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Inaugural lectures

For me it was a great opportunity to thank my current research team and the wider group of academics that I have collaborated with over the years and to celebrate our shared successes.

Professor Iain Gilchrist

Giving your inaugural lecture is an unmissable rite of passage and a fantastic occasion to bring together family and friends, past and present colleagues, students, and members of the public.

Professor Susan Harrow

Be very visual, use lots of pictures (including photos) and simple diagrams and try to have simple slides as many of the audience won’t be used to looking at slides of scientific or other data...... there is excellent help available from the university including expert AV assistance: have a practice run in the lecture theatre if possible. The inaugural lecture takes quite a bit of preparation, but is a truly memorable day in one's career.

Professor David Marks

I wanted to make the inaugural lecture a space to question and to challenge my own ideas and those of others. It was an evening where I could talk about some new ideas which were in a book I had just finished. One of the lovely things about it were the messages from colleagues before the lecture wishing me well and the notes afterwards with comments and ideas. It helped me to find new colleagues and friends in the university.

Professor Kelley Johnson

An inaugural lecture is a chance to celebrate an appointment, take stock of one's contribution to an academic discipline, and above all to be a public intellectual. The best inaugurals are both profound and pellucid. Achieving this is, indeed, not easy. But it is a challenge to which every Bristol professor should aspire.

Professor Julian Rivers

The inaugural lecture is certainly a challenge - how does one make current research accessible and interesting to such a varied audience of colleagues, students, friends, and interested members of the public? But I found the challenge stimulating, and the event satisfying (once I had stopped being nervous), and was very touched by the number of friends and relations who made the effort to attend, and who now know what I spend my time on.

Professor Elizabeth Archibald

"It is one of the first duties of a Professor, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own place in it." (GH Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology).
An inaugural lecture is an excellent opportunity to do so and to talk to a wider audience from the University and beyond. You will enjoy it, writing the lecture will teach you about your subject in an unusual way, and you are bound to be able to make use of the material again.

Professor James Ladyman

The University of Bristol’s inaugural lectures showcase and celebrate the University’s new professors. Each lecture provides an opportunity for them to share their achievements in research, innovation, engagement and teaching activities before an audience of members of the University community and the general public.

Some of the benefits of giving an inaugural lecture are:

  • The new professor can celebrate an important personal milestone with family, friends and colleagues, old and new.
  • It is an opportunity for the University to recognise and showcase the academic achievements of its staff.
  • Colleagues, both within the faculty and more broadly, can hear about research that is going on around the University.
  • It represents an essential component of the University’s public events programme, helping to create a wider awareness of the latest developments in science, engineering, arts and humanities, medicine, law and social sciences.

All new professors, both internal promotions and external appointments, are offered the opportunity to give an inaugural lecture. For further details on the format of the lecture and support offered, please see our guidelines for inaugurals.

Audio recordings of some of the previous inaugural lectures are now available

Forthcoming lectures

Autumn Term 2013

previous inaugural lectures