Massey Lectures

The Massey Lectures are a prestigious annual event in Canada, in which a noted Canadian or international scholar gives a week-long series of lectures on a political, cultural or philosophical topic. Some of the most famous Massey Lecturers have included Northrop Frye, Noam Chomsky, Jane Jacobs, John Ralston Saul and Martin Luther King, Jr..

The event is sponsored by the University of Toronto's Massey College. Until 2002, the lectures were also held at the University of Toronto. In that year, however, the lectures were made into a national tour with each of the five lectures occurring in a different Canadian city.

The lectures are broadcast each year on the CBC Radio One show Ideas. The lectures are also almost always published in book form. Many of the lectures are also available as audio transcripts on cassettes or CDs that can be purchased through the CBC.

Past Massey Lectures

• 1961 – Barbara Ward Jackson, The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations
• 1962 – Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination
• 1963 – Frank Underhill, The Image of Confederation
• 1964 – C. B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy
• 1965 – John Kenneth Galbraith, The Underdeveloped Country
• 1966 – Paul Goodman, The Moral Ambiguity of America
• 1967 – Martin Luther King, Jr., Conscience for Change
• 1968 – R. D. Laing, The Politics of the Family
• 1969 – George Grant, Time as History
• 1970 – George Wald, Therefore Choose Life
• 1971 – James A. Corry, The Power of the Law
• 1972 – Pierre Dansereau, Inscape and Landscape
• 1973 – Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom
• 1974 – George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute
• 1975 – J. Tuzo Wilson, Limits to Science
• 1977 – Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning
• 1978 – Leslie Fiedler, The Inadvertent Epic
• 1979 – Jane Jacobs, Canadian Cities and Sovereignty Association
• 1981 – Willy Brandt, Dangers and Options: The Matter of World Survival
• 1982 – Robert Jay Lifton, Indefensible Weapons
• 1983 – Eric Kierans, Globalism and the Nation State
• 1984 – Carlos Fuentes, Latin America: At War with the Past
• 1985 – Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
• 1987 – Gregory Baum, Compassion and Solidarity: The Church for Others
• 1988 – Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
• 1989 – Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology
• 1990 – Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA
• 1991 – Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity
• 1992 – Robert Heilbroner, Twenty-First Century Capitalism
• 1993 – Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial
• 1994 – Conor Cruise O'Brien, On the Eve of the Millennium
• 1995 – John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization
• 1997 – Hugh Kenner, The Elsewhere Community
• 1998 – Jean Vanier, Becoming Human
• 1999 – Robert Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative
• 2000 – Michael Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution
• 2001 – Janice Stein, The Cult of Efficiency
• 2002 – Margaret Visser, Beyond Fate
• 2003 – Thomas King, The Truth About Stories
• 2004 – Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress