Stevenson Lecture 2026 is Richard Oswald’s Library: Slavery, Collecting, and the Invention of Rare Books
Shakespeare specialist Professor Emma Smith from the University of Oxford will give the 2026 Stevenson Lecture tomorrow at Senate House in London on the subject Richard Oswald’s Library: Slavery, Collecting, and the Invention of Rare Books.
It will focus on the now dispersed library put together at Auchincruive House in Ayr by Glasgow merchant Richard Oswald (c.1705–1784) bearing in mind his profits from the transatlantic slave trade, as well as the concept of 'rare books' in the 18th century, the economic and racialised foundations of bibliophilia, and the consequences for rare book libraries.
Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, University of Oxford. She is known for her work on Shakespeare’s First Folio, including Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford University Press, 2014), and for her popular Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers (Penguin, 2022) which was shortlisted for the 2023 Wolfson Prize.
The Stevenson Lecture is an annual collaboration between the Institute of English Studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London) and the UCL Centre for Publishing which was established in memory of Professor Iain Stevenson, founder of the UCL Centre for Publishing and former Senior Research Fellow at the IES. Lectures cover authorship, book history, publishing, textual culture, and the history of reading.
The in-person event on February 25 starting at 6pm is free, but booking is required and places are limited.
