Professor John W Cairns, Professor of Civil Law, presents his inaugural lecture entitled "An Uncommon Law?". The first discipline in law taught in the University of Edinburgh was the Civil Law. It has been taught continuously for the past 303 years. Comparative lawyers have traditionally seen the “Civil Law” as something opposed to the “Common Law”. The lecture will explore the founding of the chair of Civil Law in 1710 against the intellectual and political background before considering the...

Professor Rob Dunbar, Chair of Celtic Languages, Literature, History and Antiquities, presents his inaugural lecture entitled "Canada, the Gaelic Imagination, and the Future of the Celtic Languages / Canada, am Mac-meanmna Gàidhlig, agus na Cànanan Ceilteach san Àm ri Teachd". Territories that are now part of Canada received more Gaelic-speaking emigrants than any other in the world and, unsurprisingly, the links between the Scottish Highlands and Canada are profound. This lecture will first...

Professor Susan Hardman Moore, Professor of Early Modern Religion, delivered her inaugural lecture entitled 'Time'. Recorded on Thursday 12 September 2013 at Martin Hall in the University of Edinburgh's New College.

Professor Matthias Schwannauer, Professor of Clinical Psychology, delivers his inaugural lecture entitled "From Cradle to Grave: The Development of Relationships, Emotions and Mental Health". Recorded on Tuesday 14 May 2013, at the University of Edinburgh's Business School.

Professor Christina Boswell, Professor of Politics delivers her inaugural lecture entitled "Against ‘Interests’ in Political Science: Public Policy and Political Motivation". Recorded on Tuesday 21 May 2013, at the University of Edinburgh's Business School.

Professor Ewen A Cameron, Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography delivers his inaugural lecture entitled "The Political Histories of Modern Scotland". Recorded on Tuesday 7 May 2013, at the University of Edinburgh's Business School.

Professor Charlotte Clarke, Professor of Health in Social Science delivered her inaugural lecture entitled "Phew! For a minute there I lost myself - the experience of living with dementia" Recorded on Tuesday 23 April 2013, at the University of Edinburgh's Business School.

Josephine (Tonks) Fawcett, Professor of Student Learning in Nurse Education delivered her inaugural lecture entitled "A career for nursing: passions, privileges, pains and purpose". Recorded on Tuesday 30 April 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's Business School.

Professor Philipp Koehn: Personal Chair in Machine Translation delivered his inaugural lecture, entitled "Open Problems in Machine Translation". Recorded on Thursday 21 March 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's Informatics Forum.

Professor Lydia Plowman: Chair in Education and Technology, delivered her inaugural lecture entitled "Seven myths about young children and technology". Recorded on Tuesday 19 March 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower.

Professor Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies, delivered her inaugural lecture entitled "Love and Law in Christianity and Islam". Recorded on Monday 4 March 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's St Cecilia's Hall.

Professor J Douglas Armstrong, Deputy Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Bioinformatics and Personal Chair of Systems Neurobiology, delivered his inaugural lecture entitled "Systems Neuroscience". Recorded on Tuesday 5 February 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's Informatics Forum.

Professor Catharine Ward Thompson, Professor of Landscape Architecture, delivered her inaugural lecture entitled "You really should get out more! Landscape quality and quality of life". Abstract: We all know that an active lifestyle is a healthy one, and that getting away from the stresses of everyday life can be good for us, but do we live in the kinds of environments that make these easy? There is evidence to suggest that access to certain kinds of landscapes can make a real difference to...

Professor Niamh Nic Shuibhne, Chair of European Union Law, presented her inaugural lecture entitled "The Lawless Science of EU Law: Constitutional Responsibility and the Court of Justice". Abstract When constitutional courts interpret the law, they make law. But they also influence the direction of policy-making and are frequently called upon to determine questions that seem to have very little to do with legal reasoning at all. This lecture will position the Court of Justice of the European...

Professor Ronnie Cann, Personal Chair in Linguistic Semantics, delivered his inaugural lecture entitled "Doing Language". Abstract: One of the features of human language that distinguishes it from the call systems of other species is that the former can be used to refer to situations, objects and other things that are not in the immediate context of an utterance. It is, on the other hand, also well recognised that certain aspects of an utterance, written or spoken, depend for their...

Professor Stephen Gilmore, Chair of Software Systems Modelling, presented his inaugural lecture entitled "Is Informatics an indiscrete science?" Abstract One of the first lessons that every student of informatics learns is that computers operate with digital logic in a discrete world of bits. Starting from this view, the right way to reason about and predict the behaviour of programs is then to use discrete mathematics to prove logical properties of interest because discrete methods are...

Professor Federica G Pedriali, Professor of Literary Metatheory and Modern Italian Studies, presented her inaugural lecture, entitled "Gadda Goes to War: On becoming militant in the name of the militance of literature". Abstract: There is something about Gadda. The press is in no doubt, in the wake of box office success: "Tutti pazzi per Gadda". The Italian newspaper Repubblica cannot hold back: "Fabrizio Gifuni's monologue is our mirror". It is good to know that the nation in tatters still...

Professor Kenneth Reid, Chair of Scots Law, presented his inaugural lecture, entitled "Smoothing the rugged parts of the passage: Scots Law and its Edinburgh Chair". This lecture examines the establishment of the Chair of Scots Law in 1722, considers some of its holders, and offers reflections on research and writing on Scottish private law. Recorded on Tuesday 18 September 2012 at the University of Edinburgh's Old College.

Scott Aaronson, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, delivered his inaugural lecture entitled "Quantum Computing and the Limits of the Efficiently Computable". Mr Aaronson discusses what can and can't be feasibly computed according to physical law. He argues that this is a fundamental question, not only for mathematics and computer science, but also for physics; and that the infeasibility of certain computational problems (such as NP-complete problems)...

Professor Tony Lynch, Personal Chair of Student Learning (English for Academic Purposes) , presented his inaugural lecture entitled "The Importance of Listening to International Students". The title is intentionally ambiguous. It refers firstly to the importance for international students of having adequate comprehension of spoken English; and it also alludes to the importance for the University of taking account of international students’ perceptions of studying at Edinburgh. In the lecture,...

Professor Alex Simpson, Personal Chair in Foundations of Computer Science, delivered his inaugural lecture entitled "The Intertwined Foundations of Mathematics and Computer Science". Mathematics is commonly perceived as a subject in which there are absolute standards of truth and proof. This perception, however, is not entirely accurate. There are ways in which it is possible to shape mathematics to suit the applications to which it will be put. In this talk, which is aimed at a general...

Professor Ian Campbell, Chair of Architectural History & Theory (ECA) delivers his Inaugural Lecture entitled "Planning for Pilgrims: St Andrews as the Second Rome". The burgh of St Andrews was laid out in the mid-twelfth century, on a grandiose scale, and to a different plan from the majority of contemporary burghs in Scotland, including Edinburgh. The lecture argues that it was deliberately modelled on the Vatican Borgo, the area between St Peter's and the Tiber in Rome, which had been...

Sethu Vijayakumar is the Professor of Robotics and the Director of the Institute for Perception, Action and Behavior (IPAB) at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. This inaugural lecture, entitled "Robots that learn: old dreams, new tools", is about making robots run faster, jump higher and throw further while being as versatile, robust and adaptive as humans. Sethu illustrates some success stories and talks about the spills and thrills of working on exciting robotics...

Professor John Lee, Personal Chair of Digital Media, delivers his Inaugural Lecture "Learning Vicariously with Rich Media". Recorded on Monday 26 March 2012 at the Auditorium lecture theatre, Business School, The University of Edinburgh. Audio version. Listen to podcast

Alex Lascarides, Professor of Semantics, presents her inaugural lecture entitled "Discourse Coherence". Audio version.