Nerd Nite London May 2023

Nerd Nite London is a monthly event where three speakers give 18-21 minute fun-yet-informative talks across all disciplines, while the audience drinks along. This May, we’ll be celebrating a full decade of nerdery, so join us to raise a glass and learn about an 1860s popular music sensation, conspiracy theories and how not to fall for them.

Address: The Backyard Comedy Club, 231 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 0EL / also onlineDetails: Wednesday, 17 May, 2023. Doors open at 7PM, event starts at 7.30PM.

The online stream will go live at 7:15PM, with the speakers starting at 7.30PM and will be available for around 24 hours.

"POOR FEMININE CLARIBEL WITH HER HUNDRED SONGS": BALLADS AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN MUSIC INDUSTRY

Before there was Tin Pan Alley, there was Claribel. The biggest popular-music sensation of 1860s England, Charlotte Alington Barnard published over 100 songs under that Tennyson-inspired pseudonym between 1859 and her death in 1869. Her usual genre of choice was the "drawing-room" ballad -- but thanks to some savvy business moves from her music publisher John Boosey and the contralto Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, Claribel's music broke out of the drawing room's confines and became a mainstay of public entertainment. Her songs were furiously encored at concerts, the sheet music sold like hotcakes, and of course a few snobbish music critics in the London press did everything in their power to dismiss her work and her success. Claribel is relatively obscure now, but in this presentation you'll learn how this one woman and her hundred-plus songs revolutionized the music business and paved the way for the global music industry we have today.

Bio: For over four years, Whitney Thompson worked as a music cataloguer and copyright researcher for the digital sheet music company Musicnotes. Now she's a newly minted librarian, but she still likes to call herself a "professional music detective." In her vanishingly rare free time, she plays capoeira, annoys her two cats, and comes up with new and exciting ways to overstuff her schedule.

TIME SPACE AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES: AN EXAMINATION OF THE EVIDENCE

Jonn and Tom will talk about the things they’ve learn while writing their book “Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them.”

Bio: Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman columnist, and a contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, and all sorts of other places. He was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman, where he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, and spent six happy years writing about cities, maps and borders and hosting the Skylines podcast. He has written three books, as well as over a hundred editions of his substack, the Newsletter of Not Quite Everything.

Bio: Tom Phillips is a writer and a journalist who is currently working on his fourth book. He specialises in or jumps about between things like popular history, jokes, debunking and product development. on the history of the apocalypse. As a journalist, he was most recently the editor of Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact checking organisation.

TBC

Bio: Melissa Blundell-Osorio is an anthropologist and science communicator. Over the last 10 years, she has run more than 200 adult education and engagement programs in museums, pubs, and other venues, including 7 years as the organizer of Nerd Nite Miami. She has an MSc in Human Evolution and Behaviour from UCL, and will be starting doctoral studies at Indiana University, Bloomington in the fall. Her main areas of interest are in human behaviour and evolutionary medicine as well as a wide range of topics related to sex, gender, and sexuality 

All proceeds from Nerd Nite London go to charity. this year we are partnering with The Shine Trust to help foster a new generation of nerds.