Saturday 16th May 2026
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‘This isn’t a culture war. It’s a war on culture with a very long history’: Dan Hicks on Rhodes, racism, and the Pitt Rivers 

Beatrix Arnold and Stanley Smith
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‘This isn’t a culture war. It’s a war on culture with a very long history’: Dan Hicks on Rhodes, racism, and the Pitt Rivers 

Professor Dan Hicks is a man at odds with his surroundings. Tucked away at the back of the Pitt Rivers Museum, his office is like that of many Oxford academics, stacked with books, several his own. Looking around, you spot the names of the various universities where he has taught: Oxford, Bristol, Freie, Boston, Stanford. Hicks himself, however, is not your typical Oxford don. Whereas other professors might offer you a drink or a look at a rare book, his form of hospitality is to give us two stickers: one displays a kiffeyeh under the words “Stop BP!” and the other reads: “Non una di meno: Fight Patriarchy”.

Hicks is a Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University, a curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College. He describes his work as an examination of the enduring role of colonialism in the modern world through the framework of the “four As” – archaeology, anthropology, art, and architecture. His book, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution (2020), brought him international attention for his scathing criticism of British museums and their refusal to return looted artefacts. We speak to him as he’s gearing up for a tour to promote the new paperback of his latest monograph, Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting (2025), a list of engagements that will take him all around the UK, Ireland, Europe, and as far as Canada. 

It’s with this that our conversation starts. Every Monument Will Fall is an intervention into the raging debate about what to do with the statues, buildings, and museums dedicated to colonial figures. It’s a sweeping narrative that is both local and international. “The book uses Oxford as a point of departure for a wider set of conversations that have importance here in Oxford, in the University, in the museums, but actually across Europe and around the world”, Hicks explains. He takes the reader on a kind of walking tour of the physical reminders of the city’s colonial legacies, from the statue of Cecil Rhodes that commands a domineering view from Oriel College to the museum at which he works. But it also examines efforts to reckon with the legacy of the Confederacy in the American South and the toppling of Rhodes’ likeness in Zambia and Zimbabwe in the 1960s and 1980s, respectively, situating the modern debate within the context of a much older, global anti-racist struggle.

“All these movements”, Hicks explains, “whether it’s about objects in museums, whether it’s about statues in the streets – from Edward Colston to the unfallen Cecil Rhodes here in Oxford – whether that is in the seminar rooms and the libraries and the reading lists of the universities where the the call has been to decolonise or to shift the citation practises, are responding to a single historical entity”. He has coined it “militarist realism”: a term he uses to describe a political movement in the arts and culture in the 1870s-1920s which set out to celebrate the “great men” on the imperial project, upholding in pedagogic contrast a supposedly civilised Britain against primitive colonial cultures. 

“This isn’t a culture war”, Hicks says. “It’s a war on culture with a very long history. It’s a history of the weaponisation of culture, the taking of objects from the battlefields and the putting of them on to display in museums, or the putting up of images of the colonisers and the enslavers.” Hick argues that, if we recognise that these monuments were erected, not in an effort to accurately document history, but in an attempt to bolster a political agenda which sought to consolidate colonialism, it alters the fundamental nature of the modern debate about what to do with them. 

“The book is not called ‘All Monuments Must Fall’”, he points out. “It’s a statement – every monument will fall – of archaeological reality. We hold on to a historic built environment, memory culture, if we choose to maintain it and conserve it. People say: ‘Oh, you’re cancelling history.’ No, this is about the democratic right to choose who is remembered and who isn’t; who is centred and who’s taking up space.”

Every Monument Will Fall is manifestly the product of a career spent participating in the debates around the memorialisation of Britain’s colonial history. After completing his Bachelor’s in Archaeology and Anthropology at St John’s College, Oxford, Hicks studied for a PhD at the University of Bristol, where he would later work as a lecturer. It was here that he witnessed the local campaign for the removal of a statue of Edward Colston, the 17th-century slave-trader. As Hicks tells it, Colston was a case of the unmistakable will of a community to overhaul the monument undermined by bureaucracy and vested interest – particularly by the organisation the Society of Merchant Venturers, the guardians of Colston’s endowment to the city. 

So when Hicks moved back to Oxford in 2007, he felt that “it was my generation that failed to remove that image of Edward Colston”. Soon, he witnessed a parallel local struggle: the Rhodes Must Fall Oxford movement, beginning in 2015. Taking its cue from a similar campaign at the University of Cape Town, the initiative sought the removal of the statue of Rhodes on the Oriel facade. In the face of backlash from both the national media and the University, however, Oriel College could not be persuaded to take action. 

Then, in 2020, the murder of George Floyd in the United States and the subsequent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement reignited the public debate around monuments and the glorification of slave traders. In Bristol, the statue of Edward Colston, immovable during Hicks’ time there, proved fallible when it was toppled and pushed into the harbourside. 

As Hicks tells it, it looked like that might be the moment when progress would begin to be made in Oxford: “There were protests… and a vote at Oriel College, who said they were going to relocate the statue in the summer, shortly after Edward Colston’s image had been removed. That decision was reaffirmed a year later in 2021.” He pauses: “And then, very slowly, nothing happened. So it’s the unfallen status of the Rhodes statue that makes the writing of this book possible. How is it still there? Why is it still there? What is the process?”

Moving to Oxford came with a new responsibility, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum –  a job that made abundantly clear to Hicks Oxford’s central role in Britain’s violent colonialism. He explains that, in 2019, he was asked by Worcester College to investigate the origins of a human skull which was regularly used as a chalice at the College’s formals until 2015. Circumstantial evidence suggested the identification of its owner as an enslaved woman from the Caribbean. To Hicks, the disparity between the extremely limited information available about the woman whose skull it was and the celebration of the man who gifted it to Worcester College – George Pitt Rivers, the eugenicist grandson of the museum’s namesake – epitomised everything wrong with how Britain remembers colonialism. 

Consequently, in Every Monument Will Fall, Hicks seeks to highlight that, unlike the wealthy perpetrators, those victimised by colonialism “are not memorialised. In fact, their memories, their names, even, are actively redacted. This is a book about holding this unnamed, denamed, abused, posthumously abused woman up alongside the hyper-centred, hypervisible, dead white men in an institution like Oxford”.

“The fact that that tradition, invented by the fascist grandson of Augustus Pitt Rivers in 1946, could carry on as late as 2015, reminds us that, if that can carry on, what else is surviving?” 

So what has Hicks done to put his anti-colonial values into practice in his capacity as curator of the Pitt Rivers? The first task, he says, is simply understanding which artefacts museums have and where they came from. “So much of what we’re talking about in our museums is not what you see in the galleries. It’s what’s hidden away in the storerooms.” He points to an estimate that between 35-40% of the items in storage at the British Museum are not even on a public database. The Pitt Rivers has made progress in this respect, for instance, working with the Guardian to figure out the quantity of human remains held in Oxford’s archives.

The second is providing the essential context of how artefacts made their way from their origins to being displayed in a museum. “Walk into any museum and read any label. There are two dates on that label.” One is when the object was made and the other is the date that it came into the museum’s possession. The job of an archaeologist is to understand what happened in between. “These are two different timelines”, he says. “There’s an hour hand and a second hand. And one of those is catching up with the other.”

“Some people would accuse this work of presentism. But, of course, as an archaeologist, I work on what survives in the present. Archaeology is the science of human duration. We work on the most recent layer and we dig downwards. We work with the fragments that survive. The risk isn’t presentism, it’s historicism. It’s that you simply reduce objects in museums to a certain historical narrative that doesn’t talk about ‘actually how did they get here?’”

It’s clear he feels that his role comes with an enormous responsibility. To Hicks, museums do not only shape collective memory, but help to define who that collective is. “There isn’t just something called ‘the public’ out there. You make publics.” He argues that museums are particularly influential in creating this sense of community “because they’re always making choices about who they speak to and who they don’t”.

The moment, as well, could not be more important. “We’re having this conversation at a time when cultural studies is under attack, in the form of cuts across Europe and North America. The humanities are being salami-sliced as we watch, but we’ve never needed these disciplines more”. Hicks worries that, if we lose our ability to discern the agendas that motivated the creation of many of our monuments and museums, we risk uncritically accepting them as unbiased accounts of history.

“There’s so much memory culture that at the moment is imposed upon cities, imposed from the past, rather than remade in the present. So we need to take this seriously, and we need to care for art and culture in ways, which sometimes, I’m afraid, means refusing to inherit what is here.”

As if to more directly communicate these ideas, Hicks makes use of the second person in his book: addressing the reader as if they are walking around Oxford with him. This goes beyond direct address, however. At times, Hicks puts words into the mouth of the reader, as if he is recalling an actual conversation and casting us in the role of interlocutor. He explains, when asked, that much of the book is based on the conversations he had with Professor Mary C. Beaudry, a “dear friend who died over lockdown” with whom Hicks collaborated on several books.

In fact, Hicks tells us that the arc of writing his book was framed by instances of personal loss. “My father died right at the beginning, and then my mother died in the middle, and then my sister died right at the process of the final edit. So I lost, over the course of writing, the whole family that I grew up with.” The second-person voice, therefore, was only fitting for a book about the ways in which we memorialise those who lived before us. “The vocative is a voice we use when saying a prayer or for addressing the dead”, he explains. Every Monument Will Fall, then, is a book written to pay tribute not only to Professor Beaudry, but also Hicks’ family, and the unnamed, forgotten victims of British colonialism – all those who have not been afforded the same memorialisation as such glorified figures as Rhodes and Pitt Rivers.  

There is another reason for this stylistic choice. “I don’t just want to give a lecture with this book”, he says. “I want it to be a conversation.” With the upcoming tour, he wants to “build a community”. “There’s a transformational potential here on the page that’s maybe relevant for the whole world. That’s the hope.”

After the conversation wraps up, we exit Professor Hicks’ office into the grand, colonnaded hall of the Pitt Rivers Museum. It’s difficult to ignore the contradiction – the dedicated anti-racist curator at the heart of a museum whose very displays are still organised by the legacies of 19th-century racism. Heading along Parks Road, the Rhodes House draws our attention from the side, and then the figure of Cecil Rhodes himself as we turn right and head up the High Street. Any Oxford student knows about Rhodes’ crimes, and the controversy his memorialisation continues to cause. But Every Monument Will Fall asks you to see these buildings and statues in a new light, not only as evidence of Oxford’s colonial past, but as a continued exercise in myth-making that aggrandises deplorable men. After a conversation with Dan Hicks, one does not look at Oxford in quite the same way again. 

Is there such a thing as a break-up season?

Emma Baltzer
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Is there such a thing as a break-up season?

I think that, in our own minds, and with our intimate knowledge of the people closest to us, it is easy to zoom in, to overanalyse the incompatibilities, circumstances, and personal factors of all the break-ups we experience and observe. However, when we step back to see these turbulent, seemingly singular occurrences in the wider context of the lives of people we might only brush against, I believe a pattern arises that warrants the consideration of a break-up season.

While the word ‘season’ is used figuratively, I think we can see a direct correlation between romantic or relational seasons and the seasons of the year. The seasons correspond to the growth and harvest seasons of crops, or the dry and wet seasons of tropical climates, migratory patterns of birds, hibernation of mammals. They dictate the behaviours of the natural world, to the extent that humans have even personified them as gods. And although it can be easy to think that we humans are not at the mercy of these forces, with man-made inventions often allowing us to live a consistent life year-round, there is much evidence to the contrary. Seasonal depression is a commonly recognised disorder of the colder months. Across the UK, the collective shift in mood when the sun illuminates every street, when the warmth allows us to shed the smothering puffer and adorn ourselves in colour and flowy fabrics, is so profound and so predictable, that we might secretly be solar-powered creatures. It is not such a leap, then, to say that this fleeting happiness has a domino effect, and in the warmer months we are more open to new connections and to seeing the beauty which was always there, but perhaps lay dormant or buried during the winter. Along with the nature which surrounds us, we ebb and flow under the sway of the seasons.

Autumn has a reputation for being the season of introspection. As our summer openness begins to draw in, so too do we begin to turn away from new things to relish the warm familiarity of what we know. This reputation is, of course, founded in autumn’s natural significance – that of harvest, reaping the results of the past two seasons of growth, before the ground hardens (and later freezes). This evokes a nostalgia for what was growing, now that the time to cut it down is upon us. This synesthesia between seasonal, sensory experience, and our emotional understanding of our personal relationships, is also reflected in music. A song we often associate with Autumn is ‘Sweater Weather’ by the Neighbourhood, which expresses the vulnerability and tenderness brought on by the cold. A song explicitly set in autumn, which continues these themes, is Taylor Swift’s ‘All Too Well’, a break-up anthem, referencing falling leaves, and describing the fragmentation that occurs after parting ways with a lover.

One reason I believe SZA (mistakenly) declared cuffing season as winter (in her 2022 SNL skit song ‘Big Boys’), is that the cold and the darkness, which make us retreat indoors are mellowed, even thawed, by the close presence of a lover or a friend. However, this desire for closeness is at odds with the cold, which, after months of exposure, seeps into our very being. We don’t stay out as late, plans become less spontaneous – teeth chattering and full-body shivers aren’t exactly conducive to the wide smile and gracious small talk that meeting new people and making first impressions requires. The highlight of the season is Christmas, an occasion centred on family, and which might indirectly overlook a need or desire for romance or friendship (though any Scot will tell you the latter theme is brought to the forefront come New Year’s).

As we move into spring, there is a conscious step towards optimism, and a newfound potential for growth after the inactive winter. Just as the blossoms begin to bud, and everything seems just that bit greener, so too are we encouraged to venture out of our own shells, and dare to go to that event or party. It helps that any sorrows are immediately cushioned by the longer, warmer days, and the ever-present pint prerogative. Saint Etienne’s ‘Spring’ makes the important distinction between spring and summer, which is also often identified as being a happier season. It represents spring’s inherent whimsical energy, which is perhaps born from the transition from winter, the beginning stages of our metamorphosis into our full social potential. As a result, spring is a time for social opportunities: first dates which go nowhere, interesting people you meet once and promise to meet again. Yet somehow three weeks go by before you realise that you are so focused on how the life you already have is blooming, that you neglect the chance to further expand your garden.

Summer, of course, is the much-anticipated, most glorified time of year. How can you be anything but giddy when it is 20 degrees, and you can feel the sun’s warmth radiating through the air? I would argue, though, that the social and relational mood of your summer is largely dictated by your spring. Conversely to winter, where companionship acts like a safety blanket, in summer, we are empowered and happy, and this feeling is reinforced by our everyday surroundings. We don’t need to rely on the comfort of a relationship for happiness, because all of a sudden, what we have is bathed in gorgeous light. We are delightfully open to new people in all sorts of ways, simultaneously allowing for more frivolity and freedom in general. While the new connections of spring flourish further, I think in this time of year (especially in the splendour that is Trinity in Oxford), we are less like plants and more like bees. We derive pleasure from both the comfort of the hive and the undertaking of pollination, dashing around, diversifying our days, and conversations.

I write this coming up on a year of being in a relationship, which began to sprout and bud in May last year, and so one could say that this is simply an outsider’s view of the cycles of love. But to that, I would ask you to look around, as we exit the abundance of spring to launch into the joy of summer.  Don’t you see a culture of friendliness and positivity thriving, as we throw caution to the wind and jump into the river once more?

Hospitable cultures exist because women exist

Saba Ahmadzadeh Noughani
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Hospitable cultures exist because women exist

I dedicate this piece to my maternal grandmother, to her tired eyes and overworked hands.

When guests and families sit, talk, and laugh, one person is always excluded. The same person who wakes up earlier and sleeps later than everyone else. As someone who comes from a collectivist culture, cooking, breaking bread, raising each other’s children, and caring for the elderly are embedded in our way of life. In our individualistic Western society, this is rare, hence I’d distinguish this part of my identity by how generous and welcoming my hospitable Eastern culture is. But I’ve come to realise that all this hospitality does not come from culture. It comes primarily from women. In most households, from one woman. 

Let’s think about every hospitable home that we’ve eaten and slept in, including our own. Who cooked for us? Who cleaned the house before we arrived? Who made sure that we were served and had everything we needed ? Who laid the table? And most disappointing of all, who was given the last seat on that table? 

I’m ashamed to say that, like many others, after benefiting from the unpaid labour of the women in my household, I’d instead credit and praise my culture for our family’s hospitality. 

However, it is women who are the reason why our hospitable cultures have survived. They are the reason why culture, at all, has survived. National dishes and homemade remedies can be traced back to women’s hands. Cultural attire with distinct embroidery and symbolism can be traced back to women’s hands. Songs sung to children, fables, poetry and folklore surviving generations, can be traced back to women narrating and teaching them to their offspring. 

But it is much more than this; we don’t just owe the survival of our culture to women, but our very own survival. Every homemade meal, tender embrace, wiped tear, wrapped gift, handwritten card, wise word of advice, and lullaby has raised and nourished us. With regards to the hospitality that defines our collectivist cultures, it comes with a huge sacrifice of time, energy, effort, and labour, which is almost always paid by our mothers, grand and great. They continue to make this sacrifice unpaid, unappreciated, and unnoticed. 

If roles were reversed, and a man were to prepare the home, welcome, cook for, and serve guests, we all know he’d be praised, called progressive, exceptional. His wife would be called “lucky”. So, when women do this daily, how often do you even say thank you? How often do they receive thanks from every single person who sat at the table she laid and ate the meal she prepared?

University was the first time I moved away from home. It was my mother with whom I was on the phone throughout the term. It was my mother who would text to see if I had eaten when I was away. It was my grandmother who always had a meal ready whenever I’d visit home. It was my mother who would drive me to and from Oxford, again and again, even though I could have taken the train. Before my year abroad, it was my grandmother who taught me how to cook (a proper) meal, knowing I could no longer rely on college dinners. When I came back from my year abroad, it was my aunty, who, despite having recently given birth, planned a party and “Welcome Home” cake.

While I could easily, and would love to, write an article about men’s role in sustaining the family, and the importance of the role fathers play in our wellbeing and development as adults, I write this first. Because while the survival of a family or society depends on both men and women working together, the part that women play is rarely acknowledged or appreciated. 

Across time and place, including now, “providing” is considered a masculine role, but, on the contrary, it is not a single role nor one carried out by a single person. It has always been shared, with women providing a great deal by managing the emotional and logistical labour of the household. It is their advice and comfort that provides emotional support. It is their meals that have provided physical support and nourishment. It is their commutes to and from their children’s school, clubs, and activities that have provided educational support, and facilitated the lifelong friendships that we have formed in these spaces. 

Still, women continue to provide for and look after everyone, from young babies to elderly parents and in-laws. It is their care that contributes to sustaining our families, subsequently holding wider society together. And despite all this, society continues to perpetuate the narrative that it is only men who provide, and support women.

It also seems to me that most women don’t carry all this mental and emotional strain because they want to, like to, or because they just really love guests that much. No, they do so because if they took a break from these daily tasks that keep the family home, and subsequently wider society, running and thriving, it would have consequences. The house would remain unkept, the household would remain unfed. Society has imposed this burden and an unfair sense of obligation solely upon their backs. A woman’s value has been tied to her productivity and how much she contributes to her family. God forbid these women take a break, they’d be labelled a failing mother and wife. 

It is one of my deepest desires to, even if for just one day, relieve all women, specifically our mothers, from our homes. I don’t want to see them cooking, cleaning, serving, or managing. I doubt any family would survive. I doubt any hospitable home that we take pride in would last even 24 hours. 

To quote the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran: “All houses are dark until the mother wakes up.”

Too much, yet never enough: Is burnout real? 

Alice Sanders
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Too much, yet never enough: Is burnout real? 

Burnout is a word I have heard one too many times at Oxford. Once you have heard something enough, it becomes just a senseless humming in your ear – a buzzword that loses all significance. The mere existence of such a term validates an experience previously dismissed, and thus can only add kindling to this frenzied obsession. Once named, burnout becomes an inescapable reality. The medal that comes after having worked ‘hard enough’ is complete and paralysing exhaustion, watching your tea grow cold while intentions swirl aimlessly on its surface.

There have always been moments when I have taken myself too seriously, but, amid the deluge of essay crises and reading lists, it can at times feel impossible not to. In Oxford, life can so easily slip away into a to-do list, a time-blocked schedule perfectly coloured in your Google Calendar. Yet even in those line breaks, every conversation becomes a self-assessment against a productivity scale, achievement measurable in hours studied, marks received, and flashcards reviewed. The weeks of term being so few in number only serves to further contribute to the need to be constantly in motion, constantly productive. A society event, that one night out: everything becomes pressurised, everything has a deadline. 

Tiredness is one consequence, but one distinct from the inherent exhaustion of burnout. Perhaps this is what leads to the disillusionment which some feel towards the phrase. You can hear it in every library after dark, in every coffee shop dotting the High Street. There is hardly a moment in which it isn’t breathed, from welfare emails to the depths of the mid-afternoon doomscroll, when even the fluorescent carousel of Reels begins to push you towards a clear and convenient answer. In its proliferation, ‘burnout’ can lose its potency. It becomes an excuse, a mask that is worn by laziness, paraded about by a culture of self-improvement. 

It is easy to denounce burnout as a masquerade if you have never watched a candle burn itself out. Every wick has an end, and it is quite satisfying to see the flame eat away at it, the wax dripping and melting, reforming in a puddle on the table below. It is a mess to be admired, a sculpted proof that you used everything you had – that is, until you try to light the candle again, and there is nothing left to burn. Melted wax seals and stays. It is this stasis that defines burnout: a sense of complete exhaustion and detachment, against which every best effort to resist is insufficient. 

However, despite intimate knowledge of this, I am often fooled by the scepticism towards this costume. Perhaps it is impossible not to be. The World Health Organisation labels burnout as solely an ‘occupational phenomenon’, not applicable to other areas of life. This definition neglects the academic, social, and emotional contexts: those especially pertinent to students. It is this pattern – one that rejects the reality of overwhelm – that encourages us to dismiss burnout as a fiction, a self-pitying justification for poor discipline. 

When we contribute to this dismissal of burnout as defeat,  an excuse to avoid responsibility, we only feed the destructive culture in which we live. Modern values tell us that success equates to productivity, busyness is equivalent to happiness, and entirely disavows difficulty. So it remains an obligation to continue to show up, to meet deadlines. Obligation, though, comes to engulf every facet of existence. Waking up in the morning (if only after the ninth alarm), attending any social event (if only to sit in silence, unhearing), becomes as burdensome as the original stressor, completely overrun by apathy.

In the self-contained environment of university life, which preoccupies itself with productivity and attendance, admitting to this exhaustion seems synonymous with defeat. Comparison is oppressive and wholly inescapable. All those around you become a measure of what you should be doing. Anything else is not enough. Yet, when it is simultaneously too much, how can we accept that we just have less capacity to work than those around us, writing the same essays, sitting in the same classes?

This is perhaps where I concede, because I cannot pretend to have these answers. I am always the first to revert to blaming my own ‘laziness’, to see exhaustion as merely a product of sufficient work. It is a cynical tendency to roll my eyes at the usual chain of uniform advice – “take a walk, take a break, just get it done” – but one that I maintain all the same. It is easier to lie in bed, to listen to the alarm ring, than to face it. Accepting this wake-up call, the necessity to change, is a daunting prospect. It involves acknowledging that our limits are not boundless, that our attention is finite, and that rest should never be a luxury. Burnout cannot be resolved not by forcing down the brakes, but by fixing patterns, remoulding the wax, and guarding the flame more steadily this time.

It may not be possible to deny that our perception of burnout has been intensely coloured by its ubiquity, but this does nothing to undermine its reality. Burnout is not a convenient excuse, a means of slacking. You may believe it to be, for all I care. But there is no shame in naming your struggle. There is no need to ask for permission to rest. 

‘Oleanna’: An imperfect but gripping watch

Ian Coates
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‘Oleanna’: An imperfect but gripping watch

Oleanna is one of those plays which could likely get banned from certain spaces on account of its sheer nuance. And given that nuance has these days been put on the IUCN List of Endangered Species, it brings me great joy to see plays like this still being produced. An open-ended message hidden behind layers of mystery, upon which one actually requires concentrated thought to base an opinion, is bound to be unpopular for many; and for that reason, I cannot but respect Charlie Lewis for directing such a fearless rendition of David Mamet’s 1992 classic.

The story follows the increasing tension between a student, Carol (played by Laura Boyd), and her university (sorry, college) professor, John (played by Alec Greene), over the course of three meetings. Given that it is a two-person play, I feel that Boyd and Greene should be the main recipients of my scrutiny; and so, let us begin with Greene. His charisma was astonishing, keeping me hooked to his performance even at John’s worst moments, and pairing well with Boyd to bring out the character’s concurrent charm and creepiness. What’s more, he did so whilst utterly convincing me that he was a middle-aged man. (And no thanks to the makeup department – that dusting of grey in his hair was pathetic.) He showed impressive range, too, gradually losing his composure over the course of the play, and becoming rather terrifying by the end.

And as for Boyd, she nailed the part of the nervous victim. Her instability was contagious, and even had me gasping for air a little during the first scene. My only issue with her performance is that it was a little one-note: no matter the occasion, she seemed to be concurrently scowling and hyperventilating. It worked at first but became grating over time, and also seemed somewhat out of place in the scenes where the power swings in her favour. By the end of the play, Carol is flaunting her power, which comes across strangely if she looks terrified. But on the other hand, one might argue that this delivery preserves the nuance of these scenes, allowing the audience to persist in their view of her as a victim should they choose to. Whether or not her slightly frustrating performance was intentional, and whether the aim of a play should be to preserve its nuance versus entertain the viewer, is up for debate. At the end of the day, one thing is certain: I will remember her performance, and probably even more than Greene’s. She made me reflect on Carol as a character, and all the while deeply aggravating me.

The only main issue with this production is its truly abominable staging. John and Carol seemed to be in a competition for who could show more of the audience their back, and frankly, I think they both won. As a fortunate resident of the centre front row, I got the full experience, but my friend who sat in one of the right-hand seats said that she could never see both characters’ faces at once. And compelling as it may be to see the back of Greene’s shirt, the audience in the left and right wings paid considerably more for tickets than I did (mine cost me a crisp £0.00) and deserved the same experience I had. I will sympathise, however, that the New College Long Room is a pretty crap place to stage a play.

To wrap up my review, I will end on a high. The stage combat was brutal and effective, and left me legitimately winded as I walked out of the show. Besides two silent kicks, which fell flat, the headbanging and choking were both terrifying to witness, especially from my front row seat (I did not feel so fortunate for my position as John throttled Carol a mere few inches from my face). The performances and direction ended the play with a bang, and had me thinking about it for the entire ensuing day.

Boulevard Productions’ Oleanna leaves something to be desired, but what it lacks in production value it more than compensates for in audacity; so much so that David Mamet would be proud, had he not completely lost his mind in recent years (see his article: ‘Why Charlie Kirk was a modern prophet’).




The Roger Bannister mile and its modern legacy

Tim Herd
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The Roger Bannister mile and its modern legacy

The legacy of Roger Bannister and his famous sub-four-minute mile is etched all over the Iffley Sports Centre. This year’s celebration marked the 72nd anniversary of Roger Bannister’s achievement, and was set to be particularly special. Accompanied by perfect conditions, Olympic silver medallist Laura Muir, former world champion and current Commonwealth champion, came to grace Oxford with a stand-alone performance in the elite women’s race. With Muir’s personal best in the mile standing at 4:15.24, there was little doubt that she might renew Sonia O’Sullivan’s 2004 track record for the women’s mile, currently standing at 4:27.79. Hopes were also high for the elite men’s race, with top athletes aiming to challenge the four-minute mark. 

On the 6th of May 1954, Roger Bannister ran the mile in a time of 3:59.4. This athletic accomplishment marked a turning point in running; previously, it had been thought impossible for anyone to run a mile in under four minutes. Then, after Bannister’s achievement, it was only a matter of weeks before his feat was replicated by John Landy. In the summer of 1954, during the Commonwealth Games, these two top runners both ran sub-four-minute miles in an exhilarating final. Bannister took the victory. 

Established in 2024 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Sir Roger Bannister’s world athletic record, Bannister Miles is an annual event, building up to its 75th anniversary in 2029. 

The Bannister Miles celebration is open to all: in the morning, a community mile sees members of the public run from St Aldates Road to the Roger Bannister track at Iffley. Later in the day, elite athletes try their luck on the famous Roger Bannister track, pushing their limits and hunting down rapid mile times while going head-to-head with the Bannister legacy. Throughout the day, Iffley Road hosted an exciting atmosphere, serving food and drinks in the build-up to the elite races. 

The atmosphere reached a crescendo around 5:45 pm; Laura Muir’s race was set to begin, the first event on her 2026 calendar. Ready to challenge Muir were some of middle-distance running’s young elite, including English Schools champion Kiera Brady-Jones and one of Oxford’s finest, BUCS 800m gold medallist Charlotte Buckley. The cheers of the crowd testified to the excitement of watching a world-renowned champion compete with some of the sport’s rising stars. 

Setting an infernal speed, the pacer was adamant to lead Muir to a new track record. This strung the race out, meaning all tactics went out of the window. Muir quickly separated herself from the rest of the field. At the halfway point, when the pacer dropped off, a track record was on the cards. Muir found herself alone at the front of the race, with no pacers or competitors to spur her on – a truly daunting position. Nevertheless, previous experience allowed Muir to maintain the pace: spurred on by the crowd, she was able to put further time between herself and the rest of the field. Finishing in 4:34.06, ten seconds ahead of her competitors, Muir had delivered an impressive feat – a strong start to her Commonwealth campaign. Buckley, Oxford University’s star, crossed the line in a narrowly contested third place, having held on to silver for the best part of two laps. 

The main event of the day was, of course, the Bannister Mile. A race around the same track, at the same time of day, during the same time of year in which Bannister’s famous achievement occurred. Every year, runners compete not only against their competitors for first place, but also against the clock. At the stroke of 6pm, the race began. The pacer set off perfectly, with the first lap completed in 59 seconds. The others followed, bunched up, three abreast along the track. This race produced not only a fast pace, but tactical interest: after lap three, the runners were exactly on pace. Some athletes made early bids, accelerating in an attempt to break down their other competitor, a physical and mental game. However, the race was decided down the final stretch, with a four-way sprint for the line. This was won by the 17-year-old Freddy Rowe, fresh from passing his driving test, as the commentators made sure to announce, with a startling time of 4:00.88. Tantalisingly close to replicating Bannister’s achievement, Rowe promises a record-breaking future.

This year also brought back the relatively new discipline of steeplechase miles. Being a relatively new discipline, specialists were expected to challenge the world’s best times for the steeplechase mile. Two former winners, Will Battershill and Mark Pearce, were to go head-to-head. From the beginning, it was clear that these two athletes were going to produce an excellent race, as the rest of their competitors steadily fell behind. Battershill and  Pearce proved especially adept at clearing all the barriers, particularly the tricky water jump. Coming into the final 200 metres, Battershill strove ahead to open up a decisive gap. With a time of 4:20.40, the athlete achieved a new world best in the relatively new category of the steeplechase mile. Pearce finished only a second later, separated from the third-place chaser by over ten seconds. A thrilling spectacle, the steeplechase mile proved deserving of long-term establishment in the Bannister Miles celebration for years to come. 

These results demonstrate how difficult mile running truly is. A notoriously challenging discipline, Muir and Rowe showed exceptional talent to win their races, despite falling slightly short of the pre-race fantasies. 

The event is rightly celebrated as a massive step beyond the bounds of human limitation. While the mile world record of 3:43.13 has not been broken since 1999, other historic records continue to fall. In the recent London Marathon, the first and second ever official sub-two-hour marathons were run. This marathon record was another ‘impossible’ barrier in distance running, which has now been shattered, mirroring Roger Bannister’s accomplishment. Years on, these races still show us just how extraordinary Bannister’s achievement actually was, and why this feat of human achievement is deservedly celebrated 72 years later.

Internet Babies: Students of Subculture

Sharon Wilson
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Internet Babies: Students of Subculture

There’s a certain kind of artist that I keep coming back to lately: artists who seem to know exactly what I want to hear before I do. Not algorithmically, but instinctively. Their music feels hyper-specific yet universal; familiar, but not quite verging on nostalgic.

I’ve started thinking of them as ‘internet babies’ – artists born and raised online, whose creative instincts have been shaped not by a single scene but by years of immersion in fragmented, overlapping subcultures. 

What defines these creators is long-term exposure to subcultures. Years of YouTube rabbit holes, Tumblr aesthetics, game soundtracks, and online music recommendations. A cultural collage of sorts, an environment in which emo sits comfortably next to UK garage, and indie sleaze bleeds into rap. Nothing feels out of place because everything was encountered together.

There’s also a practical shift underpinning all of this. Music-making has never been more accessible. Any kid with an iPad can stumble across YouTube tutorials, free sample packs and intuitive software that can quickly turn curiosity into something more structured. While barriers to music careers still exist, the act of creating music is no longer subject to gatekeeping in the same way. More self-sufficient artists are emerging outside traditional industry pipelines, marked by a notable increase in artists from working-class backgrounds – particularly female producers – breaking through via online platforms.

All of this marks a clear break from older models of music culture. Scenes were once tied to geography and gatekept by labels, with genres functioning as boundaries rather than starting points. For internet-native artists, taste is no longer shaped linearly, but accumulated and in flux. 

Jim Legxacy – a student of everything, bound by nothing

Jim Legxacy is one of the clearest examples of this shift in the UK right now. The Lewisham artist, of Nigerian heritage, makes music that on paper shouldn’t cohere, with rap, emo, Afrobeats, indie, R&B, even folk elements all pulling in different directions. And yet, on his genre-fluid album Black British Music (2025), it comes together in a kind of effortless logic.

You can hear echoes of Britpop and indie alongside more contemporary rap and club influences. The album’s title – often shortened to BBM – nods not just to Black British identity, but to the BlackBerry Messenger era that defined a specific kind of 2000s UK youth culture. It’s nostalgia, but not in a heavy-handed way; it’s embedded in his sound and aesthetics, but never allowed to define them.

What makes the MOBO-winning artist’s work land is not just the range of influences, but the way they’re carefully stitched together. UK rap, especially in its underground iterations, can sometimes risk collapsing into its own conventions; a kind of anti-mainstream becoming a new ‘box’ itself. Legxacy sidesteps that entirely. His music feels raw and unpredictable, yet intentional. It reflects a broader shift away from scene-based identity towards something more fluid.

PinkPantheress – the algorithm made human

If Jim Legxacy represents the collage, PinkPantheress represents the algorithm. Her rise was inseparable from the internet: posting snippets on TikTok and SoundCloud while still at university, initially without even showing her face.

Her music pulls from a wide range of influences: emo’s emotional directness (seen in artists like My Chemical Romance and Paramore), K-pop’s polish and melodic precision, and the rhythmic backbone of UK garage and drum & bass, all filtered through a distinctly British pop lens. The result is deceptively simple – short, hook-driven songs that feel immediate and endlessly replayable, built from a complex set of references.

Her songs feel designed for how we now consume music: in fragments, on loop, through clips and snippets – a natural extension of growing up with a musical and cultural landscape that’s constantly reshaping itself.

At the same time, PinkPantheress is acutely aware of the downsides of this hyper-online existence. In ‘Internet baby (interlude)’, she gestures towards the dissonance of being both shaped by and exposed through the internet, a tension that sits quietly beneath much of her work. Still, her impact on modern British music is undeniable. We see her breaking through to international audiences, with a recent showstopping performance at Coachella, and being the first woman to win Producer of the Year at the BRITs. She feels like a frontrunner in any conversation about defining stars of the 2020s.

Natanya – genre as a palette, not a boundary

Natanya offers a slightly different angle on the same phenomenon. She was classically trained in piano from a young age, with clear jazz influences, but also draws from Amy Winehouse, Aaliyah and even Vocaloid artists. However, her work doesn’t sit neatly within any one lineage. It moves between neo-soul, R&B, indie, even touches of grunge, without ever fully settling.

On Feline’s Return (2025), that fluidity becomes the point. The project feels ambitious and deliberately uncontained, drawing from both formal training and eclectic, internet-driven listening habits that define her generation. Her songs refuse to resolve into a single identity.

What’s striking about Natanya is that she doesn’t just draw from different subcultures – she moves between them so seamlessly that they begin to lose their boundaries altogether. In an interview with Exeposé, she said: “I think in worlds. Instead of genre, I’d rather imagine I’m somewhere”. When listening to Natanya, you are transported to the scene that she sets with her diaristic lyrics and unique sound.

From everything we’ve ever clicked on

Taken together, artists like Jim Legxacy, PinkPantheress and Natanya point towards something broader. Their work is defined by how it processes influence, reassembling fragments of culture shaped by years of online immersion. What emerges isn’t just collage, but music that feels both widely legible and unexpectedly personal.

There’s a common criticism that the collapse of traditional ‘scenes’ have flattened music into a set of aesthetic blends, with styles endlessly recycled. But what these internet-native artists are doing isn’t simply repackaging the past – it reflects a different mode of cultural consumption, where broadly ranging influences are accumulated, reworked and made intuitive.

To me, this generation has a distinct creative instinct. Their music is rooted in shared cultural memory but not limited by it. With the right level of craft and imagination, it becomes generation-defining.

It makes me think about how I listen, not just what I’m listening to. I’ve grown up on everything from FIFA soundtracks to Paramore to K-pop – a constant stream of sounds that never really resolved into one identity, but gradually moulded my taste through constant exposure. Maybe that’s why this music feels so familiar. It reflects that same way of consuming culture: scattered, overlapping, always in motion. I’m hearing it not just as a listener, but as a fellow internet baby.

Gareth Lim elected Oxford Union President for Michaelmas 2026 in re-poll

Cherwell News
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Gareth Lim elected Oxford Union President for Michaelmas 2026 in re-poll

Gareth Lim has been elected Oxford Union President for Michaelmas Term 2026 at a re-run of the election.

Lim received 299 first preference votes, by a margin of 80 votes over Liza Barkova, who received 219 first preferences. Hamza Hussain and Victor André Marroquín also contested the election, receiving 66 and 61 first preference votes respectively. Six hundred and forty-six valid votes were cast, well below the 1787 votes cast in the original poll, with Lim receiving a majority of 327 votes including second preferences. 

Speaking to Cherwell following his election, Lim said the victory shows that “the Union is able to unite around a non-political figure; that the union believes in something that’s much greater than politics”.  He thanked his “good friend” Katherine Yang, President for Hilary Term, among others, and described his supporters as a “very large coalition”. He said this election had “no slates”, meaning “people were far more able to vote [with] their conscience”. 

Gareth Lim first ran for President for Michaelmas Term 2026 at the end of Hilary Term, coming in 3rd place behind Catherine Xu and Liza Barkova. He acknowledged to Cherwell the difference between the two campaigns, his first as a “guerrilla campaign” and his second which “had the support of a lot more traditional political figures within the Union”, proving that people “can unite behind something brilliant”.

In a victory speech in the Union bar, Lim expressed his appreciation for the other candidates for their campaigns and those who backed his campaign. He told the assembled audience in the Union bar that “this victory belongs to all of us who voted for me”. He promised to “take back the Union” and change the “conduct” of the institution. 

During his campaign, Lim focused heavily on, what he described to Cherwell as, restoring “intellectual rigour”, arguing that recent terms had become dominated by controversy and internal disputes. He called for a broader range of debates and speakers, suggesting the Society should place greater emphasis on areas outside politics and international affairs.

Lim also raised concerns about the Union’s disciplinary culture, claiming that candidates had become “incentivised to use the Union disciplinary procedure as a replacement for campaigning”. He added that the Society had become “over-reliant” on disciplinary processes and criticised what he described as a wider “culture of fear” within Union politics.

The election took place in the context of ongoing backlash surrounding the Oxford Union’s invitation to several high-profile figures, including Carl Benjamin and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson. Speaking to Cherwell after his victory, Lim repeated that he would not have invited Yaxley-Lennon to the Society, but said the Union should “stand by [its] decisions” and said incumbent President Arwa Elrayess had “done a pretty good job” at deciding who she wanted to invite. He said Elrayess was considering changes to the debate format to “ensure that people like Tommy Robinson answer the questions” and that it will be “only after we see the debate” that we could judge whether the invitation to Yaxley-Lennon was “the right thing to do”.

The re-run election was triggered after President-Elect Catherine Xu was found guilty of electoral fraud by a Union Tribunal. The Tribunal concluded that Xu had orchestrated a scheme to impersonate legitimate voters during the original election, held in Hilary Term 2026, by distributing Oxford Union membership cards to individuals not entitled to vote and instructing them to cast ballots in other members’ names.

Oxford researchers trial non-invasive diagnostic scans for endometriosis

Melissa Eddon
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Oxford researchers trial non-invasive diagnostic scans for endometriosis

Researchers led by University of Oxford academic Dr Tatjana Gibbons have successfully trialled non-invasive scans to diagnose endometriosis.

Published in The Lancet Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Women’s Health, the study involved 19 individuals with either strong signs of “pelvic or thoracic endometriosis”, or who had already received a diagnosis. The non-invasive scan was carried out after the intravenous administration of an imaging agent that binds to tissue, and makes endometriosis growths visible on screen. 

The study demonstrated 100% specificity, meaning no false positives were reported. As such, the scan offers a viable alternative to the existing invasive diagnostic procedures. Dr Gibbons told Cherwell: “This imaging method could support patients getting an earlier diagnosis and could help diagnose endometriosis subtypes that can’t be reliably seen non-invasively.” 

Endometriosis is an inflammatory disease, in which cells similar to those found in the uterus grow in other parts of the body, such as the ovaries and fallopian tubes, but can also spread to the bladder, bowel, and chest. Symptoms such as heavy periods accompanied by severe pain and pain during sex are triggered when endometriosis growths break down but cannot leave the body.  

The condition affects an estimated 10% (190 million) of women of childbearing age. The causes of endometriosis are unknown, though some research has connected it to immune system dysregulation. The disease can also have significant impacts on fertility, with 25-50% of infertile women having endometriosis. 

At present, there are no known cures for the disease. 

Typically, diagnosis requires invasive laparoscopic surgery, which involves directly observing tissue or taking samples for examination. The complexity and expense of the procedure often lead to delays in treatment and the continuation of suffering for the patient, with one study by the charity Endometriosis UK suggesting wait times have reached an average of nine years. Currently, around 40% of surgical procedures produce negative results. Gibbons hopes the study will tackle these waiting times, and “empower the development of new therapies”. She added that the next step for the pilot study is a larger clinical trial, which she hopes will validate the team’s findings. 

Oxford Women in STEM Society told Cherwell: “The pilot scheme is a positive step, but it also highlights how delayed progress in this area has been…Conditions like endometriosis have been consistently underfunded and dismissed, which has led to real harm.”

The society hopes that the study will not only improve treatment timelines, but also “force a shift” in attitudes towards women’s pain by healthcare companies and professionals. 

The Oxford study has made national news, and was featured in an episode of Saturday Night Live UK. As part of the “Weekend Update” skit, the study was used in a joke about the pain that has come to be associated with female health procedures.

May Morning

Elizabeth Bourn
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May Morning

Smudged mascara and the curling of coffee steam. Small yawns and the shuffling of boots. Tangled hair plaited by the same girl from first-year, a crumbly pastry shared with her, too. Heads resting on shoulders, tired eyes looking skyward for the song that is coming. Fresh, crisp air and butter-yellow sunlight you could reach out and taste. There is excited chatter of stories from the night before, looks shared. A hush falls. May morning. See what the world can do before sunrise.

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