F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture
The F W Bateson Memorial Lecture was founded by the pupils and friends of F W Bateson (1901-1978). Bateson taught English at Corpus from 1946 to 1969, first as a lecturer and later as a teaching fellow. He was made an Emeritus Fellow of the College on his retirement in 1969. The lectures are held annually.
The 2023 lecture will be delivered by Professor Dagmawi Woubshet on Wednesday 3 May. His title is ‘A Quiet Gathering: James Baldwin and the Art of Late Style in The Welcome Table’.
Dagmawi Woubshet is the Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. A scholar of literature and visual culture, he works at the intersections of African American, LGBTQIA+, and African studies. He is the author of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (2015), and the co-edited volume Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture, a special issue of Callaloo (2010). His essays have appeared in Callaloo, Transition, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and The Atlantic. Woubshet is the recipient of fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, the Africa Institute in Sharjah, and the Modern Art Museum in Addis Ababa, where he curated Julie Mehretu: The Addis Show.
Former lecturers include Professor Tiffany Stern with the title 'Ballads and Product Placement in the Time of Shakespeare'; Professor Mark Ford with the title 'Woman much missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and poetry’; Professor Dinah Birch CBE with the title 'Utopian Topics: Ruskin and Oxford' in 2019; Professor John Mullan with the title ‘Dicken’s Tricks’ in 2018; and Professor Nicholas Roe with the title ‘English restored: John Keats’s To Autumn’ in 2017.
The lectures are held annually and a full list of previous lectures can be found here.
President's Seminars
Every term, the President arranges a seminar, at which prominent figures from different walks of life come and discuss issues of interest and importance. There is an open talk, with questions, followed by a dinner in the SCR, where the discussion can continue.
The Michaelmas Seminar was delivered by Xenia Wickett. Former visitors have included Sir Roger Penrose, Professor Sir Steve Cowley, Hassan Damluji, Edward Fitzgerald KC, Professor Edward Fraenkel, Surgeon Commodore Peter Buxton, Martin Wolf, Rupert Elderkin and Hector Sants.
A full list of President's Seminars can be found here.
Triennial E A Lowe Lectures in Paleography
The E. A. Lowe Lectures are given in memory of Elias Avery Lowe, a noted Paleographer and Honorary Fellow of the College from 1954 to his death in 1969.
The title of the Lowe Lectures 2023 was 'Manuscripts of Character: Codex, Ethos, and Authority in Byzantium and Beyond'. They were delivered by Professor Niels Gaul on 28 February, 2 March and 7 March.
Tuesday 28 February - “Codex” – explores the phenomenon of Byzantine literati curating their own writings in codex format and possible ancient and patristic models; with glances at similar practices in other medieval manuscript cultures
Thursday 2 March - “Ethos” – examines the ways in which such codices were thought to display the author’s character, and what the concept entailed in this context
Tuesday 7 March - “Authority” – relates expressions of authorial ethos to matters of mise-en-page, with particular attention to marginal spaces
Niels Gaul is A G Leventis Professor of Byzantine Studies and Director of the Centre for Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies at the University of Edinburgh; from 2005 to 2007 he held the inaugural Dilts-Lyell Research Fellowship in Greek Palaeography at Lincoln College and in the Faculty of Classics. His research interests include the socio-historical dynamics of schools, learning, and the classical tradition in Byzantium; since 2017 he has been co-directing an ERC-funded comparative project on classicising learning in the Byzantine and middle-period Chinese imperial systems.
Professor Judith Schlanger, President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, and Professor of Hebrew Manuscript Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris delivered 2020 Lowe Lectures. Her title was 'The Hebrew-Latin Manuscripts of the Library of Corpus Christi College'. An article by Professor Schlanger on the subject of her Lowe Lectures can be read in the July issue of the Sundial here.
Previous lecturers include Rodney Thomson, David Ganz, Susan Rankin, Anthony Grafton and Michael Lapidge.
The full list of lectures and their associated publications can be found here.
Isaiah Berlin Lectures in the History of Ideas
Isaiah Berlin read Greats (Classics) at Corpus, finding it 'cute', according to his letters. The Isaiah Berlin Lectures in the History of Ideas are a prestigious annual series, run in conjunction with Oxford's Philosophy Faculty. Previous lecturers include Michael Rosen. Jonathan Israel, J. G. A. Pocock, Daniel Garber and Allen Wood.
Follow this link for further information: Isaiah Berlin Lectures in the History of Ideas.