30 Jan 2025

This richly illustrated lecture will discuss the Nan Lian Garden in Hong Kong. The Nan Lian Garden is a Chinese classical garden which covers an area of 3.5 hectares. It is designed in Tang dynasty style with hills, water features, trees, rocks and wooden structures.

This course explores the growing impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in key sectors: biology, medicine, energy, transportation and the environment. Participants will gain insights into AI’s breakthroughs in drug discovery, diagnostics and personalised medicine, alongside its contributions to energy efficiency and environmental sustainability, examining everything from smart grids to climate modelling. Each lecture will include a blend of case studies, ethical discussions and technological advancements, equipping participants with a comprehensive understanding of how AI is reshaping critical aspects of our world.

By 2050 the number of people living with dementia is predicted to more than triple. This lecture will give an overview of dementia, its causes and its consequences. It will focus on Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia, and explore what the study of people ageing with HIV can tell us about the mechanisms underlying this disease. Recently the first medications to treat Alzheimer’s disease have been approved. Although their benefit is currently modest, we will discuss whether this may herald a new era of dementia management.

This course explores the music and ideas of Claude Debussy. We discover how Debussy liberated music from traditional Germanic modes of expression and initiated new ways of composing. The term Impressionism is explored. Debussy is introduced, and the manner in which he transferred these ideas to music is discussed. The second lecture explores the work of the Impressionist painters and their influence on composers in countries other than France. We see how their ideas influenced the succeeding generation of artists, paving the way for new trends in the twentieth century.

This lecture will demonstrate how contact between humans and lions has shown evidence of mutual comprehension that has been co-created by the changes in human and lion lifeways. It will discuss how a real lion-human community were speaking to each other and used this conversation to survive in a shared territory in the Kalahari Desert. This storywill be used as a way of thinking afresh about how we tell more-than-human histories in a way that challenges us to take animal cultures seriously.

In Louisa Treger’s novels, history comes alive through the pioneering women who defied convention and rewrote their own destinies. Dorothy Richardson, Lady Virginia Courtauld, Nellie Bly and Dora Maar reshaped culture and left indelible marks on history. But have things really changed for women today? Treger’s novels don’t just recount the past – they challenge us to see its reflection in our modern world, asking if the battles fought by these remarkable women are truly over or if their struggle for freedom and identity continues to this day.

Professor Moshabela demonstrates a deep knowledge of the challenges he may encounter and has shown that he will work with conviction and vision to ensure the university’s sustainability into and beyond 2030. He has shown a sincere commitment to agile, transformative and values-based leadership. His what the university wants and needs. ‘The advantage that I’m seeing about UCT is that people have a lot of willingness to see the challenges UCT faces put behind us. We must collectively focus on building a sense of community and trust to overcome challenges.’

Picasso dominated the twentieth century. His arrival in Paris at the age of nineteen plunged him into the toxic atmosphere of Montmartre and led to life-changing relationships with people such as Gertrude and Leo Stein, Fernande Olivier, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, the legendary art dealer Ambroise Vollard, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and many others. Picasso’s sensitivity to the zeitgeist and his prophetic instincts about the coming of a world war are to be traced in his works leading up to 1914. This course looks at what happened afterwards.

One hundred and five years after the Treaty of Versailles and eighty-five years since the start of World War II, we wonder how the European powers stumbled from one war into another. This lecture-performance examines the historical events and social developments of those twenty fateful years through the responses of the authors of the period: Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, Federico García Lorca, George Orwell, and Bertolt Brecht.

A thirty-minute lecture will be followed by a ninety-minute tour of aspects of the Upper Campus, many less well-known or not usually observed. This tour will start at the War Memorial, located between Residence Road and Madiba Circle in the parking area outside Fuller and Upper Campus residences. The route will traverse the Upper Campus initially from south to north, along Residence Road to the south. Please wear comfortable walking shoes and bring a hat and water

Various smear-style campaigns and other attempts to snuff out incriminating information have been rolled out over the years to try to conceal crimes involving state capture. These include the sabotage of the South African Revenue Service and the State Security Agency. There are several other examples of crooks colluding with government figures. This lecture focuses on those examples the impact character assassins have on individuals who are accused of criminality. It will also look at the impact this has on us – and how intentionally incorrect narratives can overwrite our history.

Wieland Gevers will be in conversation with Anwar Mall about his memoir, The Meaning of a Life: A South African Scientist’s Tale. They will discuss the author’s deep involvement in the South African higher education and research system over a period of seven decades, after medical studies at UCT, and postgraduate research in Oxford and New York with two Nobel Prize winners. The meaning of a life devoted to these activities will be examined, in the sense of Socrates’ view that ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’.

Zapiro has been an activist and cartoonist for forty years. In this presentation, he shows cartoons that have elicited unusual responses, sometimes shocking, sometimes hilarious and sometimes downright strange. There have been blow-ups in the glare of the public spotlight and there have been backroom responses that have only come to light years after the drawings appeared. What intrigues him is how the parallel universe that cartoonists create imprints itself in unexpected ways on the real world.

‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ is a piano suite in ten movements, written in 1874. It is a musical depiction of a tour of an exhibition of works by architect and painter Viktor Hartmann, put on at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, following his sudden death the previous year. Each movement of the suite is based on an individual work, some of which are lost. Join Professor Romero as he discusses and performs ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’.