Previous events

This talk explores Labelling Matters, a project at the Pitt Rivers Museum that critically re-examines the language, authority, and narratives embedded in museum displays.

How can science reveal whether a work of art is genuine, uncover the stories hidden in its materials, or trace the illicit journeys of cultural objects? Join two leading experts exploring art, technology and heritage crime.

Italy had more cities than any other region in the early medieval West, and these cities were the locus of authority, prestige, and commerce. How did urban food cultivation contribute to reshaping city environments and hierarchies of influence? Welcome to a SENKU Seminar about urban gardening in Early Medieval Italy with Professor Caroline Goodson at the University of Cambridge. 

Emotions shape how we create, experience, and interpret art, yet their historical dimensions remain understudied. In this presentation, Dr Atena Ungureanu introduces the MSCA-funded project EMOTIA – Emotional Markers Of Text and Iconography in Art – which investigates how emotions are embedded in ancient artefacts such as Egyptian coffins and papyri, and how they continue to affect audiences today.

Join us for the 20^th Viking Congress in August 2026, where we will explore key themes such as landscapes and social frameworks, as well as future research and dissemination of the Viking Age in a changing world.

Humans have shaped horses for participation in war and ceremony and forged a sophisticated language between two different species. Drawing on archaeological finds, historical imagery, and contemporary equine movement science, this seminar invites participants to rediscover the shared performance of horse and human across time.

Master Mika Boros at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History will defend her dissertation NOVUM MONETAE - Implementation of regulated coinage in medieval Norway, Poland and Austria for the degree of philosophiae doctor (PhD).

In this talk, Associate Professor Florent Audy shows how a contextual approach—tracing coins through production, use, deposition, retrieval and collection—reveals their multifaceted meanings and shifts focus from objects to the people who produced, exchanged and valued them.

Centering on Mayan water beings within a wider global comparison, this lecture examines how aquatic deities link cosmology, ecology, and human agency. It argues that such figures offer powerful narratives for reimagining more reciprocal and sustainable human-non-human relations.

The Giovanni Poleni Museum of the University of Padua in Italy was radically renovated and reopened in September 2021. The new exhibition aims at shedding light on the way physicists have been working, as well as on the connections that were set in the last centuries between physics and other disciplines, such as art, architecture, medicine or psychology.

I forberedelse til Samenes nasjonaldag, 6.februar, inviterer vi til SENKU seminar med Harald Gaski. Harald Gaski er fra Deatnu i Finnmark og er tidligere professor i samisk litteratur og kultur ved UiT Norges arktiske universitet og Sámi allaskuvla/ Samisk høgskole i Guovdageaidnu. I foredraget deler Gaski sine refleksjoner rundt samisk åndelighet og tilknytningen til landet i et perspektiv inspirert av ideen om å gjøre ting på egne betingelser.

In this paper, Professor Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme discusses how the Hebrew Bible depicts Yahweh’s sanctuary as filled with luxurious, exotic aromas. This scented symbolism conveys Yahweh’s position as supreme king and masculine authority while signifying divine presence and being.

The Museum of Cultural History in Oslo holds an important collection of forty-one Sinhālese dance masks. In this talk Dumith Kulasekara will introduce the historical context of their acquisition in 1887.

The Swedish linguist Jacob Jonas Björnståhl spent three years in Istanbul during the late 1700s. His writings constitute a starting point for Nordic academic interest in Islam, with a focus on religious practices. Björnståhl depicts the Muslim world by means of comparisons, metaphors, and analogies in ways that point to the development of contemporary disciplines such as the study of religion, ethnography, and linguistics. The lecture is held by Professor Catharina Raudvere.

Join us for an insightful seminar with Dr. Gareth Williams from the research group "Money and its use in the Middle Ages," as he delves into the phenomenon of Viking camps. This talk will explore the multifaceted economic activities within these camps, shedding light on their role in the transition from rural to urban societies in Scandinavia and beyond.

Join us to hear Professor Haidy Geismar’s compelling account of the future of Hinemihi, a Māori meeting house (whare) in the gardens of Clandon park, Surrey. A story about the dual imaginary of a new mansion house and a new meeting house, the past in the present, material change, statutory consents and culture wars.

Join us for the live event stream! Who was Queen Ellisiv, born one thousand years ago in Kyiv? She married King Harald Hardruler Sigurdsson of Norway in 1044, becoming the first Norwegian queen not born in Scandinavia. This mini-conference aims to shed light on what we know about Ellisiv and the world in which she lived.

Join us for this collaborative presentation by Nadine Panayot and Lucy Semaan, on coastal and marine heritage in Lebanon. Panayot will speak on the UNESCO inscription of the site of Anfeh in North Lebanon.This presentation highlights an interdisciplinary project centered on the site of Anfeh in North Lebanon. Semaan will introduce diversity and maritime cultural heritage across the Lebanese coast, and a holistic approach to conservation.

Join us for this presentation from our Museum of Science and University History's, Klingvall and Wittje, sharing their experiences with three exhibition projects in the Department of Physics.

Master Anette Sand-Eriksen at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History will defend her dissertation Houses of Their Own. The emergence of farmsteads and the persistence of mobile living in southeast Norway, 2350–500 BCE: Explorations towards the Nordic Bronze Ages for the degree of philosophiae doctor (PhD).

Techniques, technologies and resource exploitation in Final Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-fisher-gatherer societies.

Join us as Professor Eamonn Carrabine from the University of Essex presents his compelling talk, “Dark Tourism and the Museum Effect.” This discussion will delve into how museum environments shape the increasingly popular dark tourism experience and influence visitor interactions with representations of historical atrocities and human suffering.

Join us for this talk where Noé Conejo explores funerary practices involving coins in Late Antique and Early Medieval northern Italy, highlighting evolving rituals and regional variations reflecting the era's complex socio-political and religious shifts.