Events

Hazlitt Day-School and Annual Hazlitt Lecture 

The 24th annual Hazlitt Day-School and Lecture will take place this year on Saturday 19th September 2026. 

The venue for all talks and lectures is the Clarke Hall, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL (between Russell Square and Tavistock Square).

This year the day is broadly themed around the bicentenary of the publication of Hazlitt's last major essay collection, The Plain Speaker, in 1826.

The annual lecture will be given by Stefan Uhlig (University of California Davis), on 'Hazlitt's Plain Aesthetics', at 4pm. Professor Uhlig is the author of Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography: The Formation of a Discipline at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) and edited, with Yasmin Solomonescu, Persuasion after Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century and Romanticism (Oxford University Press, 2024), and has published on Wordsworth, Wedgwood, Goethe, Kant, and eighteenth-century and Romantic European writing, art, aesthetics, and material culture more generally.

As always, the lecture is free and open to all. If you would like to attend the Day-School beforehand, there is a registration fee to cover the costs of catering. 

Registration details TBC. 

Provisional programme:

Morning Session

9.30am Arrival and registration, tea and coffee (provided)

10-11.15 Opening plenary: Tim Fulford (De Montfort University), 'Hazlitt and Coleridge'

11.15 Break

11.45-1.15pm Merrilees Roberts (Cambridge), 'Echoes of Liber Amoris in ‘The Pleasures of Hating’: Approaching 'the object''

John Whale (Leeds), 'The Politics of Plainness'

1.15-2.15 Lunch (provided)

Afternoon Session

2.15-3.45 Dylan Carver (Oxford), ‘Hazlitt, Party Politics, and the Rules of Political Warfare’

David Woodhouse, ‘On the Jealousy and Spleen of Liberals’

3.45 Break

4-5.30 Annual Lecture: Stefan Uhlig (University of California Davis), 'Hazlitt's Plain Aesthetics'

5.30 Drinks (Marlborough Arms, Torrington Place)