William Matthews memorial lectures
In 1981 Birkbeck received a bequest from the estate of the late Professor William Matthews for an annual lecture on either the English language or medieval English literature. The lecture alternates between these subjects.
| Year | Speaker | Title of lecture |
|---|---|---|
| 22 March 2011 | Anne Carson | UNCLE FALLING |
| 21 May 2009 | Steven Kruger Professor of English and Medieval Studies, City University of New York | The Late-Medieval Literature of Conversion |
| 2008 | John Simpson | Degrees of Certainty: historical lexicography in the twenty-first century |
| 2007 | Professor Elaine Treharne | Old English Texts and Manuscripts: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly |
| 2006 | Professor Colin MacCabe | In Words we are made Flesh: towards a new Cambridge Philology |
| 2005 | Professor David Wallace | Margery Kempe in Gdansk, 1433 |
| 2004 | Ali Smith | It Don’t Mean a Thing |
| 2003 | Professor Helen Cooper, DLitt | Playing with Fire |
| 2002 | Professor Terence Brown, BA, MA, PhD | Yeats, Beckett and the Ghost in the Machine |
| 2001 | Professor Sarah Beckwith | How to do Words with Things: Medieval Drama and the Sense of Instruction’ |
| 2000 | Professor Michael Wood | |
| 1999 | Professor Tom Shippey | Bibliophobia: Hatred of the Book in the Middle Ages: Part One: The Canterbury Tales. Part Two: Poems from Harley MS 2253 |
| 1998 | Professor Douglas Dunn | Reaching Down for the Language |
| 1997 | Professor Paul Strohm, BA, MA, PhD | Sir John Oldcastle: Another Ill-Framed Knight |
| 1996 | Maggie Gee, PhD | How May I Speak in My Own Voice? Language and the Forbidden |
| 1995 | Professor Lee Patterson | Putting the Wife in Her Place |
| 1994 | Neil Bartlett | The Uses of Monotony: Repetition in the Language of Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, Edmund White and Juan Goytisolo |
| 1993 | Professor J A Burrow, FBA | Thinking in Poetry: Three Medieval Examples |
| 1992 | J H Prynne, MA | Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words |
| 1991 | Professor Jill Mann, FBA | The Narrative of Distance, the Distance of Narrative in Malory's Morte Darthur |
| 1990 | Professor John Barrell, MA, PhD | The Flight of Syntax: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Tom Raworth |
| 1989 | Professor V A Kolve, MA, DPhil | |
| 1987 | Professor Edward Said, MA, PhD | |
| 1986 | Robert Latham, CBE, FBA | |
| 1985 | Professor Christopher Ricks, FBA | |
| 1984 | A C Spearing, MA | 'Renaissance Chaucer' and 'Father Chaucer'. Published in English (1985) 34: 1-38. |
| 1983 | Peter Dronke, MA, FBA | |
| 1982 | Professor Derek Brewer, LittD, FSA |
