St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 30, 1976, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 4, 2025, by Dr. Jessy Jordan as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Jordan is Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, specializing in neo-Aristotelian natural normativity. He is also the Director of the Mount’s common, integrated, and sequenced liberal arts core curriculum. He has published numerous articles on moral philosophy and is cu...

Recording of a lecture delivered on March 28, 2025, by Dr. Emily Austin as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Austin is an Associate Professor of Classics and the College at the University of Chicago, with research interests in Greek literature, especially Homer and depictions of solitude in ancient Greece. Her first book, Grief and the Hero: the Futility of Longing in the Iliad , explores the...

Recording of a lecture delivered on October 3, 2003, by Annapolis tutor Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 9, 2014, by Francis J. "Bing" West as part of the LCDR Erik S. Kristensen Lecture Series. The lecture is the second in a series of joint lectures series between St. John's College and the U.S. Naval Academy to honor the memory of Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen. An alumnus of the United States Naval Academy and the St. John's Coll...

Recording of a lecture delivered by Santa Fe tutor Grant H. Franks on February 6, 1998, as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 7, 2025, by Annapolis tutor Mary Elizabeth Halper as part of the Formal Lecture Series. She offers the following description of her lecture: "There are two kinds of speech: the speech we speak and the speech we read. This lecture is on the latter. By way of comparison with spoken speech, and with help from Plato's Theaetetus, Phaedo, and Phaedr...

Recording of a lecture delivered on March 18, 2005, by Dylan Casey as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on January 10, 2025, by Annapolis tutor Greg Recco as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Recco offers this description: This lecture will examine the difficulty of sustaining collective action. In working together, we respond to exigent circumstances, but the social structures we thereby create have exigencies of their own. To the student of history, it can eve...

Recording of a lecture delivered by Annapolis tutor Paul Ludwig on November 5, 2004, as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 18, 2005, by Dr. Harvey C. Mansfield as part of the Formal Lecture Series. This lecture is also part of the Steiner Lecture Series. The Andrew Steiner Memorial Lecture fund was created by the family and friends of Mr. Steiner, an alumnus (class of 1963) of St. John’s College, Annapolis. It was established to attract scholars from different disciplines a...

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 19, 2004, by Stephanie Nelson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 17, 2004, by Gisela Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Audio recording of a lecture delivered on October 23, 1981, by Leon Kass as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Kass is Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and in the College at The University of Chicago, the Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the Dean of the Faculty at Shalem College in Jerusalem. He was a tutor at St. John's College f...

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 2, 2016, by Annapolis tutor Elliott Zuckerman as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a November 20, 2024 lecture and Q&A session by Karl Walling of the U.S. Naval War College. The conversation with Dr. Walling centers on the problem of peacemaking in the Peloponnesian War, and Thucydides’ preference to often call what some name peace, a mere truce.

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 15, 2024, by Stephanie Nelson as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Nelson (SJC Annapolis, 1983) is Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University and a Visiting Tutor at St. John’s. Her most recent book is titled,  Time and Identity in Ulysses and the Odyssey  (2023), and explores how each work benefits from being read alongside the other.  Pr...

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 8, 2024, by Allen Speight as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Professor Speight (SJC Annapolis, 1984) is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Admissions at Boston University, with a teaching focus on the philosophy of art and culture. Alongside his interest in early art, he has written extensively on Hegel and German Ideology, and is a pre...

Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 1, 2024, by Bret Davis as part of the Formal Lecture Series.  Bret W. Davis is Professor and Higgins Chair in Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland, where he teaches courses in Asian, Western, and cross-cultural philosophy, with previous research and teaching stops in Germany and Japan. Professor Davis has published articles on numerous philoso...

Recording of a lecture delivered on March 22, 2002, by Christopher Pelling as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Pelling is Regius Professor of Greek emeritus at the University of Oxford. Note: the recording started slightly after Dr. Pelling began speaking. This lecture is also part of the Steiner Lecture Series. The Andrew Steiner Memorial Lecture fund was created by the family and friends o...

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 2, 2001, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on October 18, 2024, by Cynthia Keppel as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Keppel, a St. John's Annapolis alum, leads the Physics Division at Jefferson Labs, where she and her colleagues study the structure and dynamics of the fundamental building blocks of matter. She is both a nuclear physicist and a cancer researcher, with numerous patents and scientific p...

Recording of a lecture delivered on October 11, 2024, by Dr. Ellwood Wiggins as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Professor Wiggins (SJC Annapolis, 1998) is an associate professor in the German department at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he teaches comparative literature and philosophy. He has also taught in Kentucky, Germany, and Russia. His teaching and research explore how peopl...

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 27, 2024, by Annapolis tutor Zena Hitz as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Ms. Hitz offers this description of her lecture: “In a St. John's seminar, we do not approach the readings historically, that is, ‘in a context.’ Instead, we ask them questions, as we might ask living people questions, and engage them in conversation and shared inquiry. Is thi...

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 20, 2024, by Ryan Shea as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Ryan Shea taught at Providence College for eight years, including courses in philosophy of science, environmental philosophy, and nature writing. His research weaves together ancient philosophical biology (especially Aristotle), the scientific revolution, phenomenology, German idealism, and G...