Join us this Friday (6 March) for the next instalment of Talking Ed’s, celebrating our International Women’s Day edition with Fellows Dr Linda King and Dr Saussan Khalil.
- Location: Garden Room
- Time: 5.30pm – 6.30pm
- Tea and coffee will be served at 5 30 pm. The seminar begins at 5 45 pm.
- No registration required.
Dr Linda King will speak on ”Climate change, biodiversity and human disease: the rise and fall of the ancient Egyptian kingdoms”
Climate is a fundamental determinant of human activity. In ancient Egypt, periods of growth (Old, Middle and New Kingdoms and Roman period) were interspersed with periods of societal collapse. We propose that periods of prosperity coincided with increases in water availability, reflected in greater plant biodiversity but also increased incidence of water-borne disease, and enhanced use of plants as medicines. We utilise ecological, climate, botanical, epidemiological and field archaeological data, as well as direct measurement of pathogens from mummy tissues, to create a detailed model of the effects of past climate change on plant biodiversity and human disease, to understand its impact in the future.
Dr Linda King is an Associate Professor in biomedical science, and a Fellow, DoS and Tutor at St Edmund’s college. Having previously focussed on heart disease and metabolic changes, she has now changed research direction, applying biological research skills to investigating changes in plant biodiversity and human disease linked to climate change in ancient Egypt. She works with a cross-disciplinary team, with colleagues from Manchester, UCL and Cambridge, and the New Kingdom Research Foundation (affiliated with the Macdonald Institute) working on a field site in Luxor.
Dr Saussan Khalil will speak on ”Is Arabic a Dying Language?
Arabic speakers number over 400million globally, making it the 5th most-spoken language in the world. It is the official language in over 25 countries – and yet – the World Bank reports that “more than half of children in countries of the Middle East and North Africa […] cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text by age 10”. With the future of such a large language hanging in the balance, local Arabic language initiatives are commonplace but ineffective. This talk will explore the deep, underlying, systemic issues as well as the green shoots of our research into Arabic language teaching and learning.
Dr Saussan Khalil is Senior Teaching Associate in Arabic at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, DoS and Bye-Fellow at St Edmund’s College, author of Arabic Writing in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2022), and the founder of Kalamna CIC. Saussan has a PhD Arabic Sociolinguistics and MA by Research in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) from the University of Leeds, and a BA English Literature from Alexandria University, Egypt.
