Saying Goodbye to Oxford’s Norham Gardens

After a long plane flight from California, I reached the house in Norham Gardens on a cold January day, dragging two suitcases containing enough clothing for my five-month stay as an academic visitor at Oxford University. The Victorian Gothic house was forbidding and strange – with closed doors between all the rooms. It had sat…

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Carved in Stone: Addressing Rhodes’s Colonial Legacy

On a bitterly cold day in mid-January, Mat Davies led our group of Oxford Next Horizons scholars to the exterior of Rhodes House where a stone carver was etching the words of a  “sleeping” African language known as ǀxam into the building’s lower parapet. As the Rhodes Trust’s Director of Estate, Mat had been closely…

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POLAR X: True Stories About Women at the Poles

It was sweltering in Paris over the weekend of Polar X, an inaugural workshop and symposium at the Université Paris Cité which brought together scholars, artists, and writers from around the world to examine a new framework for thinking about polar narratives in the Arctic and Antarctic. On the first day, June 13th, Paris hit…

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