The Wiles Lectures were founded in 1953 by Mrs Austen Boyd of Craigavad, Co. Down, in memory of her father, Thomas S. Wiles of Albany, New York. Acting with the advice of the then vice-chancellor of Queen’s, Sir Eric Ashby, and of Sir Herbert Butterfield, then master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Mrs Boyd generously endowed a trust fund to support an annual series of lectures ‘to promote the study of the history of civilisation and to encourage the extension of historical thinking into the realm of general ideas’.

The fund brings to Belfast each year an expert in a particular field of historical scholarship to deliver four lectures on successive days, related to the lecturer's research and reflecting on the wider implications of their work for historical understanding.

The Wiles Trust also supports other scholarly activities at Queen's, including a series of Wiles Colloquia on historical topics, convened by members of School staff.

For more information, contact the Chair of Trustees, Prof. Peter Gray

The Wiles Lectures 2021 will be give by Professor Chris Wickham, on the topic:

'Rethinking the Commercial Revolution of the 11th and 12th-Century Mediterranean'

The lectures will be given on 12-15 May 2021. More details to follow.

Chris Wickham is Chichele Professor of Medieval History (Emeritus) at the University of Oxford and a fellow of All Souls' College. He has worked on a range of topics in medieval history: detailed rural/regional analyses in an Annales tradition, and also urban histories, of Italy up to the early thirteenth century; comparative history, of socio-economic and socio-political patterns, particularly in late Antiquity and the early middle ages, but later on as well; socio-legal history; the study of social memory in Europe and more widely; and the interface between history and archaeology. His current research focusses on the Mediterranean in a long eleventh century and the development of exchange/commercial patterns in that period, from Spain to Egypt.