The American Society for Aesthetics and the British Society of Aesthetics are pleased to announce that Murray Smith will be the Richard Wollheim Lecturer at the American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting in Baltimore October 22-25, 2025.
Professor Smith is Professor of Philosophy, Art, and Film, and Director of the Aesthetics Research Centre at University of Kent. He was a Leverhulme Research Fellow (2005-6), a Laurence E. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University’s Centre for Human Values (2017-18), and President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (2014-7). He is a member of the editorial boards of the British Journal of Aesthetics, Series, and Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image. He works primarily in film theory broadly, but especially the ‘philosophy of film’ – film theory informed by analytic philosophy – and classical film theory; cognitive and evolutionary approaches to cinema, and to art in general; empirical and experimental approaches to the arts.
For more information about Professor Smith, click here.
For more information about Professor Wollheim, click here.
The Richard Wollheim Lecture is jointly sponsored by the American Society for Aesthetics and the British Society of Aesthetics. The ASA nominates a lecturer to speak at the BSA annual conference in even years and the BSA nominates a lecturer to speak at the ASA annual meeting in odd years.
Previous Wollheim Lecturers:
▪ 2024: Garry Hagberg
▪ 2023: Elisabeth Schellekens
▪ 2022: Rachel Zuckert
▪ 2021: Matthew Kieran
▪ 2020: Yuriko Saito
▪ 2019: Eileen John
▪ 2018: Carolyn Korsmeyer
▪ 2017: Derek Matravers
▪ 2016: Susan Feagin
▪ 2015: Catherine Wilson
▪ 2014: Jenefer Robinson
▪ 2013: Gregory Currie
▪ 2012: Kendall Walton
▪ 2011: Berys Gaut
▪ 2010: Noël Carroll
▪ 2009: Peter Lamarque