Arts & Culture
Marking 100 years of Norton Lectures

Sean Kelly (from left), Stephanie Burt, Adam Gopnik, Vijay Iyer, and Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Eileen O’Grady

Harvard Staff Writer

September 29, 2025 5 min read

Panelists reflect on ‘incredible value’ of annual series as ‘megaphone’ for artists and scholars

In November 1926, Oxford classics scholar Gilbert Murray stood before an audience in Harvard’s Lowell Lecture Hall to deliver the first-ever talk in the newly endowed Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry. His lectures on the classical tradition drew such crowds that according to a Crimson story published at the time, the final one had to be moved to Boston’s Symphony Hall to accommodate the demand.

“We’re now in the 100th year, and this distinguished lecture series has witnessed a century of individuals delivering lectures on literature, music and the visual arts,” director Suzannah Clark told an audience at Farkas Hall at a recent event marking the milestone anniversary.

In a panel discussion moderated by Arts and Humanities Dean Sean Kelly, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English Stephanie Burt, Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts Vijay Iyer, writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, and The New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik discussed their relationship to the longstanding lecture series and its impact on arts and humanities fields.

“A healthy democracy depends, yes, on the rule of law and fair elections, but it depends just as much on having a flourishing, pluralistic culture,” said Gopnik. “The idea that you have had lectures on subjects that may seem esoteric, that are open to the public, that’s a simple idea of incredible value. When I look at the Norton Lectures I think about the power and fragility of pluralistic culture, and I think we have to be more committed to it now than we have ever been.”

Each of the panelists wrote a new foreword to a past Norton Lecture released this month by Harvard University Press. Iyer wrote on the 1939-40 lectures of Igor Stravinsky, Burt on the 1989-90 lectures of John Ashbery, Nguyen on the 1967-68 lectures of Jorge Luis Borges, and Gopnik on the 1956-57 lectures of Ben Shahn. Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English Louis Menand also wrote a forward to the 1992-93 lectures of Umberto Eco.

“The idea that you have had lectures on subjects that may seem esoteric, that are open to the public, that’s a simple idea of incredible value.”
Adam Gopnik

Nguyen, who delivered last year’s Norton Lectures, described the experience as “nerve-wracking,” jokingly calling it “the ultimate final exam” for an academic. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sympathizer” said that, as a Vietnamese refugee, the invitation felt like a form of canonization, or entry into an elite cultural tradition, but that, for him, the series is significant less for its prestige and more for the way it has centered the voices of outsiders.

“The relationship to inclusion in the canon is really important, because a lot of people who are included in the canon and in the Norton series are people who come from the outside,” Nguyen said. “They’re often people who struggle with the very notion of culture and what it represents, culture as a mode of artistic possibility, intellectual accomplishment, but culture as a mode of power. That, in the end, to me, is what gives a Norton series its significance, is our recognition of the multivalent nature of the power of art.”

Burt said she thinks of the Norton Lectures — and Harvard at large — less as an instrument of canonization and more of a way to amplify the voices of artists.

“John Ashbery wanted to tell you who some of his favorite artists were. Harvard handed him a giant megaphone, and he said, ‘Hey, go read John Clare,’” Burt said. She recalled hearing Ashbery, in his 1989 talk, say that artists should draw inspiration from whatever obscure or eccentric figures excite them the most, rather than relying on the traditional “war horses” of literature like John Milton, T.S. Eliot, or Henry James.

“Art can come from anywhere,” Burt added. “You can make art anywhere, and you’re going to make more interesting art if you look for art by and about and for people who aren’t like you.”

Iyer, who recalled the sense of awe he felt at hearing jazz musician Herbie Hancock deliver the Norton Lectures in 2014, said the Norton Lectures also offer an opportunity for an institution like Harvard to learn something, too. Artists have a reach and an impact to the broader world that an academic institution does not always have, Iyer said.

“There is a sort of insularity that happens in the institution,” Iyer said. “When a moment like Herbie Hancock giving the Norton Lectures happens it’s like the floodgates open and Harvard learned something new about the world, and new relationships are formed, new truths are revealed.”

This year’s series, which starts Tuesday, will feature six lectures by award-winning “Hunger” (2008) and “12 Years a Slave” (2013) filmmaker Steve McQueen.