The Josephine Gessner Ferguson Lecture is a cherished springtime tradition for students, local alumni, and faculty of the English Department at Tulane University. The lecture series annually brings an outstanding literary scholar to Tulane’s campus to speak about a topic of general interest pertaining to their research.
The Ferguson Lecture series was established in 1990 by Charles A. Ferguson Jr. (Tulane College Class of 1958; Tulane Law Class of 1961) and Barbara Ferguson Ginsberg (Newcomb College Class of 1951) in honor of their mother, Josephine Gessner Ferguson, a Class of 1924 graduate of Newcomb College who maintained a lifelong interest in English literature and especially in nineteenth-century English literature. Barbara Ginsberg sadly passed away in 2020, and is remembered by her husband, Howard Ginsberg; her brother, Charles Ferguson, and his wife, Jane Ferguson (Newcomb College Class of 1959); and by the Ferguson and Ginsberg families.
Because of Josephine Gessner Ferguson’s love of nineteenth-century English literature, many of the Ferguson lectures have addressed topics pertaining to the English Nineteenth Century. But from the beginning and increasingly over time, Ferguson lectures have also discussed subjects beyond English literature and the Nineteenth Century. We are grateful to Charles Ferguson and the Ferguson family for their generosity in making the Ferguson Lecture possible every year. And we are grateful for their sustained commitment to publicizing the importance of literature and literary scholarship.
Upcoming Lecture
April 17, 2025
Merve Emre – Wesleyan University.
Past Lectures
1990
Nina Auerbach – University of Pennsylvania
“Ectoplasm and Evil: Women’s Ghosts”
1991
Daniel Schwarz – Cornell University
“Spirituality Inquisitive Images: The Influence of Modern Painting on Wallace Stevens”
1992
Patrick Brantlinger – Indiana University
“The Case of the Poisonous Book: Mass Literacy as Threat in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction”
1993
Helena Michie – Rice University
“Failed Victorian Honeymoons”
1994
Jay Clayton – Vanderbilt University
“Is Pip Postmodern? Or Dickens at the End of the Twentieth Century”
1995
Catherine Gallagher – University of California, Berkeley
“Melancholy Madness and the Dismal Science in Dickens’s Hard Times”
1996
David Grylls – Oxford University
“The Victorian Novel: Forms, Themes, and Literary Techniques”
1997
Stephen Gill – Oxford University
“Spontaneous Number: Wordsworth and Poetic Composition”
1998
Christopher Ricks – Boston University
“A.E. Housman: No More Poetical Than Anagrams”
1999
Dame Gillian Beer – Cambridge University
“Talk and Tactics: The Alice Books”
2000
Stephen Greenblatt – Harvard University
“Hamlet in Purgatory”
2001
Valentine Cunningham – Oxford University
“Flesh and the Victorians”
2002
Helen Cooper – Oxford University
“Desirable Desire: The Familiar Middle Ages”
2003
Geoffrey Galt Harpham – Tulane University
“Beyond Mastery: The Future of Conrad’s Beginnings”
2004
J. Hillis Miller – University of California, Irvine
“Victorian Multi-plotted Novels as Models of Community: The Example of Anthony Trollope”
2005
Claudia L. Johnson – Princeton University
“Jane Austen and War”
2006
U.C. Knoepflmacher – Princeton University
“Male Voices in the Brontë Fictions”
2007
Christopher Lane – Northwestern University
“The Ache of Modernism: The Victorians’ Failing Gods”
2008
Robert J.C. Young – New York University
“The Idea of English Ethnicity”
2009
Frances Ferguson – John Hopkins University
“Trust and What Literature Has to Say About It: The Case of Robinson Crusoe”
2010
Nigel Smith – Princeton University
“Are We Still Mystics? Talking with God in Literature After the Middle Ages”
2011
Ian Baucom – Duke University
“Never Let Me Go: The Humanities in the Age of Natural Science”
2012
Joseph Bristow – University of California, Los Angeles
“Oscar Wilde in New Orleans”
2013
Mark Samuels Lasner – University of Delaware
“Useful and Beautiful: The Books of William Morris”
2014
David Lawton – Washington University, St. Louis
“On Nightingales: Voice, Pain, and Literature”
2015
Lisa Ruddick – The University of Chicago
“Poetry, Psychoanalysis, and the Self”
2016
James Shapiro – Columbia University
“Shakespeare in America”
2017
Christina von Nolcken – The University of Chicago
Two Professors ‘Busting’ the German Code, and a Landmark Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”
2018
Ted Underwood – The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“Digital Perspectives on the Long Arc of Literary History”
2019
Toril Moi – Duke University
“Never Treat Characters as if They Were Real People: On the Origins and Future of a Taboo”
Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, The Ferguson Lecture Did Not Take Place in 2020 and 2021
2022
Barry McCrea – The University of Notre Dame
“Neighbors on the Seine: Joyce and Proust in Paris, 1922”
2023
Julia Reinhard Lupton – University of California, Irvine
"Couples, Couplets, and Conversation: Shakespeare and the Art of Love"
James Shapiro – Columbia University
"Macbeth in Harlem: The Making of the Federal Theatre's Greatest Hit"
2024
Devoney Looser – Arizona State University
"The Making of Jane Austen"