Gresham Professor of Rhetoric
Latest lecture
Current Professor
Professor Richard J. Evans FBA is Regius Professor of Modern History and President of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge.
He has lectured extensively all over the world at a variety of literary festivals and events, is widely published and is a frequent contributor to the broadcast media and the press. He has been Editor of the Journal of Contemporary History since 1998 and a judge of the Wolfson Literary Award for History since...
Past professors
| 1 Caleb Willis - 1596/7 2 Richard Ball - 1598 3 Charles Croke - 1613/14 4 Henry Croke - 1619 5 Edward Wilkinson - 1627 6 John Goodridge - 1638 7 Richard Hunt - 1654 8 William Croune FRS - 1659 9 Henry Jenkes - 1670 10 John King - 1676 11 Charles Gresham - 1686 12 Edward Martyn - 1696 13 John Ward - 1720 14 Jospeh Whateley - 1759 15 Joseph Thomas Waugh - 1797 16 F Newnham - 1808 17 Edward Owen - 1817 18 Charlton Lane - 1863 19 Thomas Francis Dallin - 1875 20 J E Nixon - 1881 21 Foster Watson - 1915 22 Oliver Elton - 1929 23 George Stuart Gordon - 1930 |
24 Arthur William Reed - 1933 25 Rowland Walter Jepson - 1946 26 Lord David Cecil - 1947 27 Nevill Coghill - 1948 28 William Empson - 1953 29 Richard Hughes - 1954 30 Bonamy Dobrée - 1957 31 Stephen Spender - 1961 32 John Wain - 1963 33 Cecil Day-Lewis - 1963 34 Patric Dickinson - 1965 35 Sir Robert Birley - 1968 36 John Morley Pick - 1985 and 1987 37 Jan Kott - 1986 38 J M Rae - 1988 39 Sir Andrew Derbyshire - 1990 40 Peter G Moore - 1992 41 Peter Hennessy - 1994 42 Lynette Hunter - 1997 43 Richard Sorabji - 2000 44 Kathleen Burk - 2003 45 Rodney Barker - 2006 |
All Gresham Professor of Rhetoric lectures
Further information
The 2011-12 Gresham Rhetoric lectures by Professor Richard J Evans will be on
The Rise and Fall of European Empires from the 16th to the 20th Century
The description of the lecture series is as follows:
Empire has been the defining world experience of the modern era. Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European powers put their stamp on the Americas. After the decline of the old pre-industrial empires in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new empires arose, as Europe raced ahead of the rest of the world in terms of economic and military power. In 1800, Europe and its colonies and ex-colonies covered just over half the land surface of the world; by 1914 this proportion had increased to nearly 85 per cent. By the Second World War, the only major inhabited areas of the world that had never been under European rule were China, Ethiopia, Japan, Mongolia, Persia, Siam, and Tibet. Yet within little more than thirty years, these great global empires had almost all collapsed, and by the end of the twentieth century, all that was left were a few isolated and fragmentary colonial possessions. This series of six lectures examines the rise and fall of the great European empires in a transnational and comparative framework, taking in not only the British and French experience but also that of other major and minor European colonial powers such as Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Russia and Spain. The lectures conclude with a discussion of the impact of empire and imperialism in the twenty-first century.
