The Ford Lectures in British History were founded by a bequest from James Ford, and inaugurated by S.R.Gardiner in 1896-7. Since then, an annual series has been delivered over six weeks in Hilary term. They have long been established as the most prestigious series in Oxford and an important annual event in the History Faculty calendar.
Though sometimes elected from among the Oxford History Faculty, the Ford Lecturer is often a distinguished visitor from elsewhere in the United Kingdom, or further afield. Towards the end of the series, the Lecturer generally convenes a seminar for faculty members and students, where the themes and ideas of the series are discussed.
The lectures alternate between medieval, early modern and modern history. They bring the opportunity for distinguished scholars to present their work to an Oxford audience, in a scholarly but accessible way. The attendance, which is often very large, habitually includes people from the local community as well as many from outside Oxford.
The Lectures invariably result in important books, many of them classic and pioneering works of British history.
These lectures explore the social, cultural, and ritual histories of Roman-Britain’s people through an investigation of their entanglements with dogs. In the highly anthrozootic world of Roman Britain, dogs and humans together shaped mutual ecologies and life-ways. Dogs also served as metaphorical and ritual agents, and they were central in the production of both social difference and lived religion under Rome. By following the trail left by dogs, we can recover something of the life-ways and experience of the people with whom they shared the world, and we can identify and characterize some of the mechanisms through which a Roman provincial society was created.
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