room, Department of Politics, Birkbeck, 10 Gower Street

Booking: j.hansson@bbk.ac.uk

Speaker: Prof. Amy G. Mazur, Washington State University; and visiting professor at Birkbeck during the fall of 2014.

Scholars of women’s movements have thus far not had access to enough conceptual tools that permit systematic comparison across a variety of temporal, sectoral and cultural contexts in order to construct sound theory about movements themselves as well as their social and political impacts. This presentation will offer a way of comparing variations in women’s movement strength through conceptualization that builds from research on gender equality policy, state feminism, women’s movements, and social movements. This approach involves careful definition of movements and movement strength as well as the specification of their dimensions for empirical observation through description, comparison and assessment of change. Using data from the RNGS project about women’s movements from the 1970s to the early 2000s in 13 Western democracies, the talk will illustrate how this approach can advance the study of and theorizing about women’s movements both as drivers and outcomes.

2 December – 18:00-20:00 – Global PA Association Launch

Venue: Keynes Library, 46 Gordon Square

Booking: enquiries@globalpa-association.com

We are pleased to invite Personal Assistants interested in furthering their careers to the launch event of the Global PA Association. Drinks and canapes will be served from 6pm.

Guest speakers include:

Pia Larsen – Director of Procurement and Supply Chain, UCLH

Katrina Arratoon – Executive PA Magazine ‘PA of the Year’

Paula Moio – BBC

Michelle Barber – Network Rail

Please email Rosemary Parr to book your place in advance.

3 December – 16:00-17:00 – THE TRANSPORT INTERNET SEMINAR

Venue: Imperial College London

Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-transport-internet-foodtubes-electric-cargo-capsule-pipelines-tickets-12509194337

The Transport Internet & Foodtubes Project Team are presenting and discussing this planet saving project with scientists engineers and students at Imperial College London, at 4 pm to 5 pm on Wednesday 3rd December 2014. Dave Wetzel who was Vice-Chairman of Transport for London will describe the impact on cities and citizens, Noel Hodson will outline the new project as a basis for a new global transport industry and new jobs, and Professor Taylor will respond to technical questions from the audience.

We invite Engineering under-graduates, graduates, tutors and all those who are concerned about environmental issues and commerce – governments, banks, pipeline companies, freight companies, food companies, civil engineers, architects, media and concerned citizens etc. to attend.

5 December – 18:00-21:00 – Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image Guilt Screening-The Last of England

Venue: Birkbeck Cinema, Gordon Square

Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bisr-guilt-screening-tickets-12951382935

The Last of England
Derek Jarman, UK, 1987, 87 minutes
Presenter: James Brown

The Last of England is preoccupied with stray beauty and with violence.

Jarman appears in his warehouse studio, assembling a scrapbook. The film takes shape around him. Jarman conjures a vision of England out of his own Super 8 footage and home movies shot by his father and grandfather.

The Last of England is personal and poetic. Yet it is also a scathing critique of social and political reality. Echoing T.S. Eliot, Jarman writes, ‘My world is in fragments, smashed in pieces so fine I doubt I will ever re-assemble them’. Yet the film has the force of an indictment.