The Camden Lecture Series was established to bring speakers with specialties in pre-1800 studies to Rice University.   

2024 - Chi-ming Yang (University of Pennsylvania) - Bat Metabolism & Racial Capitalism

2019 - Ellen MacKay (University of Chicago) - Not Without Qualms: Digitizing Shakespeare

2017 Fall - Julian Yates (University of Delaware) - Ark Thinking

2017 Spring - Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (George Washington University) - Ravens & Doves or Tales from Noah's Arkive

2016 - Timothy Sweet (West Virginia University) - Moby-Dick and Nineteenth-Century Extinction Discourse

2015 - Bruce Holsinger (University of Virginia) - Archive of the Animal

2014 - Robert Markley (University of Chicago)

2012 - Victoria Kahn (U.C. Berkeley) - Political Theology as Poetic Theology: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza

2011 - Richard Halpern (New York University)

2011 - Blakey Vermeule (Stanford University) - How the Unconscious Shapes our Stories

2010 - Regina Schwartz (Northwestern University) - Sacramental Poetics

2008 - Michael Neill (University of Auckland) - The Look of Othello

2008 - Felicity Nussbaum (UCLA) - Owning the Self: The Actress and Theatrical Property

2007 - Jonathan Kramnick (Yale University) - Conscious Matter: Lucretius, Rochester and Elsewhere

2007 - Barbara Fuchs (University of Pennsylvania) - Beyond the Missing Cardenio: Anglo-Spanish Relations in Early Modern Drama

2006 - John Guillory (New York University)     

2005 - Ania Loomba (University of Pennsylvania)           

2004 - Clark Hulse (University of Illinois, Chicago)

2003 - Michael McKeon (Rutgers University) - The Public and The Private in Aphra Behn's "Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister"

2001 - Sir Peter Hall (UC Berkeley) - Theatre in the Future

2001 - Jeffrey Masten (Northwestern University) - Rosencraft and Gilderstone are dead (Reading Shakespeare's three Hamlets)