lectures for peace 2025

‘Timing: please note that bookings close at 5.30 pm on the day of the lecture. We can’t monitor the mailbox once we are in the zoom call, so please book before 5.30 pm to be sure that we see your email. Thank you!

Theatre as Protest: Euripides’ Trojan Women with Jan Parker

Euripides' Trojan Women, exploring the devastation and dehumanising effect of war, is sadly timeless. But it was written while the wives and children for sale in the Athenian slave market were, for the first time, the victims of the total reduction of a free Greek state. This decision was taken by the Athenians after a debate arguing that for a strong state, compassion is weakness, that might is right.

We will explore the characters whose fate echoes down the ages: Hecuba, Andromache, baby Astyanax, Helen in the Trojan Women and in the Iliad and ask about the politics of compassion.

With Jan Parker, University of Cambridge.

Sunday 14 December 2025 live online
18.00-20.00 British Summer Time
19.00-21.00 Central European Summer Time
Morning or lunchtime in the Americas

Set Reading

Trojan Women text trans. Ian Johnston (2022).

Optional Further Reading

The Iliad text online.
Jan Parker, The Iliad and Odyssey: The Trojan War, Tragedy and Aftermath (London, 2021) 
Essay on the Context for The Trojan Women. Cambridge Greek Play (1998) website.

To book, please make a donation to one or more of the charities via the buttons below, to a total of:

£33.00 full price (£11.00 to each charity)
£30.00 students and unwaged (£10.00 to each charity)
£30.00 CAMcard holders (£10.00 to each charity)

We suggest that people support all 3 charities equally, but it is up to you to decide how to distribute your donation. Links to the charities’ websites for donations:

• Oxfam Gaza and Lebanon Campaign (food and medical relief to Gaza and Lebanon)
• Standing Together (Palestinian and Jewish joint peace campaign, protecting aid for Gaza and protesting within Israel to end the war and the Occupation); updates on their Instagram page.
• Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group (helping refugees in the UK)

Please email us with a copy of the donation receipt and we will add you to the attendance list. If you have any problems doing this, please let us know and we will help to sort it out.

Thank you so much for your support.

Lectures for Peace 2026

Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet? with Alison Hennegan

Saturday 7 March 2026, 6.00-8.00 pm UK time.

For many people the name of Siegfried Sassoon is inseparably linked with that of Wilfred Owen, and together they remain probably the best known English poets of the Great War.  But when in 1918 Sassoon published his most famous volume of war poetry, ‘Counter Attack’, he already had twenty-five years of authorship behind him for he had been writing poems from the age of seven.

Although he would often make gentle fun of his very early pre-war poems, many of them are in fact remarkable for their focus on themes and emotions particularly associated with  his ‘war’ poetry. The very young Sassoon was already ‘haunted’ by death, ghosts, a strong and constant sense of human mortality, and a vision of the world which could encompass both the  nightmarishly deformed and the numinously beautiful. This lecture explores the young Sassoon as ‘a war poet in the making’. 

To book, please make a donation to one or more of the charities via the buttons below, to a total of:

£33.00 full price (£11.00 to each charity)
£30.00 students and unwaged (£10.00 to each charity)
£30.00 CAMcard holders (£10.00 to each charity)

We suggest that people support all 3 charities equally, but it is up to you to decide how to distribute your donation. Links to the charities’ websites for donations:

• Oxfam Gaza and Lebanon Campaign (food and medical relief to Gaza and Lebanon)
• Standing Together (Palestinian and Jewish joint campaign for equality and peace and against the Occupation); updates on their Instagram page.
• Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group (helping refugees in the UK)

Please email us with a copy of the donation receipt and we will add you to the attendance list. If you have any problems doing this, please let us know and we will help to sort it out.

Thank you so much for your support.