St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 10, 1995, by Annapolis tutor Steven Crockett as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on March 29, 1996, by Annapolis tutor Michael Dink as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 17, 2026, by Annapolis tutor Louis Petrich, as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Petrich offers the following description of his lecture: "To think that Shakespeare felt Iago deeply, as he felt Othello and Desdemona. To authenticate what it’s like to corner human dispositions and fantastically turn all heads. To hear the vulgar tongue of the stre...

Recording of a lecture delivered on March 28, 2003, by Annapolis tutor Stewart Umphrey, as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 20, 2026, by Annapolis tutor Leah Lasell, as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Ms. Lasell offers the following description: "Antoine Lavoisier claims that there is no free caloric in his Elementary Treatise on Chemistry . Less than twenty years later, Jane Marcet, in her Conversations on Chemistry (1806), claims that there is. Moreover, she argues...

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 13, 2026, by Annapolis tutor Brendon Lasell, as the 2026-26 NEH lecture. Mr. Lasell offers the following description of his lecture: "Diophantus begins his Arithmetica by saying that he has 'tried to establish the nature and power of numbers.' After a short general introduction, he goes on to pose and solve hundreds of difficult problems about numbers....

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 6, 2026, by Annapolis tutor Janet Dougherty, as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Ms. Dougherty offers the following description of her lecture: "Usbek, the most prolific writer in Montesquieu’s epistolary novel  The Persian Letters , is in voluntary exile from his homeland and his harem. During his sojourn in Europe his perspective as a stranger...

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 18, 1992, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on December 9, 2026, by Annapolis Assistant Dean Ron Haflidson, as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Haflidson offers the following description of his lecture: "In Genesis, when the Man first meets the Woman, he says: 'This one at last, bone of my bones/ and flesh of my flesh…'. Then, the narrator adds, 'Therefore does a man leave his father a...

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 14, 2025, by Annapolis tutor Matthew Linck, as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Professor Shiffman offers the following description of his lecture: "Our encounter with Matisse will be an occasion to think about learning. Paintings look like themselves, but they can remind us of other things (for example, other paintings). Aristotle says that when...

Recording of a lecture delivered on October 24, 2025, by Professor Mark Shiffman, as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mark Shiffman (A89) is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy at Saint Patrick’s Seminary in California and Director of the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics. He is the author of What is Ideology, with scholarly work spanning the fields of ancient philosoph...

Recording of a lecture delivered on October 10, 2025, by Annapolis tutor Khafiz Kerimov, as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Kerimov offers the following description: The final lines of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit  are not his own. Hegel ends the book with a quotation from Friedrich Schiller’s poem "Friendship" (" Freundschaft" )—and misquotes it in a number of ways....

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 26, 2025, by Annapolis Dean Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Macfarland offers the following description: "According to Galileo, the grand book of the universe standing before our eyes is written in the language of mathematics, in the characters of geometrical figures. On account of this conception of nature as fundamentally...

Video recording of a lecture delivered on September 19, 2025, by Santa Fe Dean Sarah Davis. Ms. Davis offers the following description: "I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.” Nietzsche opens The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life with this quote from Goethe.  It appropriately frames Nietzsche’s own meditation, which do...

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 12, 2025, by Annapolis tutor Nicholas Bellinson as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Bellinson offers the following description of his lecture: "What kind of relationship to time underlies the urge to attend the theater? Shakespeare points to this question in various plays through the metaphor of time's pregnancy. Over and over, his chara...

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 5, 2025, by Professor Thomas Merrill as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Thomas Merrill is an associate professor for American University’s School of Public Affairs, and the associate director for the university’s Political Theory Institute, with research interests in political science and governance. He previously served on the President’s Council o...

Recording of a lecture delivered on August 22, 2025, by Annapolis President Suzy Paalman as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Ms. Paalman offers the following description: 'We learn as young children that multiplication is taking a number a certain number of times, to form the times tables. As we learn more, the meaning of multiplication subtly changes, even as the methods of doing actual pro...

Recording of a lecture delivered on August 30, 2024, by Annapolis tutor Nicholas Bellinson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 2, 1988, by Annapolis tutors Wye Allanbrook and Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. This lecture was the first for the 1988-1989 academic year, at the time called the Dean's Lecture. Note: The recording begins after the start of the lecture and the first sentence is cut off. A typescript of the complete lecture is available on the St. J...

Recording of a lecture delivered on May 19, 1978, by Howard Zeiderman as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Zeiderman is now a tutor emeritus at St. John's College.

Recording of a lecture delivered on May 2, 1986, by Dr. Stephen Salkever as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on January 17, 1986, by Annapolis tutor Stewart Umphrey as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 8, 2002, by Jacob Howland as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on January 11, 2002, by Ori Soltes as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 16, 1994, by James N. Jarvis as part of the Formal Lecture Series.