The Elementary Forms of Human Freedom
Founded by Grace and Obert Tanner in the mid-1970s, the Tanner Lectures are a lecture series of distinction, dedicated to enriching the intellectual and moral life of humankind. Annual Tanner Lectures are delivered at nine universities: Stanford, Berkeley, Utah, Michigan, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge.
David Wengrow has been invited to give the 2026 Tanner Lectures on Human Values on 24 March 2026 at the University of Utah entitled 'The Elementary Forms of Human Freedom.'
Several distinguished panelists are invited to comment on the ideas and issues put forward in the Lecturer's remarks, and to discuss the lectures in relation to their own work. Each main lecture is published in an annual volume of Lectures from the nine universities which is made available digitally as well as in university libraries across the world.
Previous speakers have included Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Toni Morrison, Salmon Rushdie, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
David has said:
"I am deeply honoured by this invitation to deliver the Tanner Lectures on Human Values next spring, and would like to use this illustrious platform to discuss work in progress, towards a theory of human freedoms that emerges from my joint research with the late anthropologist David Graeber.”
David is Professor of Comparative Archaeology and is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Penguin), a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and winner of the Wenjin Book Award for 2025.
He has also authored volumes including The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, c. 10,000 – 2650 BC (Cambridge UP); What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West (Oxford UP); The Origins of the Monsters: Image & Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Princeton UP), as well as academic articles on topics such as the origins of writing, ancient art, Neolithic societies, and the emergence of the first cities and states.
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Image: Prof David Wengrow, UCL Institute of Archaeology (Image credit: Tom Jamieson)
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