A New Leaf: Evening Lectures 2025-2026

A New Leaf: Lecture Series

Drinks reception from 6pm

Lectures from 6.30-7.30pm

Tickets £10 / Booking is essential via TicketTailor by telephone or in person at the Institution.

30th October 2025.

Christopher Southgate, ‘The evolution of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets’

Four Quartets is one of the most important and best loved poetic sequences from the 20th Century. It is often read as a unified whole, reflecting its eventual structure around the elements air, earth, water, and fire. However, recently published materials, especially Eliot’s letters to his intimate friend Emily Hale, shed new light on the sequence, and especially on the first poem ‘Burnt Norton’, which was written as a standalone piece. Eliot writes to Emily in January 1936 that ‘Burnt Norton’ is ‘a new kind of love poem, and it is written for you, and it is fearfully obscure’. Reading the first poem in this way enables us to see how different it is from the other three poems, written in 1940-2, and how the sequence moves strikingly from moments of ecstatic disclosure, surrounded by ‘waste sad time’ to a spirituality of redemption anchored in ‘prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action’.

Drawing on his recent research into the Hale letters at Princeton, and other archival resources at Cambridge and Harvard, Professor Southgate will trace the evolution of the Quartets and reflect on the interaction between the poet’s biography and his spiritual journey. The poems remain obscure, and are best heard as music as much as parsed out for meaning. Eliot himself can be understood as a profoundly flawed person, and yet someone who has given us a masterpiece that can be appreciated on a range of levels.

27th November 2025

Nicola Thomas, ‘The reinterpretation of General Sir Redvers Buller statue in Exeter.’

This evening lecture and discussion will be a space for reflection on the presence of the colonial past in contemporary civic life. There are many signals of Exeter’s place within the British Empire in the fabric of the city, not least the 1905 bronze equestrian statue memorialising General Sir Redvers Buller. Between 2020-2023 Nicola inhabited the role of  ‘critical friend’ to Exeter City Council as they navigated the challenges of working with changing (and charged) public feelings around the colonial present in our city life. Following a change in government policy around memorials, with the focus on ‘retain and explain’, Nicola led a group to develop an interpretation board, consulting with stakeholders in the city. The interpretation group looked for a way to present a perspective that offered context, explanation, and an invitation to seek connection and understanding around a controversial figure and time in British history. This lecture will bring you into the thinking that led to the interpretation board design and wording, explore some of the challenges of working within a moment charged by culture war politics, and make visible the values which guided the work. The lecture will close by reflecting on the work of public histories, our civic contribution, and the importance of heritage in making visible contemporary values.

29th January 2026

Nick Collins, ‘Have we been here before? New technology, changes in daily life, and lessons for today from the Industrial Revolution.’

In the classic view, the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a time of upheaval not just for the English economy but for daily life. Temporal routines were smashed, gender and family relations radically reshaped, long-standing work practices corralled into factory discipline, and popular culture scythed to stubble by urbanisation and commercialisation. That view holds in the popular imagination and has received support from many historians, particularly during the twentieth century. Since then, other historians have begun to reassess individual aspects of that narrative. Some have argued that regular working routines were well-established long before industrialisation, and others that the new commercial popular culture was the preserve of only a small part of the population. This paper aims to bring together some of those existing ideas, along with original research based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century court documents, to argue that for many people the apparent transformation of daily life was gradual and incomplete rather than rapid and overwhelming. After making this argument, the paper offers an explicit reflection on what we can learn from the past for our current situation. New technology threatens work and aspects of daily life today just as it did in the eighteenth century, and the change this time is likely to be much more rapid. We should not assume that everything will happen in the same way this time, but nor should we ignore what we might learn from past experience. Some aspects of life might well be transformed in the next few years, but it is likely that many others will endure. It is also likely that there will be benefits from new technology, some of which may as yet be beyond our imagining. Turning a new leaf can be frightening, but it can also be for the best.

26th February 2026

Craig Beall, ‘Turning a “New Leaf” in Medicine: Stem-Cell Therapies for Diabetes and Dementia’

Stem-cell science is transforming the way we think about health, ageing, and the future of medicine. This lecture explores how innovative cell-based therapies could allow us to “turn a new leaf” in treating two of today’s most pressing health challenges: type 1 diabetes and dementia.

Recent advances in regenerative medicine suggest that brain-derived stem cells could be helpful to protect pancreatic β-cells during transplantation but also reshape how we understand resilience in human biology. This approach could provide more durable therapies for people with type 1 diabetes, while simultaneously offering new insights into protecting brain health in ageing populations. By reimagining how we use and understand living cells, stem-cell technologies open the door to treatments that regenerate, protect, and redefine what is possible in human medicine.

Professor Craig Beall is an Associate Professor at the University of Exeter, whose research focuses on developing novel stem-cell therapies for type 1 diabetes. Funded by the Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge, his work investigates how brain cells may help to protect insulin-producing β-cells from immune attack. Alongside this, his wider research explores how stem-cell approaches can deepen our understanding of the brain, with the potential to inform future dementia therapies. His writing has been published in The Conversation, The Independent and ScienceAlert. He is a member of the British Associate of Science Writers.

26th March 2026

Beth Howell, Reframing the ‘fairy land’: The ideas of the Dartington ‘experiment’ 100 years on and the development of the Elmhirst Heritage Centre’*

This paper will explore the history and reinterpretation of the Dartington
‘experiment,’ a project of rural, social, and cultural renewal established by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst in 1925, and consider the ways its rich story might be reinterpreted for a new audience in its centenary year and beyond. As a programme of regeneration set up by a wealthy American in rural Devon, the estate’s programme was as controversial as it was forward-thinking, but its major successes included establishing Staverton Construction Ltd, a company that employed local builders, and providing a home for refugees from across war-torn Europe, including the Jooss Ballet and the theatre director Michael Chekhov. In 1929, the Dartington Hall Trust was set up in an attempt to co-ordinate and refine the experiment’s original charitable aims, an organisation that has sought and strived to work for the good of the local community and the arts, and has sometimes fallen short. In 2025, the opening of the Elmhirst Heritage Centre, a new indoor visitor destination, is marking a new chapter for Dartington. Informed by archival images and showcasing the core art collection acquired by Dorothy Elmhirst herself alongside a series of temporary exhibitions, it is a project that represents the original spirit of the Elmhirsts’ endeavour, bringing to life the stories of the individuals that shaped Dartington, and exploring how they were shaped by it in turn. The paper will discuss the evolution of this museum development as an important point in Dartington’s history, and explore its hopes for the future.

30th April 2026

Martin Calder, ‘Friends, Patrons, University Men, and Well-Connected Women: Doing Justice to the Memory of Benjamin Kennicott, 1718-1783’

The Devon & Exeter Institution holds in its collection a volume of poems, in hand-written fair copy, by the eminent eighteenth-century Hebrew scholar Dr Benjamin Kennicott, born at Totnes in 1718. The existence of the volume presents a literary-historical puzzle. Only one of the poems, ‘On the Recovery of the Hon. Mrs. Eliz. Courtenay,’ was ever published. The poems are not in Kennicott’s own hand and are undated. Another hand-written volume of the same poems is held in the archives of Princeton University Library in the United States, copied out by John Cooke, a fellow native of Totnes and a contemporary of Kennicott at Oxford. While the source of the poems remains a mystery, they offer a window onto the life, mind and connections of Benjamin Kennicott, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, Canon of Christ Church, Keeper of the Radcliffe Library and Rector of Culham. His great scholarly enterprise was to produce a collation of all the known manuscripts of the Bible in Hebrew, for which he created and maintained an international network of patrons and scholars in the British Isles, across Europe, and beyond, extending the project to Egypt, China and North America, working together for more than a decade. Scholars collating manuscripts in Rome, Florence, Turin, Milan, Paris, Berlin, Helmstadt, Hamburg, Parma and Madrid were sent common instructions in Latin. It was one of the most extensive collaborative academic research projects of the age and showed global thinking. Kennicott documented progress in annual reports that seem to anticipate interim reports submitted to modern research grant awarding bodies. Kennicott was invited to present the finished work to George III. He is mostly remembered now for the illuminated ‘Kennicott Bible’, the lavish Hebrew manuscript produced at Corunna in Spain in 1476, purchased by the University through Kennicott, and now the jewel in the crown of Jewish manuscripts in the Bodleian. The Bible is an expression of devotional art and cross-cultural collaboration, mixing Jewish, Christian and Islamic elements. In the personal sphere, his well-connected and sociable wife Anne had a circle of friends that encompassed many of the cultural luminaries of her time, including Eva-Marie Garrick, Hannah More and William Wilberforce. Sixteen years after his death, The European Magazine published an article on Kennicott’s life and work, concluding: ‘We cannot […] refuse ourselves the hope that some friend will do justice to his memory, while it is yet in his power, by drawing his character in the manner it deserves.’ That was written in 1799. I cannot be that friend who will draw his character in the manner it deserves, when all I have to go on are the leavings of History; but I do have an interest in seeing his memory restored, since Benjamin Kennicott was my first cousin, eight generations removed.

Martin Calder is an independent researcher, with specialisms in 18th-century literature and ideas and garden history, which I used to teach in the French Department at the University of Bristol. I have a number of publications. The present study arises in part from recent research into my family history. I gave a short paper on Kennicott’s wife Anne at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference at Pembroke College, Oxford in January.