Inaugural lectures
Inaugural Lectures are a landmark in academic life, held on the appointment of new professorships. The College of Arts and Law Inaugural Lectures series showcases the vibrant, challenging and diverse research of our academics.
Upcoming inaugurals
- Friday 25 April 2025, Professor Alexander M Cannon - Noisy hegemonies: How does tradition help a community regain its voice?
- Friday 6 June 2025, Professor Ruth Page - Why sharing stories matters: Influencers, mental health narratives and TikTok
Professor Nathan Waddell - Good Bad Books: Our Love Affair with Dystopia
In this March 2025 lecture Nathan suggests that our love affair with dystopia lies in this tension between form and content—in the generative strain between what dystopian novelists write about and how they write about it. Are dystopian books as radical as we tend to think? Or do they enjoyably indulge our fears, compensating for unease with craft?
Recordings of previous inaugurals
- From Birds to Words: Onomatopoeia, Metaphor, and the Language of Birdsong. Professor Bodo Winter. February 2025.
- Proving, pleasing and persuading: why ancient rhetoric still matters. Professor Henriette van der Blom. November 2024.
- Our mushroom moment? The trans possibilities of a new history of communal life. Professor Mo Moulton. October 2025.
- Should we stop talking about The Crusades? Professor William Purkis. May 2024.
- A turn: memory, craft and hope. Professor Adam Ledger. May 2024.
- How is sign language? Professor Adam Schembri. March 2024.
- Merrie England: 21st Century Military History, Professor Jonathan Boff. March 2024.
- What do we mean when we talk about totalitarianism today? Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge. March 2024.
- Studying Medieval Animals: The Case Of The Panther. Professor Nigel Harris. November 2023.
- From "dualism" towards isolationism? Or why the Government keeps losing cases. Professor Alexander Orakhelashvili. November 2023.
- The Dangers of Time Travel. Professor Nikk Effingham. April 2023.
- Shakespeare, The Simpsons and Difficult Sixth Novels: Creative Writing After the Apocalypse. Ruth Gilligan. March 2023.
- Understanding crimes across and between events. Professor John Child. March 2023.
- Around the Year's Midnight. Professor Alexandra Harris. January 2023.
- Habitual Ethics, Professor Sylvie Delacroix. October 2022.
- ‘Plays Inside Out’: Theatre, Marketing and Ballads. Professor Tiffany Stern. May 2022.
- I was always not never doing the same thing again…Professor Scott Wilson. July 2022.
- Bog bodies, wetland archaeology and peatland heritage. Professor Henry Chapman. May 2022.
- Relations of Remembrance. Professor sara Jones. March 2022.
- Ways and whys. Professor Al Wilson. February 2022.
- Of wo/men and machines: an interdisciplinary take on language in use. Professor Dagmar Divjak. August 2021.
- Christian Theology in the Image of the Pentecost. Professor Wolfgang Vondey. September 2019.
- Wounded Sentimentalism: The Literature of Uplift. Professor David James. May 2019.
- The Future of Language Change. Professor Jack Grieve. December 2018.
- What is a 21st century city system for culture? Professor Gary Topp. November 2018.
- Baudelaire in Song. Professor Helen Abbott. November 2017.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls: Isolationism, Elites and Austerity. Professor Charlotte Hempel. May 2017.
- Clash of the Titans: Barth v Hegel. Professor Nicholas Adams. October 2017.
- Why do metaphors work? Professor Jeannette Littlemore. March 2017.
- What I found there: Reading Classical Landscapes. Professor Diana Spencer. November 2016.
- Corpus linguistics and the challenges of close and distant reading. Professor Michaela Mahlberg. June 2016.
- Agency without rationality. Professor Lisa Bortolotti. May 2016.
- Kill John Bull with Art. Professor Andrzej Gasiorek. May 2019.
- What the editor learns (and why it might matter). Professor Valerie Rumbold. May 2015.
- Taking Time - a composer's reflection on how he works. Professor Michael Zev Gordon. May 2015.
- Shakespeare and the Idea of National Theatre. Professor Michael Dobson. October 2014.
- A funny thing didn't happen on the way to the Forum. Professor Simon Esmonde-Cleary. February 2015.
- Selfish Women and Other Inconvenient Deviants. Professor Lisa Downing. November 2014.
- A World of World Heritage: Seduction, Dis-enchantment and New Intimacies. Professor Mike Robinson. October 2014.
- Freetown! Shakespeare and Social Flourishing. Professor Ewan Fernie. January 2014.
- The Life and Afterlife of Early Music. Professor Andrew Kirkman. February 2014