The History of the Slade Professors
In 1869, the Slade Lectures were founded in pursuance of the will of art collector and philanthropist Felix Slade. Slade left his collections to the nation, and founded chairs of fine art at Oxford, Cambridge and University College London. John Ruskin (pictured right) was the first Slade Professor of Fine Art in Oxford, and gave the first series of eight public lectures in 1870. In his inaugural lecture, he announced that he was setting up the Ruskin School of Drawing, which is now the Ruskin School of Art.
Each year, the Department of History of Art plays host to the Slade Professor of Fine Art, who is always a figure of international standing in the study of the visual arts. The annual lecture series continues to focus on art historical topics, and takes place in weeks 1-8 in Hilary Term. The list of previous lectures can be found here.
Where available, previous podcasts of Slade Lectures are available to listen here.
Recent Slade Lectures
'Gaps' by Professor Beate Fricke, Hilary Term 2025
In writing history, the things that we do not know rarely play a starring role. These gaps in documentation about the past – blank spots in the material record and the archival apparatus – might all too easily be taken as indexes of moments in which nothing much happened. But from another perspective they are the sea surrounding what are truly infinitesimal islands of knowledge or the connective tissue that forms the basis for historical arguments about the fragmented forms of the past. These lectures attempt to recast the gap in this way, reframing assumptions and speculation as the normative condition of history writing rather than its aberration. And it seeks to expand from historical and historiographic notions of the gap to see the chasm, separation, schism, absence, and void within the objects of the past that we study and as central to their visual and material operations.
'A Natural History Of The Studio' by William Kentridge, Hilary Term 2024
