The Massey Lectures are an annual five-part series of lectures on a political, cultural or philosophical topic given in Canada by a noted scholar. They were created in 1961 to honour Vincent Massey, Governor General of Canada. The purpose is to "enable distinguished authorities to communicate the results of original study on important subjects of contemporary interest." Some of the most famous Massey Lecturers have included Northrop Frye, John Kenneth Galbraith, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Franklin, and Nobel laureates Martin Luther King, Jr., George Wald, Willy Brandt and Doris Lessing. In 2003 novelist Thomas King was the first person of aboriginal descent to be invited as a lecturer.
The event is co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The lectures have been broadcast by the CBC Radio show Ideas since 1965. Before 2002, the lectures were recorded for broadcast in a CBC Radio studio in Toronto. In 1989. and after, a single public lecture was also given at the University of Toronto. Since 2002, the lectures were taken out of the studio with each of the five lectures being delivered and recorded for broadcast before an audience in a different Canadian city.
The lectures are broadcast each November on Ideas, and are published in book form by House of Anansi Press. Two consolidations of five older lectures have been published. Many of the lectures are also available in CD audio which can be purchased through the CBC. In 2011 most of the lectures were available on the Ideas website. Since 1997 the lectures have included some form of interaction through web forums.
1961 – Barbara Ward, 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 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
1976 – No Lecture
1977 – Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning
1978 – Leslie Fiedler, The Inadvertent Epic
1979 – Jane Jacobs, Canadian Cities and Sovereignty Association
1980 – No Lecture
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
1986 – No Lecture
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
1996 – No Lecture (see Notes below)
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
2005 – Stephen Lewis, Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa
2006 – Margaret Somerville, The Ethical Imagination
2007 – Alberto Manguel, The City of Words
2008 – Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
2009 – Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
2010 – Douglas Coupland, Player One: What is to Become of Us
2011 – Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season
2012 – Neil Turok, The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos
2013 – Lawrence Hill, Blood: The Stuff of Life
2014 – Adrienne Clarkson, Belonging: The Paradox of Citizenship
2015 – Margaret MacMillan, History's People: Personalities and the Past
2016 – Jennifer Welsh, The Return of History: Conflict, Migration and Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century
In October 2013, for Lawrence Hill's Massey Lectures, CBC Radio produced a visual narrative to accompany his topic of Blood: The Stuff of Life and published it on a website. This story is presented with huge, full-screen images of blood, animations which visually demonstrate historical attitudes and videos of people affected culturally by blood. The website elements are triggered by scrolling so that as the reader continues on the page, the multiple backgrounds seem to move at different speeds, creating a sensation of depth. This is known as a parallax website.
There was no lecture in 1996 because the Ideas producers and the selected Lecturer, Robert Theobald, could not agree on what constituted a sufficient manuscript for the lecture. The topic was to be on the broad theme of the future of work. Theobald later published his manuscript as Reworking Success: New Communities at the Millennium (1997).
