“There are, in every age, new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.”
Blum Lectures
The Daniel G. Blum Memorial Lectures are named in honor of one of the founding directors of the Society—an enthusiastic supporter of all matters Johnsonian. The Daniel G. Blum Memorial Lecture is given at each annual meeting. The lectures have been by leading Johnson scholars, collectors of Johnsoniana, and actors with an interest in the period. The titles of past Daniel G. Blum Memorial Lectures exemplify the broad range of topics that is stimulated by the study of Samuel Johnson and his circle. The list of lecturers and titles includes:
2025: Rachael Scarborough King, “The Shape of History: Time Travel in the Eighteenth Century”
Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1775)
2024: Greg Clingham, “Johnson and the Dream of Sleep”
2023: Bryan A. Garner, “Just Deserts: Evaluating Johnson as a Lexicographer”
2022: Freya Johnston, “The Books Johnson Did Not Write”
2019: Loren Rothschild, “Collecting Samuel Johnson and His Circle”
2018: Claudia L. Johnson, “Hard Reading:Austen (and Johnson)”
2017: Jack Lynch, “Johnson Goes to War”
2016: Stuart Sherman, "Growing Old with Samuel Johnson"
2015: Margaret Anne Doody, " 'Promise, large promise': Samuel Johnson and the Necessary Enjoymentof Emotion and Delusion"
2014: James Engell, “Johnson, Honestly: His Anatomy of the Lie”
2013: Richard Fancy, “The Actor and the Editor”
2012: Nicholas Hudson, “The Challenge of Writing Johnson’s Biography”
2011: Thomas Kaminski, “Making History: Johnson’s Parliamentary Reporting for the Gentleman’sMagazine”
2010: James G. Basker, “When a Man Is Tired of London . . . He Goes to Oxford? Johnson’s Second Life in the City of Dreaming Spires”
2009: John W. Byrne, “A Shadowy Presence: Samuel Johnson in Australia”
2008: Michael Bundock, “Johnson’s London: London’s Johnson”
2007: Gerald Goldberg, “Samuel Johnson and His Circle: The Goldberg Collection”
2006: Paul T. Ruxin, “Dorando and the Douglas Cause”
2005: Ian Simpson Ross, “Ursa MajorinPartibus Fidelium ”
2004: Peter Sabor, “United in One Performance: Samuel Johnson and Fanny Burney”
2003: Richard Wendorf, “Samuel Johnson Abandons the Capital”
2002: Jeffrey Meyers, “Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and Modern Biography” (joint meeting with the Johnsonians)
2001: Martin C. Battestin, “Dr. Johnson and the Case of Harry Fielding”
2000: Kenneth Tigar, “I Must Be Mr. Boswell”
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Kate Chisholm, the author of Wits and Wives: Dr. Johnson in the Company of Women and Fanny Burney: Her Life will deliver the thirty-first Daniel G. Blum Memorial Lecture at the society’s annual meeting 11 October 2026. Ms. Chisholm has also published biographical essays on the Burney family (in The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney) and Mary Wollstonecraft (in Mary Wollstonecraft in Context). Most recently, she edited Letters to Sophia: The Afterlives of Hester Thrale.
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