Housman Lectures
The Department of Greek and Latin at UCL organizes a Housman Lecture each year. These are delivered by a scholar of international distinction from outside London.
Born in Worcestershire in 1859, Alfred Edward Housman was a gifted classical scholar and poet. After studying in Oxford, Housman worked for ten years as a clerk, while publishing and writing scholarly articles on Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles. He gradually acquired such a high reputation that in 1892 he returned to the academic world as Professor of Classics at University College London (1892-1911) and then as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge (1911-1936). During his time as professor in the Department of Greek and Latin at UCL Housman produced some of his most important scholarly work (including his edition of Juvenal and the first volume of his Manilius) and published his first and best known collection of poetry, ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (1896). Housman’s continuing reputation as a scholar and a poet is reflected in Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play The Invention of Love, which includes a dramatisation of A.E. Housman’s election to the chair of Latin in London.
2026 Chris Stray: Two hundred years of Classics at UCL: historical and historiographical reflections
Was 4 March 2026 at 5:00pm
- THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED OWING TO ILLNESS
- We shall advertise a new date as soon as we are able.
The London University, which became UCL in 1836, provided a striking contrast to Oxford and Cambridge. This talk looks at its history of classical teaching within this context. It also highlights the work of some of its teachers, including Housman, whose historiographical rhetoric is assessed in relation to the history he surveyed.
- Wilkins Building, UCL (Main Quad area): G17 Yellow Room (off the North Cloisters).
- Events Page
- Please sign up on Eventbrite.
✰ Part of UCL 200
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2025 Pantelis Michelakis: Cinematic gateways to ancient Greece (19 November 2025)
2024 Victoria Rimell: Seneca, consolation and the crisis of critique (13 March 2024)
Housman lecture 2024: published text
2023 Richard Armstrong: ‘Homer the Balladeer: Francis Newman, William Maginn, and the Politics of Translation’ (15 March 2023)
Housman lecture 2023: published text
2022 Gregson Davis: ‘The reception of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things in Aimé Césaire’s Journal of a Homecoming’ (18 May 2022)
Housman lecture 2022: published text
2021 Susan A. Stephens: ‘Jason and the Athletes’ (27 October 2021)
Housman lecture 2021: published text
2020 Ellen Oliensis: ‘The Trials of Latona in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ (28 October 2020)
Housman lecture 2020: watch the webcast
2019 Victoria Wohl: ‘The sleep of reason: the psyche and the subject in ancient Greece’ (22 May 2019)
Housman lecture 2019: published text
2018 Bernard O’Donoghue: ‘Chosen Ancestors: Seamus Heaney and Virgil’ (14 March 2018)
Housman lecture 2018: published text
2017 Judith Butler: ‘Kinship Trouble in The Bacchae’ (8 February 2017)
Housman lecture 2017: published text
Watch the webcast of this lecture
2016 Maurizio Bettini: ‘From market to metamorphosis. Cultural images of “translation” in Rome’ (23 February 2016)
2015 Leslie Kurke: ‘Pindar’s Material Imaginary: Dedication and Politics in Olympian 7’ (4 June 2015)
Published text of this lecture
2014 Denis Feeney: ‘Ovid as a literary historian’ (20 March 2014)
Published text of this lecture
2013 Eric Csapo: ‘The Dionysian Parade and the Poetics of Plenitude’ (20 February 2013)
Published text of this lecture
2012 Stephen Hinds: ‘Displacing Persephone: Epic between Worlds.’
Published text of this lecture
2009 Alessandro Barchiesi: ‘Ovid, Boccaccio, and the emergence of prose fiction’ (3 June 2009)
2009 Housman 150 Anniversary: UCL celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of AEH with an evening of talks. David Butterfield, Stephen Harrison, Peter Howarth and Norman Vance spoke about Housman’s life, scholarship, poetry and place in Victorian culture.
2007 Christopher Pelling: ‘The Grandstand that was Greece: Greek observers on Roman Civil Wars.’
Published text of this lecture