20th anniversary lecture: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography past, present, and future

September 2024 marks twenty years since the publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB], the collective achievement of thousands of authors from around the world, revising and updating a resource that dates from 1885. Since first publication in 2004, with some 55,000 lives, the ODNB has published regular updates, adding a further 8,000 lives. These additions include 4,600 biographies of notable figures who died between 2001 and 2020. These recent lives, covering virtually every aspect of recent British history and drawing on the advice of about one thousand experts in around forty-five broad occupational areas, represent a remarkable and possibly unique, curated national biographical record. Over the past twenty years, the ODNB’s coverage of all historical periods has also been extended by releases of lives mainly organized in thematic areas, incorporating new research and perspectives on the national past.

Professor Sir David Cannadine has been general editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography since 2014, and is a specialist in the political, social, and cultural history of modern Britain and its empire, and the study of history over time. He was Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University from 2008 to 2023 (now Emeritus), and previously taught at the universities of Cambridge, Columbia, and London, where he was Director of the Institute of Historical Research from 1998 to 2003.

A former chairman of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and president of the Birmingham & Midland Institute, David was knighted for services to scholarship in 2009. As General Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography he is a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of History at Oxford, University of Oxford, and is an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford (and of Clare and Christ’s colleges, Cambridge). From 2017 to 2021 David served as President of the British Academy.

The lecture will be followed by a small reception.