Paula Marantz Cohen DREXEL UNIVERSITY How can decline in enrollments in the humanities be explained? Nationwide in recent years estimates of the drop in liberal arts majors range from one-fourth to one-third of those in English, history, government, philosophy and other traditional subjects. English departments have been hit especially hard. One study found that faculty members seem to be in denial about the general decline. How in a practical way might interest in humanities majors be...

Aaron Pratt HARRY RANSOM CENTER Before the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio in 1623 and the efforts of subsequent editors and critics, England’s printed playbooks were considered “riff raff,” connected more with the world of London’s popular theaters than with what we might think of as “capital-L” Literature. Or so we have been told. This lecture will offer the beginnings of a new narrative that places quartos at the center rather than on the periphery of literary culture in...

Tancred Bradshaw LONDON One of the surprises of Britain’s withdrawal from the Middle East was the successful creation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971. Tancred Bradshaw will discuss the critical role played by Sir William Luce, previously Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Aden Colony, in that transition. Luce was responsible for establishing a viable political structure for the previously semi-independent sheikhdoms of the Gulf. Against the odds, he succeeded in his quest to create...

Philip Goad is the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Professor of Australian Studies (AY2019-20) at Harvard University and Chair of Architecture and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne. He was trained as an architect and gained his PhD in architectural history at the University of Melbourne where he has taught since 1992 and was founding Director of the Melbourne School of Design (2007-12). He has been President of the Society of Architectural...

The London Review of Books was founded in 1979 during a strike at The Times that prevented the publication of the Times Literary Supplement. By the time the dispute at The Times was settled, two issues of the LRB had been published. At the beginning there was only a small circulation. A large proportion of the reviews focused on academic issues. And there was, in the words of its editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, both “a leftish point of view” and a certain amount of condescension and even mockery...

Thomas Ricks NEW YORK TIMES   If the best measure of a general is the ability to grasp the nature of the war he faces, and then to make adjustments, George Washington was one of the greatest the United States ever had. This is not perceived even today because he had few victories during the entire War for Independence. But it was not a war that would be won by battles. It was a different sort of conflict. Washington came to understand this, and he changed, moving away from the offensive...

Speaker – David Leal, Nuffield College, Oxford P.G. Wodehouse was England’s greatest comic writer. His new memorial at Westminster Abbey celebrates his achievements as “Humorist, Novelist, Playwright, Lyricist.” He continues to be widely read and written about. Wodehouse is best known for creating sunny fictional worlds into which we can escape, yet he found himself embroiled in a dark real-world controversy for making five radio broadcasts from Berlin, at the behest of the Nazi government,...

Speaker – Allen Packwood, Churchill College, Cambridge Allen Packwood will use his knowledge of the Churchill Papers, held at Churchill College, Cambridge, to analyze the contents of Churchill’s despatch boxes. He will go behind the iconic image and the famous oratory to look in detail at Churchill’s leadership and shed light on how the Prime Minister conducted wartime operations. One of his first agonizing challenges was how to respond to the collapse of France in May 1940. The Director of...

Speaker – Philippa Levine Diverse institutions have attempted to order and to organize, to regulate and to banish, to promote and to sell nakedness. Focusing on religion’s always ambivalent relationship with the human body, this talk explores a cultural history with surprisingly powerful contemporary resonance. Philippa Levine holds the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas at UT. Her most recent book, part of the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series, is on...

Speaker – Janine Barchas In the nineteenth century, inexpensive editions of Jane Austen’s novels were made available to Britain’s working classes. They were sold at railway stations, traded for soap wrappers, and awarded as school prizes. At pennies a copy, these reprints were some of the earliest mass-market paperbacks, with Austen’s stories squeezed into tight columns on thin, cheap paper. Few of these bargain books survive, yet they made a substantial difference to Austen’s early...

Speaker – Michael J. Birkner, Gettysburg College This lecture is about journalists based in Australia practicing their craft in 1942, when the prospect of a Japanese invasion was impending. How did professional standards compare with daily practice? Most information came from official sources, and draft articles had to run the gantlet of military censors. What were the trade-offs for reporters, including self-censorship? How well did the journalists manage to inform their readers back home?...

Speaker – Gwyn Daniel OXFORD In many of his plays, Shakespeare deals with profound political questions that have continuing relevance for the contemporary world. His tragedies often have a family drama at their heart. They include conflicts between personal and family loyalties, on the one hand, and on the other the demands of realpolitik. In Macbeth and Coriolanus, his themes include the violent seizure of power, dilemmas of political representation, and the perspectives of ordinary citizens...

Speaker – Sandra Mayer Oscar Wilde once described Benjamin Disraeli’s life as ‘the most brilliant of paradoxes’. It served as a model for someone who, as an Irishman and aspiring literary celebrity, shared Disraeli’s outsider status, his Byronic dandyism, his mastery of the quotable epigram, and his quest for fame in the British establishment. This lecture will look at the performances in which Wilde and Disraeli catered to the desires of an increasingly pervasive Victorian celebrity...

Speaker – Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa Since 1981, conservators who work in libraries and archives to preserve cultural records have been educated typically in three-to four-year graduate programs. Before 1981 in the U.S., however, no higher education opportunities existed—neither undergraduate nor graduate—targeted to the field of library and archives conservation. Why was this case? Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa locates the beginnings of the modern field of library and archives conservation during the...

Speaker – Wayne A. Rebhorn Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night has long been associated with the festive aspects of carnival, especially in its rejection of authority and the exploration of gender confusion in its main, romantic plot. But ‘carnival’ as used by Shakespeare also meant a time of grotesque liberation and indulgence. The carnivalesque can be disturbing as well as exhilarating. While rejection of authority finally yields to a return to the norms of ordinary social life, Twelfth...

Speaker – Stephen Sonnenberg While a student at Princeton in the late 1950s and early 1960s Stephen Sonnenberg was influenced by the ideas of the literary critic and poet R. P. Blackmur, and read C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). He will explain Snow’s influence on his thinking throughout his life, as reflected in his memoir now in its third draft, which looks closely at doctor-patient exchanges. A physician and humanities scholar, Sonnenberg will further...

Speaker – Sam Baker Often described as the inventor of the historical novel, the Scottish author Walter Scott (1771-1832) was also a poet, lawyer, pioneering editor, and popular historian. This talk will explore the theme of stewardship in Scott’s fiction—with particular reference to his best remembered work, Ivanhoe, and one of his least remembered, The Fair Maid of Perth—and will connect that theme with the historiography of feudalism that Scott discovered in the writings of early modern...

Speaker – Dean Robert King This occasion celebrates the end of the five-year process, sponsored by Randy Diehl and the College of Liberal Arts, that resulted in 150 Highly Recommended Books. The other committee members for the project were Robert Abzug (Rapoport Chair of Jewish Studies), Roger Louis (Kerr Professor of English History and Culture), Al Martinich (Vaughan Centennial Professor in Philosophy), Elizabeth Richmond-Garza (Director of Comparative Literature), and Steven Weinberg...

Speaker – David Edwards (GOVERNMENT) David Edwards has been a dedicated reader of American and British newspapers and opinion magazines since the 1950s. In fact, he still subscribes to more than one hundred print editions of newspapers, magazines, and journals. He will talk about how fake news has evolved into the versions of it that increasingly pervade politics today. And he will answer the question, what are some possible ways of understanding and coping with the challenge to democracy...

Speakers – Bill Brands (HISTORY) Bat Sparrow (GOVERNMENT) Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa (HARRY RANSOM CENTER) Bill Brands and Bat Sparrow will discuss the difference between writing history and biography, and between writing the life of a living person and that of someone dead, perhaps long ago dead, as well as the attitudes of biographers toward their subjects. And what of reviews that criticize a book seemingly other than the one the author thought he or she had written? Brands and Sparrow will...

Speaker – Mark Gasiorowski This lecture will begin with the historic Britain-Iran connection: ‘If you lift up Khomeini’s beard, you will find “MADE IN BRITAIN” stamped on his chin.’ After Iran’s 1978-1979 revolution, US and British officials sought a cooperative, mutually-beneficial relationship with the country’s new leaders. Contrary to what many believed, the CIA did not undertake covert political operations against the new regime and, in fact, rejected many opportunities to do so. The...

Speaker – Joanna Hitchcock Among the 1,300 passengers aboard the Titanic when she steamed out of Southampton Harbor in April 1912 was Noël, Countess of Rothes. She was traveling to the States to join her husband. This account of Noël’s experiences on the ship, in the lifeboat, and aboard the rescue ship is told through her own eyes, based on letters she wrote immediately after the sinking to her parents and to her cousin, the speaker’s grandmother. Joanna Hitchcock is the former Director of...

Speakers – Virginia Brown (Dell Medical School), Robert Prentice (McCombs Business School) Stephen Sonnenberg, M.D. (Plan II), Paul Woodruff (Philosophy) The Oxford Ethics Centre was established in 2003 with the aim of rational reflection on personal and professional ethics: ‘The vision is Socratic, not missionary’. The Oxford Centre promotes discussion on ‘climate change, terrorism, global inequality, poverty, and genetic engineering’. The Centre has transformed the way philosophy is taught...

Speaker – Bernard Wasserstein At the end of its three-decades-long mandate in 1948, Britain withdrew its administration and 100,000-strong armed forces from Palestine. But unlike its departure from any other dependent territory, it did not hand over to any successor government. Instead it left Arabs and Jews to fight for possession of the Holy Land. Historians have long debated why Britain left Palestine. But how did they leave? Was it a dignified withdrawal or a disorderly cut and run?...