When a new statutory Professor is appointed to the Faculty of History, they give their Inaugural Lecture to the public at Examinination Schools. Below you will find a selection of Inaugural Lectures from the past few years.
Women Making History
For the first time, on October 14, 1920, the University of Oxford granted degrees to women, many of whom had successfully completed the work necessary to earn those degrees decades earlier. To mark the Centenary of this transformative event, Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson partnered with former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to create a new endowed chair in women’s history at Oxford, the first post of its kind in the world. Professor Brenda Stevenson was soon appointed the inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton Professor of Women’s History. Vice-Chancellor Richardson launched Oxford’s year-long Centenary celebration in an insightful and thoroughly enjoyable discussion with Secretary Clinton and Professor Stevenson.
The Ford Lectures in British History were founded by a bequest from James Ford, and inaugurated by S.R.Gardiner in 1896-7. Since then, an annual series has been delivered over six weeks in the Hilary term and they have long been established as the most prestigious series in Oxford and an important annual event in the History Faculty calendar.
*Please note: The lectures featured below are those that the Faculty currently had permission to publish at this time *
Family and Empire: Kinship and British Colonialism in the East India Company Era, c. 1750-1850
These lectures investigate the structures and aspirations of the family as central forces that propelled and maintained the upsurge of British imperialism that marked the century from Robert Clive’s celebrated victory at Plassey in 1757 to the declaration of Crown rule in India in 1858. Historians hotly dispute the causes of British imperial expansion, variously ascribing colonial conquest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to ideological, cultural, political and economic push factors. By taking family and kinship—in their myriad British and cross-cultural forms—as its focal points, this series of lectures reassesses and resituates these interpretations. It also takes seriously the contribution made to East India Company rule on the subcontinent by the forgotten majority of the British population: woman and children. Without reducing empire to family, the lectures argue that family imperatives made British empire in India both desirable and possible. Contested understandings of kinship, moreover, lay at the heart of British understandings (and misunderstandings) of Indian politics in this period. Family writ large thus emerged as a powerful and contentious paradigm for governance in the Company era. To exemplify these lines of argument, the lectures address topics that include demographic growth, marriage, perceptions of racial difference, property relations, the material cultures of East India Company homes and Georgian and Victorian conceptions of dynastic politics.
2019: Professor Mark Bailey
AFTER THE BLACK DEATH: Society, economy and the law in fourteenth-century England
As the single greatest catastrophe in recorded history, the Black Death of 1348-9 continues to grip both the popular and scholarly imagination. This series of six lectures reassesses the main social, economic, legal and cultural responses to the great mortality during the second half of the fourteenth century and explores how they were shaped by the prevailing institutional framework—the rules, laws and belief systems—regulating social and economic behaviour in England.
2017: Professor Stefan Collini FBA
History in English Criticism 1919-1961
Stefan Collini FBA (Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature, University of Cambridge)
The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII
In this lecture series Professor Steven Gunn looks at the effects of war on the people of England in the 1500s. This lecture series was recorded in Hilary Term 2015 and is part of the annual James Ford Lectures in British History series at the Examination Schools in Oxford University.
This lecture introduces the series and asks how many people took part in war in Henry VIII's England and how far those not directly involved were aware of what was happening.
This lecture uses the records of hundreds of parishes and boroughs to see how communities coped with the pressures of war in Henry VIII's England. This included buying and maintaining up-to-date weapons and armour, fortifying the coasts and developing new mechanisms of local government to organise their efforts.
This lecture explores how military service related to the social power and self-image of lords and gentlemen in Henry VIII's England. While contemporaries complained that they were giving up the knightly ways of their forebears, many still valued their martial honour and found a satisfying place in the new structures of the lord lieutenancy or the increasingly permanent English army in Ireland.
This lecture examines war and the economy in Henry VIII's England: heavy taxation and disrupted trade threatened recession. But, arms traders, fortification builders, privateers and those who raided the Scots for their livestock, often with names familiar to followers of North-Eastern football - Robson, Milburn, Charlton - did well.
This lecture asks what weapons people owned in Henry VIII's England and whether they knew how to use them, some of its evidence drawn from coroners' inquests into accidents with bows, guns and swords. Exhortations to manly valour egged soldiers on to fight, but as in most wars before penicillin, more died of disease than from enemy action.
This lecture argues that engagement in war vitally shaped the relationship of Henry VIII's subjects with the king and with his immediate successors. Their idea of national history and their place in it, and their sense of Englishness, Welshness, or Englishness in Ireland.
