The George Jack Memorial Lecture

The lecture commemorates former colleague George Barr Jack (1946–1999). George Jack was a medievalist and a linguist who taught Old and Middle English and the history of the English Language. His research focused on syntax and negation especially in relation to early Middle English texts such as Ancrene Wisse.

Photograph of George Jack looking out over water

He was also interested in editing and is probably best known for Beowulf: A Student Edition (Oxford, 1994), an edition that has introduced the Old English poem to generations of undergraduates. The edition has also been used by translators such as the poet Seamus Heaney who delivered the first George Jack Memorial Lecture in St Andrews in 1999. Reflecting George Jack's many interests lecturers have included both scholars and poets.

The School of English is proud to host this annual lecture in George's memory, and is grateful for the continuing interest of his widow, Maureen Jack.

Lecturers

  • 2025 Professor Wendy Scase (University of Birmingham), 'Thinking with Visual Devices: Genealogy and a Gentry Family of the 15th and 16th Centuries'
  • 2024 Professor Michael P. Kuczynski (Tulane University), 'Blake's Pilgrimage'
  • 2023 Professor Yoko Iyeiri (Kyoto University), 'Jack's Law and the History of English Negation'
  • 2022 Professor Richard Dance, 'Many Meetings: Medieval English and the Etymologist'
  • 2021 Postponed due to Covid-19
  • 2020 Professor Alasdair A. MacDonald (University of Groningen), 'Lost Literature of Jacobean Scotland'
  • 2019 Professor Francis O'Gorman (University of Edinburgh), 'Yeats's Presences'
  • 2018 Professor Rachel Bowlby (University College London), 'How not to make babies'
  • 2017 Professor Ralph Hanna (University of Oxford), 'CUL Dd.1.17 (Piers Plowman): Some Historical Notes'
  • 2016 Professor Jim McLaverty (Keele University), 'Books and the Editor: New Approaches to Pope, Swift, and Johnson'
  • 2015 Professor Bella Millett (University of Southampton), 'Joining the Dots: New Perspectives on the Early Middle English Sermon'
  • 2014 No lecture
  • 2013 Mr Thomas G. Duncan (St Andrews), 'Editorial Obligations'
  • 2012 Professor Jeremy J. Smith (University of Glasgow), 'Punctuation and Performance'
  • 2011 Professor Hugh Magennis (Queen's University Belfast), 'Beowulf in the Nineteenth Century'
  • 2010 No lecture
  • 2009 Professor Michael Alexander (St Andrews, Emeritus), 'T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets'
  • 2008 Professor Nick Groom (University of Exeter), 'Damsels, Dulcimers, and the Devil's Lyre: The Milk of Paradise and the Music of Pandaemonium'
  • 2007 Professor Edward Larrissy (Queen's University Belfast)
  • 2006 Professor Michael O'Neill
  • 2005 Professor John Burrow
  • 2004 No lecture
  • 2003 Tom Paulin (Hertford College, Oxford), 'Sentence Sound: Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry'
  • 2002 No lecture
  • 2001 Bernard O'Donoghue
  • 2000 No lecture
  • 1999 Seamus Heaney