St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures Greenfield Library

Recording of a lecture delivered on January 18, 2013, by Michael W. Grenke as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

A typescript of the lecture is available in the St. John's College Digital Archives.

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 20, 2012, by Louis Petrich as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on October 2, 2015, by Andrew Alexander Davis as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Davis is a professor at Belmont University. Davis describes his lecture: "Hegel claims that truth must be presented in a system. He also claims that there can be no preface to a system of philosophy. I explore the purpose of Hegel's preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit in light of these two claims."

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 23, 2024, by Annapolis tutor Daniel Harrell as part of the Formal Lecture Series.Mr. Harrell describes his lecture: "When the so-called New Program was established at St. John’s College in 1937, conversation was to play no essential role—at least if you believe the first statement of the program, written by Scott Buchanan. Where you would expect the word 'conversation' you find 'instruction' instead, as in this brief description of the seminar:Meetings of seminar groups will occur twice a week with any additional meetings that special circumstances or difficulties may indicate. There will be two instructors in charge, and the instruction will make use of a wide range of devices from explication de texte to analysis of intellectual content and the dialectical treatment of critical opinion.When I read this description, I like to think that the importance of conversation to our endeavor emerged over time: a matter of discovery rather than dictate.Has something similar happened with the importance of books to our endeavor? We have always stated this importance in terms of what makes certain books great; but what makes them books, I have come to think, is even more central to our experience of reading them, discussing them, and learning from them. Perhaps there is no way to dictate by 'great' how we come to find ourselves in these books, just as there was no way to dictate by 'instruction' how we came to find ourselves in a conversation about these books.But what makes books books? What does it mean to be a book? This is the question of my lecture. And my hope—despite the St. John’s frame I use here—is that the lecture will be of interest to any reader of books, even if it fails, by my lights, to make full sense of a book."

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 11, 2022, by Ange Mlinko as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Ms. Mlinko offers this description of her lecture:  "Poetry is an enormous subject, but it can be distilled into a single figure. This figure is Echo, who manifests in three ways: as a prosodic device at the level of the line and stanza; as a poetic form; and as a nymph from Greek mythology, who may stand in for literature itself. We will look at the many ways in which Echo informs poetry and teaches us to read it.”


Ms. Mlinko is a professor at the University of Florida and a Guggenheim fellow.

This lecture is also part of the Steiner Lecture Series, which is made possible by a gift from the Steiner family in memory of Andrew Steiner, an alumnus of the college from 1963. The lecture series was established to bring notable speakers to campus from a variety of disciplines and endeavors, in recognition of Steiner’s intellectual versatility, and for the sake of continued learning.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 23, 2022, by Mary Townsend as part of the Formal Lecture Series.Ms. Townsend is an assistant professor of philosophy at St. John’s University in New York. She is the author of The Woman Question in Plato’s Republic (2017) and a graduate of Tulane University (PhD, 2015) and St. John’s College (BA, 2004).