A public lecture on public lecturing

Public lecturing flourished throughout Enlightenment Britain and by the early nineteenth century a variety of institutions had sprung up to house, foster and fund them. As a rhetorical and quasi-theatrical performance, the public lecture takes its place no less in a history of sociability and public entertainment than in a history of knowledge transmission, with celebrity lecturers vying with celebrity preachers for the hearts and minds of a public hungry for information and sensation. This talk reflects on the erotics of knowledge and on the public or ‘popular’ lecture as a complex cultural phenomenon.

Will Christie is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the Australian National University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and literary culture and his Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life was awarded the NSW Premier’s Prize for Literary Scholarship in 2008.