Romanes Lecture

Annual public lecture

The Romanes Lecture is a prestigious free public lecture given annually at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, England.

The lecture series was founded by, and named after, the biologist George Romanes, and has been running since 1892. Over the years, many notable figures from the Arts and Sciences have been invited to speak. The lecture can be on any subject in science, art or literature, approved by the Vice-Chancellor of the University.

List of Romanes lecturers and lecture subjects

1890s

1892 William Ewart Gladstone — An Academic Sketch (A report of the speech is available in the digital archive of The Nation.)
1893 Thomas Henry Huxley — Evolution and Ethics (See also a contemporary review of Huxley's lecture)
1894 August Weismann — The Effect of External Influences upon Development
1895 Holman Hunt — The Obligations of the Universities towards Art
1896 Mandell Creighton — The English National Character
1897 John Morley — Machiavelli
1898 Archibald Geikie — Types of Scenery and their Influence on Literature
1899 Richard Claverhouse Jebb — Humanism in Education

1900s

1900 James Murray — The Evolution of English Lexicography (Also available at The Oxford English Dictionary site.)
1901 Lord Acton — The German school of history^[1]
1902 James Bryce — The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind
1903 Oliver Lodge — Modern views on matter
1904 Courtenay Ilbert — Montesquieu
1905 Ray Lankester — Nature and Man
1906 William Paton Ker — Sturla the Historian
1907 Lord Curzon — Frontiers
1908 Henry Scott Holland — The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'
1909 Arthur Balfour — Criticism and Beauty

1910s

1910 Theodore Roosevelt — Biological Analogies in History
1911 J.B. Bury — Romances of Chivalry on Greek Soil
1912 Henry Montagu Butler — Lord Chatham as an Orator
1913 William Mitchell Ramsay — The Imperial Peace: an ideal in European history
1914 J. J. Thomson – The Atomic Theory
1915 E. B. Poulton – Science and the Great War
1916
1917
1918 Herbert Henry Asquith — Some Aspects of The Victorian Age
1919

1920s

1920 William Ralph Inge — The Idea of Progress
1921 Joseph Bédier — Roland à Roncevaux
1922 Arthur Stanley Eddington — The theory of relativity and its influence on scientific thought
1923 John Burnet — Ignorance
1924 John Masefield — Shakespeare & spiritual life
1925 William Henry Bragg — The Crystalline State
1926 G.M. Trevelyan — The Two-Party System in English Political History
1927 Frederick George Kenyon — Museums and National Life
1928 D. M. S. Watson — Palaeontology and the Evolution of Man
1929 Sir John William Fortescue — The Vicissitudes of Organized Power

1930s

1930 Winston Churchill — Parliamentary Government and the Economic Problem
1931 John Galsworthy — The Creation of Character in Literature
1932 Berkley Moynihan — The Advance of Medicine
1933 Henry Hadow — The Place of Music among the Arts
1934 William Rothenstein — Form and content in English Painting
1935 Gilbert Murray — Then and Now
1936 Donald Francis Tovey — Normality and Freedom in Music
1937 Harley Granville-Barker — On Poetry in Drama
1938 Lord Robert Cecil — Peace and Pacifism
1939 Laurence Binyon — Art and freedom

1940s

1940 Édouard Herriot, lecture not delivered
1941 William Hailey — The position of colonies in a British commonwealth of nations
1942 Norman H. Baynes — Intellectual liberty and totalitarian claims
1943 Julian Huxley — Evolutionary Ethics (50 years after his grandfather gave the lecture)
1944 G. M. Young — Mr Gladstone
1945 André Siegfried — Characteristics and Limits of our Western Civilization
1946 John Anderson — The machinery of government
1947 Lord Samuel — Creative Man
1948 Lord Brabazon of Tara — Forty years of flight
1949 Claud Schuster — Mountaineering

1950s

1950 John Cockcroft — The development and future of nuclear energy
1951 Maurice Hankey — The science and art of government
1952 Lewis Bernstein Namier — Monarchy and the party system
1953 Viscount Simon — Crown and Commonwealth
1954 Kenneth Clark — Moments of Vision
1955 Albert Richardson — The significance of the fine arts
1956 Thomas Beecham — John Fletcher
1957 Ronald Knox — On English translation
1958 Edward Bridges — The State and the Arts
1959 Lord Denning — From Precedent to Precedent

1960s

1960 Edgar Douglas Adrian — Factors in mental evolution
1961 Vincent Massey — Canadians and Their Commonwealth
1962 Cyril Radcliffe — Mountstuart Elphinstone
1963 Violet Bonham Carter — The impact of personality in politics (45 years after her father gave the lecture)
1964 Harold Hartley — Man and Nature
1965 Noel Annan — The Disintegration of an Old Culture
1966 Maurice Bowra — A case for humane learning
1967 Rab Butler — The Difficult Art of Autobiography
1968 Peter Medawar — Science and Literature
1969 Lord Holford — A World of Room

1970s

1970 Isaiah Berlin — Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament (Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 14 February 1971)
1971 Raymond Aron — On the Use and Abuse of Futurology
1972 Karl Popper — On the Problem of Body and Mind
1973 Ernst Gombrich — Art History and the Social Sciences
1974 Solly Zuckermann — Advice and Responsibility
1975 Iris Murdoch — The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato banished the artists
1976 Edward Heath — The Future of a Nation
1977 Peter Hall — Form and Freedom in the Theatre
1978 George Porter — Science and the Human Purpose
1979 Hugh Casson — The arts and the academies

1980s

1980 Jo Grimond — Is political philosophy based on a mistake?
1981 A.J.P. Taylor — War in Our Time
1982 Andrew Huxley — Biology, the Physical Sciences and the Mind
1983 Owen Chadwick — Religion and Society
1984
1985 Miriam Louisa Rothschild — Animals and Man
1986 Nicholas Henderson — Different Approaches to Foreign Policy
1987 Norman St. John-Stevas — The Omnipresence of Walter Bagehot
1988 Hugh Trevor-Roper — The Lost Moments of History (A revised version at the NYRB.)
1989

1990s

1990 Saul Bellow — The Distracted Public
1991 Gianni Agnelli — Europe: Many Legacies, One Future
1992 Robert Blake — Gladstone, Disraeli and Queen Victoria (The Centenary Lecture)
1993 Henry Harris — Hippolyte's club foot: the medical roots of realism in modern European literature
1994 Lord Slynn of Hadley — Europe and Human Rights
1995 Walter Bodmer — The Book of Man
1996 Roy Jenkins — The Chancellorship of Oxford: A Contemporary View with a Little History
1997 Mary Robinson — Realizing Human Rights:"Take hold of it boldly and duly..."
1998 Amartya Sen — Reason before identity.^[2]
1999 Tony Blair — The Learning Habit

2000s

2000 William G. Bowen — At a Slight Angle to the Universe: The University in a Digitized, Commercialized Age
2001 Neil MacGregor — The Perpetual Present. The Ideal of Art for All
2002 Tom Bingham — Personal Freedom and the Dilemma of Democracies
2003 Paul Nurse — The great ideas of biology
2004 Rowan Williams — Religious lives
2005 Shirley M. Tilghman — Strange bedfellows: science, politics, and religion
2006 Lecture was to have been delivered by Gordon Brown, but was postponed
2007 Dame Gillian Beer — Darwin and the Consciousness of Others
2008 Muhammad Yunus — Poverty Free World: When? How?
2009 Gordon Brown — Science and our Economic Future

2010s

2011 (June) Andrew Motion — Bonfire of the Humanities
2011 (November) Martin Rees — The Limits of Science
2014 Steven Chu — Our Energy and Climate Change Challenges and Solutions
2015 Mervyn King — A Disequilibrium in the World Economy
2016 Patricia Scotland — The Commonwealth of Nations
2018 (June) Hillary Clinton – Making the Case for Democracy
2018 (November) Vint Cerf – The Pacification of Cyberspace
2019 Eliza Manningham-Buller - The Profession of Intelligence

2020s

2020 Brenda Hale - Law in a Time of Crisis
2021 Dame Catherine Elizabeth Bingham, DBE - Lessons from the Vaccine Taskforce
2022 Micheál Martin - The Centre Will Hold: Liberal Democracy and the Populist Threat
2024 Geoffrey Hinton - Will digital intelligence replace biological intelligence?^[3]^[4]

References

The text of each Romanes Lecture is generally published by Oxford University Press using the "Clarendon Press" imprint, and where appropriate the citation for an individual lecture is listed in the published works of each author's entry in Wikipedia.

Romanes lectures, University of Oxford, 1986–2002, Oxford, Bodleian Library: MSS. Eng. c. 7027, Top. Oxon. c. 827
Oxford lectures on philosophy, 1910–1923, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1908–23.
Oxford lectures on history, 1904–1923, Oxford, The Clarendon Press 1904–23, which includes "Frontiers", by Lord Curzon, the Romanes lecture for 1907, "Biological analogies in history", by Theodore Roosevelt, the Romanes lecture for 1910, "The imperial peace" by Sir W. M. Ramsay, the Romanes lecture for 1913 and "Montesquieu" by Sir Courtenay Ilbert, the Romanes lecture for 1904.
J.B. Bury, Romances of chivalry on Greek soil, being the Romanes lecture for 1911, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1911.
Sir E. Ray Lankester: Romanes Lecture, Nature and Man, Oxford University Press, 1905

Notes

^ Never delivered, due to Acton's illness, but many notes are extant, see Herbert Butterfield, Man and His Past (1955), p. 63, and p.234 of A History of the University of Cambridge: 1870-1990 by Christopher Brooke, CUP, ISBN 0-521-34350-X
^ Sen, Amartya (1999). Reason before identity. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199513895.
^ Hinton, Geoffrey (2024). "Will digital intelligence replace biological intelligence?". youtube.com. University of Oxford.
^ Anon (2024). "Romanes Lecture". ox.ac.uk.