St Catharine's Alumni Festival

The St Catharine’s Alumni Festival will bring together Members of the College from across the globe, reconnecting friends in a world where distance is no longer a barrier to communication.

The virtual Festival will feature three lectures and live Q&As given by our fellows, a virtual tour through our College, and new virtual social spaces via SpatialChat where Alumni will be able to reunite with friends and classmates by decade. SpatialChat allows you to meet with your friends as though you were with them in person, moving around a room to talk with different groups of people.

Socialising via SpatialChat:

You can try a demo of SpatialChat here, or watch the video below to see how it works. 

Key Speakers: 

Devotion or witchcraft? Policing religion in Renaissance Italy.

Professor Abigail Brundin, Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Subject: Modern and Medieval Languages (Italian):

This talk will describe my work with trial records and other kinds of documents from sixteenth-century Italy to understand how ordinary people navigated the blurry boundary between licit religious devotion and heresy or witchcraft. I will share sources that allow us rare access to the voices of the poor and illiterate who, in the turbulent years following the European Reformation, often found themselves unwittingly straying into unorthodox practices and called in front of the Inquisition. 

What is the outlook for China-US relations?

Dr Simon Taylor, Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Subject: Management Practice (Finance):

One of the dominant themes in world affairs in the coming years is likely to be the relationship between the US and China. We will explore three questions: Is this best thought of as a new cold war? What are the risks in a growing rivalry? And what are the prospects of some kind of peaceful cooperation?

Rebuilding St Catharine’s – model. 

Dr Peter Wothers, Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Subject: Natural Sciences (Chemistry): 

In this talk we will look at some of the problems encountered in trying to reconstruct the old architect’s model of the college from the 1930s-40s with the hope of permanently displaying it in the new building project.  We will see how photos from the archive help to work out what some of the missing structures looked like, and the areas which are still rather uncertain.

Terms and Conditions of Booking:

Please view our full event booking Terms and Conditions here. 

Please note that in order to process your booking, your registration details will be securely shared with our event provider, Venue Audio Visual. You can read our full Data Protection Statement here.