Here are the principal talks I can currently offer. Please get in touch to discuss terms if you are interested in booking me to speak to your group. Fee negotiable.
If one of the topics sounds interesting but you would like to alter it in some way, please also get in touch as this may be possible.
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NINE WOMEN, ONE HOUSE
Nine women have lived and died in the same York street, Micklegate, in the same house or a house in the same place. They range from Helike, married to a Roman centurion and far from her original home in the south of France, to Ursula, a twenty-first century woman with twenty-first century anxieties. How are their lives impacted by York's complex history and the time in which they live? How do they in some sense stand for all women, in all times? I discuss these questions, looking at how differing cultural norms throughout history have affected women's lives, from Roman times to the present day.
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YOU GIRLS STAY HERE: Gender roles in British children's fiction
The ideas and attitudes we learn as children help to shape our identity. Drawing on my own research, I examine some of the ways that gender roles are presented in children's fiction, with especial focus on the adventure fiction of the mid-twentieth century. Librarians and teachers condemned Enid Blyton and Biggles, even as children clamoured to read them. What was actually going on in mainstream children's books at that time, and have things changed?
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HE SAID, SHE SAID: The relationship between language and gender
It is widely agreed that gendered behaviour is at least partly a social construct, rather than biologically determined. To what extent do 'women talk like this, men like that', and to what extent does language itself actually contribute to the construction of gender roles? This talk looks at how modern research methods have revealed how deeply embedded assumptions about gender difference are in our everyday language, but also how this might be changing.
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DECONSTRUCTING BABEL: A look at the world's languages
Language is one of the key elements in being human. Other species communicate, but none with the same range and complexity. Drawing on my knowledge of Chinese, Japanese and several European languages in addition to an MPhil in Linguistics, I outline some of the differences and similarities of a wide variety of languages. I touch on sentence structure, vocabulary, phonetics and writing systems with examples and explanations aimed at a general audience. How does language reflect culture, and what is the linguistic future of our globalised world?
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BEDBUGS AND CHAMBERPOTS: Human hygiene through time and around the world
Today in the UK if we want a cup of coffee we fill the kettle from a tap, and if we want a shower we turn on running hot water. How did our ancestors get water, what did they use for toilet paper, how did they clean their teeth and how often did they bathe? Based on my book of this title, this talk answers these questions and more, and looks at differing social customs not just down the ages, but also around the world today.
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