2006

Inaugural Lecture

Dr. Robert Fox

Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist

March 30, 2006

Robert Fox's interest in Thomas Harriot began almost half a century ago, when he was an undergraduate physicist in Harriot's Oxford college, Oriel. As a graduate student and in his subsequent academic career, his main research interests focused on the history of the physical sciences in the modern (post-1800) period. But his appointment to the chair of the history of science at Oxford in 1988 led him to resume contact with the world of Harriot scholarship. In 1990 he organized the first of what have become annual Thomas Harriot Lectures at Oriel, and in 2000 he edited a volume -- Thomas Harriot. An Elizabethan Man of Science (Aldershot: Ashgate) -- containing revised versions of the first ten lectures.   

Oriel College, where Robert Fox is now an honorary fellow, remains committed to the promotion of Harriot scholarship, and it now looks forward to hosting the seventeenth Harriot lecture in May of this year.

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