Recordings of Past Lectures in the Research Study Rooms

Here you may stream or download audio recordings, in mp3 format, from past lectures from the scholars and writers of The New York Public Library's Research Study Rooms (the Wertheim Study and the Allen Room).

Alex Wright - The Web That Wasn't: Forgotten Forebears of the Internet - March 7, 2013

Renee Marton - Rice: the Immigrant Grain - January 31, 2013

Andrew Roberts - Why Hitler Lost - January 10, 2013

Margot Adler - Why Our Society Likes Vampires: their Moral Struggle – and Ours - December 20, 2012

Seth Gopin - Building to Impress: New York Skyscrapers and the People who Commissioned Them - December 13, 2012

Sally Webster - James Lenox and the Origins of The New York Public Library - December 6, 2012

William Moeck - Charles Dickens: Speaking in Pictures - November 29, 2012

Judith Weinraub - A Salad Story: In the Beginning, long ago, there was Lettuce - November 15, 2012

Tom Shachtman - The Science of the Founding Fathers - October 25, 2012

Christian Ayne Crouch - The Road to New Orleans starts in 1752: Seven Years' War Roots in the War of 1812 - October 18, 2012

Megan Elias - Is Lunch for Wimps? the History of the Midday Meal - October 11, 2012

Gretchen Dykstra - One Minister, Two Sleazebags and the Ku Klux Klan in North Dakota in the 1920s - September 27, 2012

Patricia King - Eliza Lynch and the Gold of Paraguay - July 24, 2012

Anatoly Pinsky - The Individual after Stalin : Writers, Diaries, and the Reform of Soviet Socialism. - July 10, 2012

Katherine R. Broad - Girlpower?: Teenage Heroines in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction - June 19, 2012

Damion Searls - Watchmakers, Hippies, and the World Economic Summit: Three Magic Mountains and the Birth of Today's World in Switzerland - June 12, 2012

Donovan Finn - A Greener Big Apple: How Citizens And Government Are Creating a More Sustainable Gotham - June 5, 2012

Marcelle Thiébaux - Unruly Princess: Margit of Hungary, a Medieval Saint and her Disappointed Suitor - May 23, 2012

Paul Arpaia - Antisemitism, Italian Style: The Italian Royal Academy, 1938-1943 - May 18, 2012

Kyoo Lee - Cogito Interruptus: Descartes and Princess Elisabeth on Life, Love and Growing Old - May 9, 2012

Jonathan Gray - Enacting Innocence: Barack Obama's Speech on Race in the Context of American Exceptionalism - May 4, 2012

Linda Neiberg - Memorializing the Dead in Romeo and Juliet, Othello and The Winter’s Tale - April 26, 2012

Ashley Cross- Vindicating the Writing Woman: Mary Robinson in Dialogue with Godwin and Wollstonecraft - March 22, 2012

Kathleen Lubey - Late Eighteenth-Century Feminisms: Mary Wollstonecraft and her Contemporaries - March 9 2012

David LaRocca - Everybody's Autobiography: Remarks on Anxiety and Pseudonymity in the work of Soren Kierkegaard and Charlie Kaufman - February 16, 2012

Johannes Burgers - From the Dreyfus Affair to the Holocaust: The Emergence of Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory - February 7, 2012

Rosemary Wakeman - Tomorrowland: Space Age Cities of the 1960s - January 25, 2012

Felder Dorn - How Episcopal Bishops of the Antebellum and Civil War Years Responded to Slavery - January 10, 2012

Elizabeth Powers - Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea - August 4, 2011

Tony Perrottet talks about The Sinners' Grand Tour, May 25, 2011

Shakespeare

• Scott Trudell, Hamlet: Poetry That Doesn't Matter, April 15, 2011
• Naomi Liebler and Estelle Parsons: Reading (Between) the Lines: Shakespeare's Old Ladies, April 14, 2011
• Gavin Hollis: Shakespeare's Mappery, April 13, 2011
• Bernice W. Kliman: Hamletworks.org for Everyone!, April 12, 2011
• Matthew Zarnowiecki (with Dana Ivey) : The End of Shakespeare's Sonnets, April 11, 2011

Elizabeth Livingston - A [Wedding] Dress in the Attic - March 24, 2011

Michael Krondl - Sweet, Sacred and Profane: Dessert in Kolkata - March 10, 2011

Joel S. Schwartz - Darwin's Disciple, George John Romanes - March 3, 2011

David Meskill - The Unmaking of the German Working Class: Shy Class Conflict Ended after 1945 - January 26, 2011

Daniel Walkowitz - Country Dance and the Transatlantic Politics of Folk Revivals - January 24, 2011

Christine Folch - Stakes of a Triple Frontier City: the Untold History of Ciudad del Este - January 21, 2011

Lia Paradis - Gordon's Ghost: Imagining the Sudan after the Fall of Khartoum - January 7, 2011

Radical Women Artists of New York City

• Barbara Moore: Charlotte Moorman and Her 15 Avant-Garde Festivals, December 21, 2010
• Aseel Sawalha: Feminist Art Collectives in New York: An Anthropological Perspective, December 14, 2010
• Kathleen Wentrack: The Posters and Wall Collages of Mary Beth Edelson, December 7, 2010

Six Facets of Ireland

• Celtic Tigresses: Postfeminism in Ireland, by Claire Bracken, November 17
• Israelites in Erin: the Politics of Exocus in Irish Writing, by Abby Bender, November 17
• Nineteenth-century Irish Landscape Painting and the Sublime in the Works of Francis Danby, James Arthur O'Connor, and George Petrie, by Elizabeth Martin, November 17
• Irish and Irish-American Collections at The New York Public Library, by Mary Jones, November 16, 2010
• Menacing Women: Sebastian Barry's Exposition of Ireland's Mental Asylums in The Secret Scripture, by Tara Harney, November 16, 2010
• Where are Ireland's Counter-Monuments?, by Anne O'Byrne, November 16, 2010