Academic Events
Special lectures
In November 2022, Gregory Brown (University of
Nevada/VF), General Editor of Oxford University
Studies in the Enlightenment, presented an exciting
digital project at the Maison Française d’Oxford under
the title ‘Beaumarchais’s correspondence network:
textual corpus, metadata and social historiography’.
The 2022 Besterman Lecture was delivered by
Helena Rosenblatt (CUNY), an eminent historian of
political thought and an expert on the Enlightenment.
Professor Rosenblatt flew over from New York to talk
to a full lecture theatre at the Examination Schools on
‘Napoleon’s Nemesis: Madame de Staël and the Origins
of Liberalism’.
In May, we were delighted to welcome Peter B.
Kaufman (MIT and St Edmund Hall) to Oxford to give
a talk on ‘The Fifth Estate: Networks of Enlightenment
in the Age of Trump’, highlighting the VF’s continuing
commitment to opening up discussions about how the
values of Enlightenment translate to the contemporary
global context.
Watch the
Besterman
lecture on
our YouTube
channel
Top: Helena Rosenblatt (CUNY), 2022 Besterman Lecturer
Bottom: (l.t.r.) Andrew Kahn chairs Peter Kaufman’s talk at
St Edmund Hall, Oxford, May 2023
Bottom right: The 2022 Besterman Lecture, East Writing School,
Examination Schools, Oxford
Enlightenment workshop series 2023
Our interdisciplinary flagship seminar
returned to its in-person format after two
years online and moved to a new-old venue
at Magdalen College, where the seminar
had been launched in the 1990s by John
Robertson and Laurence Brockliss.
The 2023 series (January to May) featured renowned
international scholars as well as Oxford-based early-
career researchers. David Armitage (Harvard) attracted
a large public from diferent faculties for his discussion
of the impact of international law on Mozart’s Marriage
of Figaro. Friedrich Vollhardt (Munich) compared the
prominence of theodicy in works by Lessing and
Voltaire and Eva Piirimäe (Tartu) discussed Herder’s
changing views of the French Revolution. Luisa
Simonutti (Milan) talked on unpublished manuscripts by
John Locke that testify to the impact of early-modern
Arabic sources on his work, while Sanja Perovic (KCL)
shared with us the results of a collaborative project on
the transfer of revolutionary thought between Britain,
Italy and France. Jürgen Overhof (Münster) talked on
the understudied influence of the educational reformer
Basedow on Immanuel Kant’s pedagogical writings,
and Jefrey Ravel (MIT) fascinated us with a talk on
the unexpected uses of playing cards in 18th-century
France.
But the Enlightenment Workshop was not only a
forum for visiting eminent scholars from abroad:
the seminar also allowed Oxford-based postdocs
to showcase their research. Ruggero Sciuto (VF
and St Edmund Hall) focused on the radical end of
the scale in his paper on representations of female
atheists in 18th-century France, while Michelle Pfefer
(Magdalen College) spoke on a major representative
of the ‘religious Enlightenment’, William Warburton,
and his prominence in the public sphere. Nicolas Fréry
(Strasbourg), concluded the series with a presentation
of a new edition of Voltaire’s hitherto unpublished
correspondence with his niece, Marie-Louise Denis.
10 | VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23