Lent Term 2015
A special lecture series for MSc students
Chairs: Professor Paul Kelly and George Gaskell
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building, LSE
Time: Fridays,1.00pm to 2.00pm
This event is free and open to LSE MSc students with no ticket or pre-registration required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis.
We endeavour to podcast record all the lectures in this series. We will make the podcasts available on this website within a few working days of the lecture.
LSE is a community of scholars, students and academics, who in different ways are committed to the social scientific analysis of society and to the betterment of society. There are good reasons for becoming specialists with a depth of training in a
particular area.
Yet, if we are to join in the debates around the challenges facing contemporary societies we need, on occasions, to go beyond our specialism and to appreciate the perspectives of other disciplines
This course, starting in the coming Lent term, is a pilot test of the concept. If it attracts a good audience and receives positive feedback, we plan to establish the course as a weekly event in the next academic session. I hope you will find the time to attend at least some of the lectures.
Professor George Gaskell
16 January 2015
Do arms races cause wars?
Professor David Stevenson (International History)
Professor David Stevenson holds the Stevenson Chair of International History, endowed by Sir Daniel Stevenson in 1926. His publications include: Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904-1914 (Oxford University Press, 1996); 1914-1918: the History of the First World War (Penguin, 2004); and With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (Penguin, 2011).
He is currently writing an international history of the year 1917 and co-editing a history of arms races from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, both for Oxford
University Press.
23 January 2015
The role of the state
Professor Tim Besley (Economics)
Tim Besley is School Professor of Economics and Political Science. His research, which mainly has a policy focus, is in the fields of development economics, public economics and political economy. He is a former member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee and a former editor of the American Economic Review.
He has been President of the European Economic Association and is currently President of the International Economic Association. At LSE, he has played a key role in developing the MPA program and the International Growth Centre.
30 January 2015
From the Webbs to the Third Way: social science at the LSE
Professor Michael Cox (IDEAS)
Michael Cox has lectured for over forty years and has held a Chair in International Relations at LSE since 2002.
He began academic life as ‘Sovietologist’, went on to teach the International Relations of the Cold War and now focuses most of his attention on US foreign policy and the US relationship with Asia. He has published widely. His most recent books include Global 1989: Continuity and Change in World Politics (2010); Soft Power and US Foreign Policy (2010); Introduction to International Relations (2012); US Foreign Policy (2006; 2nd edition 2012) and US Presidents and Democracy Promotion (2013).
One of the founders of LSE100, Professor Cox has been active at LSE in many roles: most importantly perhaps as one of the Founding Directors of IDEAS – the LSE Think Tank on foreign policy (see lse.ac.uk/ideas) - and at different times as Academic Director of all three of the LSE’s highly successful Summer Schools.
6 February 2015
American exceptionalism in crime, punishment and inequality
Professors David Soskice (Government) and
Nicky Lacey (Law, Gender and Social Policy)
David Soskice has been School Professor of Political Science and Economics in the Government department since 2012. He has held a number of visiting professorships, most recently at Harvard in Government and at Yale in Political Science. He taught macroeconomics at Oxford for many years before seeing the interdisciplinary light and now works on the interrelations between politics and economics.
His major work in political economy is on varieties of capitalism, and how different capitalist systems interact with political systems; this is with Torben Iversen (Harvard) and Peter Hall (Harvard and Centennial Professor at the European Institute in the LSE). He is a Fellow of the British Academy in politics and economics. He is currently working, with Nicola Lacey, on American Exceptionalism in crime, punishment, and social policy. With Wendy Carlin (Economics, UCL) he has written Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability and the Financial System which is published by OUP in November. He is writing up his 2013 Federico Caffee lectures on Knowledge Economies: an Essay in Comparative Political Economy.
Nicola Lacey is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy. She has held a number of visiting appointments, most recently at Harvard Law School and at New York University. She is an Honorary Fellow of New College Oxford and of University College Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Nicola's research is in criminal law and criminal justice, with a particular focus on comparative and historical scholarship.
Over the last few years, she has been working on the development of ideas of criminal responsibility in England since the 18th Century, and on the comparative political economy of punishment. She is currently working, with David Soskice, on American Exceptionalism in crime, punishment, and social policy, and with Hanna Pickard on the philosophy and psychology of punishment. Nicola also has research interests in legal and social theory, in feminist analysis of law, in law and literature, and in biography.
13 February 2015
The causes and consequences of the
economic crisis
Professor Charlie Bean (Economics)
Professor Sir Charles Bean was until recently Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy at the Bank of England – a position he held through the Global Financial Crisis. Prior to that, he was Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Bank. Before joining the Bank, he was a member of the LSE’s economics department for almost twenty years.
He has long been engaged in public service roles, including serving as a consultant to HM Treasury, special adviser to both the Treasury Committee of the House of Commons, and to the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, and as adviser to the House of Lords enquiry into the European Central Bank. He is presently President of the Royal Economic Society.
20 February 2015
Measuring poverty to reveal its causes
Professor Mary Morgan (Economic History)
Mary S. Morgan is Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics in the Department of Economic History and holds the same title at the University of Amsterdam.
She has also taught and held research fellowships in the USA (Duke, UC Berkeley, UPenn and Princeton) and Germany (Berlin and Bielefeld). She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002 and an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences in that same year.
27 February 2015
Pressed for Time: is the problem digital devices, or the way we design and use them?
Professor Judy Wajcman (Sociology)
Judy Wajcman is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology. She joined the LSE as Head of the Sociology Department in 2009. She was previously Professor of Sociology in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She has held posts in Cambridge, Edinburgh, Manchester, Sydney, Tokyo, Vienna, Warwick and Zurich. She was formerly a Centennial Professor at the LSE, a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Women in Business at the London Business School. She was President of the Society for Social Studies of Science (2009-2011) and is currently a Research Associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Her work has been translated into French, German, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. Professor Wajcman's scholarly interests encompass the sociology of work and employment, science and technology studies, gender theory, and organizational analysis.
6 March 2015
Ethics, equity and the economics of climate change
Professor Nick Stern (Grantham Institute)
Lord Stern is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government at LSE and Chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. In December 2013 he was presented with the Stephen H. Schneider award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication.
On announcing the $10,000 prize, the Climate One panel said: “Few people have impacted the discussion of economics of carbon pollution more than English economist Nicholas Stern. Lord Stern authored the highly influential 2006 “Stern Review,” which concluded that the costs of inaction were far greater than the costs of action and has more recently emphasized the great opportunities in the transition to the low-carbon economy. Nick Stern stands out in his ability to assemble crucial information from earth scientists, biologists, technologists, and social scientists, to combine this information in a way that yields important climate-policy conclusions, and to communicate these findings widely and effectively to the public."
Lord Stern has a distinguished career as an academic and in public life. Adviser to the UK Government on the Economics of Climate Change and Development from 2005–2007. He was Head of the Government Economic Service from 2003–2007; Second Permanent Secretary to Her Majesty's Treasury from 2003–2005; Director of Policy and Research for the Prime Minister's Commission for Africa from 2004–2005; Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the World Bank from 2000–2003; and Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from 1994–1999.
13 March 2015
Global power shift: The rise of the East and the decline of the West
Professors Danny Quah, Mick Cox and Peter Trubowitz
Danny Quah is Professor of Economics and International Development, Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and Senior Fellow at LSE IDEAS. He is Tan Chin Tuan Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore and previously visiting Professor of Economics at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management and the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. He has served on the Academic Panels of HM Treasury and the Office for National Statistics in the UK, and on the National Economic Advisory Council in Malaysia.
Professor Quah was born in Malaysia. He holds a blackbelt in taekwon-do and used to compete regularly in regional and national championships. Some of his work has been translated into 18 languages.
Peter Trubowitz is Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre. His main teaching and research interests are in the fields of international security and US foreign policy. Before joining the LSE, he was Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Princeton, Universidad de Chile, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City, and the Beijing Foreign Studies University, where he was the J. William Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in American Foreign Policy. His most recent book is Politics and Strategy: Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft (Princeton University Press).
20 March 2015
Paradoxes of auditing and performance measurement
Professor Michael Power (Accounting)
Michael Power is Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), an Associate member of the UK Chartered Institute of Taxation, and an honorary fellow of the Institute of Risk Management.
He was on the board of St James’s Place plc from 2005-2013 and is currently a non-executive Director of RIT Capital Partners plc and chairman of St. James's Place International plc. He also has a number of advisory positions for public bodies, including the Financial Reporting Council, and was Director of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation at LSE until April 2014.
He has honorary doctorates from the Universities of St Gallen, Switzerland and Uppsala, Sweden. His research and teaching focus on regulation, accounting, auditing, internal control, risk management and organisation theory. His major works, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford 1999) and Organized Uncertainty: Designing a World of Risk Management (Oxford 2007) have been translated into Japan