Digital Event Type: Zoom Lecture

Two Renegade Sexologists – Mikita Brottman

Renegade Sexologists

This lecture will consider the life and work of two renegade sexologists: Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and J. Paul de River. The aristocratic Krafft-Ebing was a German psychiatrist and author of the seminal Psychopathia Sexualis. J. Paul de River was the chief psychiatrist of the Los Angeles Sex Offense Bureau during the 1940s and author of The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytic Study. The work of these two eccentric, obsessive, and sometimes deluded psychiatrists provide compelling time-capsules into the dark underbelly of 19th century Vienna, and the sordid backstreets of mid-century Los Angeles. Lectures will be illustrated and enhanced by vivid clinical case studies of what the authors deem “sexual psychopaths.”

Speaker Bio

Mikita Brottman, PhD, NCPsyA, is an Oxford-educated scholar, true crime author, psychoanalyst, and professor of literature and psychology at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She performs forensic evaluations for the National Institute for the Study, Prevention, and Treatment of Sexual Trauma. She was formerly the Chair of Engaged Humanities at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, and has taught at various universities in Europe and the USA. She has also worked in the Maryland prison system and forensic psychiatric facilities. She is the author of 16 books. Her latest, Guilty Creatures: Sex, Death and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2025.

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The Ghosts of Christmas Past – Sarah Clegg- Zoom

The Ghosts of Christmas Past

Christmas might seem like a time of jollity and cheer, but underneath all the tinsel and fairy lights there’s a far darker mood – one we see expressed in our modern custom of telling ghost stories at Christmas, in monsters like the Krampus, which roam the streets of European towns and cities across the Christmas season, and the horrible horse-skulled monster the Mari Lwyd who appears across Wales in the darkest nights of the year.

This talk will examine both the origins of these dark Christmas customs, and how they’ve changed and shifted down through the centuries – following everything from the hierarchy shredding Roman festival of Saturnalia to the custom of dressing as a monster and going house-to-house demanding drinks, food and money (the origins of modern Halloween trick-or-treating), and even the Christmas witches, who were said to riot through the skies with bands of the dead over the midwinter.

Speaker Bio

Sarah Clegg has a PhD in ancient history from Cambridge University and was part of the 2020/21 London Library Emerging Writers Programme. Her most recent book – The Dead of Winter: the Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas– was published in 2024.

Curated & Hosted by

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.

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St Guthlac and Miracles in the Fens – Max Adams – Zoom

St Guthlac and Miracles in the Fens

Saint Guthlac, the Hermit of Crowland, led a fascinating life of miracles and political intrigue in the Fens in the 8th century.

Born into a noble family in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia (in what’s now the English Midlands), as a young man Guthlac formed a band of soldiers. Then, aged 24, he experienced a profound conversion and became a monk at a monastery in Derbyshire. Deciding that he wished to live a solitary life as a hermit, he chose a remote and desolate location on the island of Crowland in the Fens, like Christ in the desert or Saint Anthony in the wilderness.

The British author and television presenter Max Adams will guide us through Guthlac’s journey from soldier to saint, drawing on sources including the Guthrac Roll, a beautifully drawn medieval illustrated account of his life.

Speaker Bio

Max Adams is the author of fourteen books, and the writer and presenter of several documentary films. He began his career as an archaeologist, excavating widely and publishing many papers and monographs. He later became a broadcaster and woodsman and began to travel more widely for writing. He has written biography and group biography, several histories of Early Medieval Britain and a number of books on trees and woodlands. His debut novel The Ambulist was published in 2016. The Firebringers (2009) was a Guardian Book of the Week, and Max has been widely reviewed in The Times, TLS, LRB, and elsewhere. The King in the North and The Wisdom of Trees were both bestsellers.

Max continues to manage woodlands and plant trees, to travel and, increasingly, illustrate his work with his own photographs and maps.

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An Unusual History of Fish – Amorina Kingdon – Zoom

An Unusual History of Fish

For centuries humans ignored sound in the ‘silent world’ of the ocean, assuming that what we couldn’t perceive, didn’t exist. But we couldn’t have been more wrong. Marine scientists now have the technology to record and study the complex interplay of the myriad sounds in the sea. Finally, we can trace how sounds travel with the currents, bounce from the seafloor and surface, bend with temperature and even saltiness; how sounds help marine life survive; and how human noise can transform entire marine ecosystems.

Award-winning science journalist Amorina Kingdon, author of Sing Like Fish, will give a clear and compelling portrait of this sonic undersea world. From plainfin midshipman fish, whose swim-bladder drumming is so loud it keeps houseboat-dwellers awake, to the syntax of whalesong, from the deafening crackle of snapping shrimp, to underwater earthquakes and volcanoes, Amorina will explain how sound plays a vital role in feeding, mating, parenting, navigating, and warning.

Meanwhile, our seas also echo with human-made sound, and we are only just learning how these pervasive noises can mask mating calls, chase animals from their food, and even wound creatures. Amorina’s lecture will be a captivating exploration of how underwater animals tap into sound to survive, and a clarion call for humans to address the ways we invade these critical soundscapes.

Speaker Bio

Amorina Kingdon is a writer based in Victoria, British Columbia. Until 2021 she was the staff writer for Hakai Magazine, where her work was anthologized in Best Canadian Essays 2020 (Biblioasis). She has received a Digital Publishing Award and a Jack Webster Award, and been honoured as Best New Magazine Writer by the National Magazine Awards.

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The Mysteries of Easter Island – James Grant-Peterkin – Zoom

The Mysteries of Easter Island

For centuries, the iconic stone statues of Easter Island have puzzled visitors to this remote outpost in the South Pacific. Who carved them? Why did they carve them? And what cataclysmic event later caused them all to be knocked down?

Ever since its discovery by European explorers on Easter Sunday 1722, the island has intrigued travellers with its colossal statues and unexplained archaeology. Found nowhere else in the world, these stone monoliths have even been attributed to the work of aliens and extraterrestrials.

Join James Grant-Peterkin as he discusses what might have actually happened on Easter Island and what the famous ‘heads’ really mean; and why the island’s history also serves as a cautionary lesson to humankind regarding overpopulation and the management of finite resources on our one island – planet Earth.

Speaker Bio

James Grant-Peterkin first visited Easter Island in 1996 almost by chance and was immediately captivated by life on one of the world’s most isolated inhabited islands. He read Modern Languages at Cambridge University which lead to a year’s fieldwork studying Rapa Nui, the unique language spoken only on Easter Island. He went on to live on the island for over 20 years, running his own travel company there and serving as the British Honorary Consul. He is the author of A Companion to Easter Island (2023) as well as South Pacific (2025) in the Travel Enrichment Series.

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Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Chlamydia Through the Ages – Lena Heide Brennand & Cat Irving – Zoom

Plagues of Passion: A History of Herpes, Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, Hepatitis & HIV — A 6- Part Lecture Series Exploring the Dark Intimacies of Disease

Lecture three – Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Chlamydia Through the Ages

Often called the “silent infection,” Chlamydia trachomatis has shaped far more than modern sexual health statistics—it has left its mark on human history, medicine, and even cultural perceptions of disease. In this third part of our series, we trace chlamydia’s journey from obscure ancient ailments to one of the most reported infections worldwide. We will explore its medical recognition, the shifting social stigma surrounding it, and the transformative breakthroughs in diagnosis and treatment. Drawing on case studies from archaeology, literature, and public health campaigns, this lecture uncovers how an organism smaller than a grain of dust has influenced law, policy, and intimate relationships for centuries.
Prepare for a vivid, evidence-based exploration that moves seamlessly between the microscope and the macrocosm—where biology meets history, and medicine meets morality.

Speaker Bio

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

Speaker Bio:

Cat Irving has been the Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall since 2015 and has been caring for anatomical and pathological museum collections for over twenty years. After a degree in Anatomical Science she began removing brains and sewing up bodies at the Edinburgh City Mortuary. Following training in the care of wet tissue collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England she worked with the preparations of William Hunter at the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University, where she is now Consultant Human Remains Conservator. Cat is a licensed anatomist, and gives regular talks on anatomy and medical history. She recently carried out conservation work on the skeleton of serial killer William Burke

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Madness and Decadence in the 1890s – a Zoom talk with Nick Freeman

‘Then in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church; or if they did I have forgotten.’

So said W.B. Yeats in 1936, looking back at what he termed ‘the tragic generation’, the writers and artists he had known forty years earlier. His claim is a handy checklist of decadent attributes, but its rhetorical panache disguises the creative achievements and human tragedies of that time.

This talk examines the ways in which madness shaped and haunted English decadence during the 1890s and afterwards, looking at such intriguing characters such as the poets John Barlas and Arthur Symons, and the painter Charles Conder, all of whom experienced incarceration in asylums. It will investigate why madness seems to be so central to the decadent world-view and considers some of the ways in which iit continues to shape our response to creative visionaries.

 

About the Speaker

Nick Freeman teaches English at Loughborough University. He has published widely on decadence, the supernatural and the occult and has also edited a selection of A.M. Burrage’s ghost stories for the British Library’s Gilded Nightmares series.

Your curator and host for this event will be the author Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is All the Fear of the Fair (pub. Oct 2025) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

[Image: An absinthe addict eyeing three glasses on a table; advertisement for film Absinthe. Colour lithograph, ca. 1913. Source: Wellcome Collection.]

Spirits of Dark and Lonely Water – a Zoom talk with John Clark

In 1973 Britain’s Central Office of Information commissioned a film, directed at children, to warn them of the dangers of playing near ponds and rivers. Presiding over it was a sinister Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, voiced by the actor Donald Pleasance. In this presentation we shall look at how a similar approach was adopted by parents in the 19th century, and how they used ‘imaginary monsters’ to scare children away from dangerous waters. Our starting point is a recent Royal Mail stamp depicting just such a monster, named Grindylow. By way of the world of Harry Potter and the writings of 20th- and 19th-century folklorists we shall track Grindylow and her sisters Jenny Greenteeth and Nellie Longarmsto their lairs in the ponds and flooded marl pits of north-west England in the early 1800s.

 

Your speaker is John Clark, who was for many years Curator of the medieval collections of the Museum of London (now London Museum). Since his retirement in 2009 he has continued to research and publish on a range of subjects, including medieval horses and their equipment, London legends, and folklore and fairylore. His book on the medieval story of the Green Children of Woolpit, The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England, bringing together the results of some 25 years of research, was published in 2024 by University of Exeter Press in their series New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Belief.

Your curator and host for this online event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. He has edited two anthologies of classic ghost stories for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series – Eerie East Anglia (2024) and his latest, All the Fear of the Fair: Uncanny Tales of Circus and Sideshow (pub. Oct 2025). For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – the next day we will send you a recording valid for two weeks.

 

[Image: montage of a still from Lonely Water (Central Office for Information, 1973) and a depiction of Grindylow by Adam Simpson for the Royal Mail’s 2025 ‘Myths and Legends’ stamp series (© Stamp Design Royal Mail Group Ltd, 2025).]

Greek Myth and Religion – Philip Matyszak – Zoom

Greek Myth and Religion

What did the Ancient Greeks actually believe – and how did it shape the way they lived their lives?

Philip Matyszak, a noted scholar of Greek myth and religion and author of numerous books such as A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece (Michael O’Mara, 2021), will guide us through the Ancient Greeks’ belief system, bringing their world to life. He’ll give us an overview of how their religion worked, explaining how their gods embodied concepts and forces – from wisdom to the weather – that were part of their daily reality.

We’ll also learn how their myths, with their complex and flawed heroes, differ from the moralism of popular stories today, exploring and explain the human condition rather than trying to improve it. Matyszak views the Greeks’ many myths as part of one large, rambling story that runs across four generations with a cast of dozens, if not hundreds. The same characters interact and pop up in each other’s stories: Theseus kidnaps Helen of Troy, is rescued from Hades by Hercules, who meets Medea and buries Icarus. And its span is immense: from cosmogony, where humans do not yet exist, to Seven Against Thebes, where the gods barely feature, it is a tale that goes from one end of the known world to the other.

Speaker Bio

Philip Matyszak has a doctorate in Roman history from St John’s College, Oxford. He is the author of many books on classical civilization, including Chronicle of the Roman Republic, The Enemies of Rome, The Sons of Caesar, Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day, Ancient Athens on Five Drachmas a Day, Lives of the Romans (with Joanne Berry) and Legionary.

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Psychedelics and Memories of Birth, Abuse and Alien Abduction – Timmy Davis – Zoom

Psychedelics and Memories of Birth, Abuse and Alien Abduction 

Psychoanalysing the psychedelic phenomena of recovered memories of abuse, birth and alien abduction

From earliest life every one of us is immersed in a world of pure novelty, preoccupied with weaving the fluctuations of experience into a stable and coherent tapestry. We theorise and construct understandings and expectations of space, time, the social world and ourselves within it from the threads of culture we happen upon in our maturation. Yet novelty insists upon us, disrupting all attempts to complete the picture. Protected by only this thinnest of veils, every so often we experience something so apparently novel it creates a hole in the very fabric of our reality. These rips, tears and ruptures can undermine faith in our habitual ways of knowing, our own memories and even our sensory perceptions themselves, demanding suture. In this talk we will draw on contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of trauma, revelation, gaslighting and eye witness testimony to think about some of the more far-out experiences that can be engendered by psychedelics, and one of their unfortunate results, epistemic injury.

Speaker Bio

Timmy Davis is the founder of The Psychedelic Experience Clinic, director of Psychedelic Policy and Regulation at the Centre for Evidence Based Drug Policy (CEBDP), policy director at the Psilocybin Access Rights (PAR) campaign and a trainee at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

Curated and hosted by

Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic researcher.

Her background is in psychedelic parapsychology research with Greenwich University, specialising in exceptional human experience and entity encounters on psychedelics, and as an artist. She has studied shamanism for 10 years, working closely with Amerindian indigenous shamanic cultures of Mexico and Peru and western neoshamanic groups, focusing on the introduction and integration of indiginous and animistic knowledge and perspectives to westerners and western ontologies.

She publicly lectures on the subjects of psychedelics and shamanism, and produces art on the subjects informed by her research and experience, including films, performances, writing and immersive worlds. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Britain and Breaking Convention and is the creator and host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series.

Walking between the worlds of art, psychedelic science and shamanism she works to bridge them and uses each as investigatory tools to inform and articulate each other.

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Maya
maya