Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 4 hours ago
Speakers: Luke Kemp, Stephen Luby, and Scott Sagan
Join us for a special seminar featuring Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp, author of the bestseller Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. In this new book, Kemp conducts a historical autopsy of hundreds of polities over the last 300,000 years to draw lessons from history on how collapse could unfold in the future and what we can do to avoid it. Drawing on cutting-edge research in anthropology and archaeology, Goliath’s Curse is a radical retelling of human history with many surprising lessons, including the role of inequality in past collapses, how these historical breakdowns often were blessings and not just reversions to a ‘dark age’, and why collapse in the future is a far grimmer prospect.
Speakers: Luke Kemp, Stephen Luby, and Scott Sagan
Join us for a special seminar featuring Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp, author of the bestseller Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. In this new book, Kemp conducts a historical autopsy of hundreds of polities over the last 300,000 years to draw lessons from history on how collapse could unfold in the future and what we can do to avoid it. Drawing on cutting-edge research in anthropology and archaeology, Goliath’s Curse is a radical retelling of human history with many surprising lessons, including the role of inequality in past collapses, how these historical breakdowns often were blessings and not just reversions to a ‘dark age’, and why collapse in the future is a far grimmer prospect.
