The Edmund Kemper Broadus Lectures
The annual Edmund Kemper Broadus lectures are a series of scholarly discourses sponsored and hosted by the Department of English & Film Studies and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, and named after the legendary first Head of English at the U of A., a Virginian by birth, lured from Harvard to central Alberta by President Henry Marshall Tory in 1908 to found and run one of the University's four original departments, which he did with distinction until 1936, the year of his death.
In 1971-72, Professor Chris Drummond delivered a series of lectures that, the following year, officially gave rise to an annual departmental lecture series known as the Edmund Kemper Broadus lectures. The format has varied: in 1987, Chair Linda Woodbridge defined it as 4 lectures of no more than 50 minutes duration each, but most in the series since then have consisted of only 2 or 3 lectures. Some of the lecture series titles do not survive; it is possible that some of the series did not have an overarching title. Also, Newsbulletins of the day did not always include mention of the year’s Broadus lectures, so it is impossible to be certain how many lectures in the series were given in some of the years; thus the official list given below is less than complete.
2024 Broadus Lectures: The Ends of Oil: From Emergence to Emergency
This three lecture series will be presented by Mark Simpson on March 19, 20 and 22.
Lecture 1: The Traffic in Traffic
Tuesday, March 19
Henderson Hall (1-17 Rutherford Library South)
3:30-5:30 PM
This lecture will consider how the advent of oil culture inaugurates a traffic in traffic by which mass-mediated cultural forms serve to circulate and so consolidate the prospect of fossil-fueled mobility.
Lecture 2: Abstractability
Wednesday, March 20
Henderson Hall (1-17 Rutherford Library South)
3:00-5:00 PM
This lecture will examine how oil supplies a logic and an aesthetic of abstraction in the late twentieth century.
Lecture 3: Carbon Ruins
Friday, March 22
Henderson Hall (1-17 Rutherford Library South)
3:00-5:00 PM (Light snacks and refreshments from 5:00 to 6:15 PM)
This lecture will address signs of petrocultural ruination and energy futurity today, exploring recent examples of collaborative, speculative, critical-creative endeavor in order to ask what was impasse? ...
Mark Simpson (PhD Duke) is a settler scholar and professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta (Treaty Six/Métis Territory), where he investigates US culture, energy humanities, and mobility studies. Recent examples of his scholarship have appeared in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, Postmodern Culture, and English Studies in Canada, and in volumes from presses such as Minnesota, Fordham, Edinburgh, Toronto, McGill-Queen’s, and Oxford. He is a co-founder of the After Oil Collective and a core member of the Petrocultures Research Group.
Previous Broadus Lectures
Year |
Lecturer |
Lecture Title |
# |
| 71-72 | Chris Drummond | An Anti-Miltonist Reprise | |
| 72-73 | EJ Rose | [Blake/Milton] | 4 |
| 73-74 | A White | The Poetry of Christopher Smart | 3 |
| 74-75 | Norman Page | Thomas Hardy: Facts and Problems | 3 |
| 75-76 | JT Jones | Counting Syllables in English Verse: Problems of Scansion & Phonetics from Spenser to Burns | 4 |
| 76-77 | Richard Hoffpauir | Romantic Fallacies [November] | 4 |
| 76-77 | John Orrell | Vitruvius in London: The Theatre Plans of Inigo Jones [February] | 4 |
| 77-78 | John Lauber | [Modernist Art] | |
| 78-79 | Sam Rees | Celts, Catholics and “The Tradition” in Modern British Literature | |
| 79-80 | Robert Wilson | Literature and the Notion of “Game” | 4 |
| 80-81 | Garry Watson | Literature as Human Science: Egalitarianism, Desire and Christianity | |
| 81-82 | Morton Ross | American Public Styles: Community and the Private Heart | 4 |
| 82-83 | Diane Bessai | The Colonial Imagination in Modern English Canadian Letters | |
| 83-84 | Gary Kelly | Fiction and Social Revolution in Britain | 4 |
| 84-85 | Juliet McMaster | The Visible World of Charles Dickens | 5 |
| 85-86 | Raymond J Grant | The Laughter of Love: A Study of Robert Burns | 4 |
| 86-87 | Barbara DeLuna | Some Fresh Glimpses of the Mortal Shakespeare | 5 |
| 87-88 | Patricia Demers | Women as Interpreters of the Bible | 4 |
| 88-89 | Milan Dimic | Aspects of the Romantic Paradigm | 3 |
| 89-90 | Shirley Neuman | The Gendered Bodies of Autobiography | 3 |
| 90-91 | Linda Woodbridge | Shakespeare and Magical Thinking | 4 |
| 91-92 | Muriel Whitaker | King Arthur and the Victorians: Ideals for an Industrial Society | 3 |
| 92-93 | Fred Radford | James Joyce and the Texts of Irish Identity | 4 |
| 93-94 | Robert Wilson | The Hydra’s Breath: Imagining Disgust | 4 |
| 94-95 | Juliet McMaster | The Body Legible in the l8th Century Novel | 4 |
| 95-96 | Chris Bullock | Men in the Nineties: Life Issues in Literature | 3 |
| 96-97 | Isobel Grundy | Lives into Books? | 3 |
| 97-98 | Ian MacLaren | Paul Kane’s Western Travels and the Making of Canada | 3 |
| 98-99 | Stephen Slemon | Thug Life: Travels of a Colonial Stereotype | 2 |
| 99-00 | Steven Kruger | Identity/Conversion | 2 |
| 00-01 | Patricia Clements | The Politics of Knowledge: Liberal Arts in a Science Society | 3 |
| 01-02 | Dianne Chisholm | Queer Constellations: Walter Benjamin and New Urban Narrative | 3 |
| 02-03 | Isobel Grundy | Women’s Literary History | 2 |
| 03-04 | Daphne Read | Reading Oprah | 2 |
| 04-05 | Jo-Ann Wallace | Edith and Me: Adventures of a New Biographer | 3 |
| 05-06 | Susan Hamilton | [Victorian Feminism] | 2 |
| 06-07 | William Beard | The Cinema of Guy Maddin: The Melancholy of the Lost Object | 3 |
| 07-08 | Robert Merrett | Imperial Paradoxes: Training the Senses and Tasting the Eighteenth-Century | 3 |
| 08-09 | Michael O’Driscoll | The Archive of Everything: Culture, History, Theory | 3 |
| 09-10 | Peter Sinnema | Cosmic Egg: The Hollow Earth in England and America | 3 |
| 10-11 | Jerry White | Dual-ing Entities: Looking Bi-lingually at Irish Literature | 3 |
| 11-12 | Ted Bishop | The Social Life of Ink | 3 |
| 12-13 | Julie Rak | Boom! Manufacturing, Selling and Reading Contemporary Memoir | 3 |
| 13-14 | Cecily Devereux | Empire’s skin show: the business of erotic dance in the long nineteenth century | 3 |
| 14-15 | Sylvia Brown | Print culture and Dissent: Seventeenth-Century Types | 3 |
| 15-16 | Elena Del Rio | The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas | 3 |
| 16-17 | Karyn Ball | Pleasure for Pleasure’s Sake? On Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s “Pornocracy” Today | 2 |
| 17-18 | Katherine Binhammer | The Novelization of Money | 3 |
| 18-19 | Ono Okome | Animist Africa | 2 |
| 19-20 | David Gay | Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic in Early Modern England | 3 |
| 20-21 | Liz Czach | Passport to the World: Travel-Adventure Films on the Lecture Stage | 3 |
| 21-22 | Katherine Binhammer, David Gay, Isobel Grundy, Gary Kelly, Ian MacLaren, Juliet McMaster, Michael O'Driscoll, Onookome Okome, Julie Rak, Jerry White, Linda Woodbridge | 50 Years of Broadus Lectures | 1 |
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