Friends of Fisher Events
2025 Lectures
This year’s Kiddell Lecture on the History of the Book is a conversation about memory, storytelling, and identity around cookbooks and food cultures in Guyana.
Friends of Fisher by Maurice Vellekoop
2024 Lectures
In this lecture, Surekha Davies shows how print and manuscript miscellanies and geographical works produced in Europe by geographers, naturalists, and collectors like Sir Hans Sloane were artefacts with which their compilers puzzled through the boundaries (or lack thereof) between human, animal, and the idea of the monster.
Dr. Winona Wheeler will speak on the origin stories of Cree syllabics, and how Cree people used their written words.
In this first Friends of Fisher lecture of the 2024/25 season, Tamara J. Walker retrace some of American pianist Philippa Schuylers’ steps and reflect on her influence in the world of women travelers.
This is the inaugural J. Edward Chamberlin Lecture, delivered by U of T Law Professor John Borrows, the Loveland Chair in Indigenous Law. Professor Borrows is a member of the Chippewa of the Nawash First Nation in Ontario, Canada, and he is an acclaimed scholar and leading authority on Canadian Indigenous law and constitutional law.
2023 Lectures
Massimo Riva, Professor of Italian Studies and Modern Media at Brown University, will be speaking on eighteen- and nineteen-century optical devices.
This talk employs the lens of Afrofuturism to address new dimensions of the Underground Railroad, detailing what imagination, tact, and technology, it took for fugitive Blacks to flee to the "outer spaces of slavery."
2022 Lectures
Shawn Micallef, Toronto author and editor on "Understand Toronto: Trying to Figure Out a Confounding City."
Professor Andrew Pettegree, Bishop Wardlaw Professor at University of St. Andrew's, Scotland, on "The Book at War: Libraries and Reading in a Time of Conflict."
Rebecca Romney, rare book dealer, appraiser and author, on "Putting Together a Collection of Popular Romance Novels."
2021 Lectures
Colette Fu, photographer, book artist and paper engineer, on "We Are Tiger Dragon People: The Magical Pop-up Books of Paper Engineer and Artist Colette Fu."
Michelle Brown, Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London on "The Luttrell Psalter: Incestuous Knights, Abducted Heiresses and Other Everyday Folk in Early 14th-century England."
Garrett Herman, Toronto book collector, on "Collecting Darwin."
Dr Alexandra Gillespie, Vice-President and Principal, University of Toronto Mississauga, on "The Silk Roads Project."
2020 Lectures
Dr Thomas Keymer, University Professor, Chancellor Jackman, Professor, University of Toronto on "Authorship, Print, and Sedition in Eighteenth-Century England."
Dr Margaret Schotte, Associate Professor of Early Modern, History, York University on "For Merchants and Mariners - The Business of Nautical Manuals."