Manchester Lit&Phil Annual Percival Lecture

Professor Duncan Ivison

President and Vice-Chancellor of The University of Manchester

Professor Duncan Ivison joined The University of Manchester on 1 August 2024.

Professor Duncan Ivison, FAHA FRSN, is President and Vice-Chancellor of The University of Manchester. Duncan completed his BA (hons) in political science and philosophy at McGill University, in Montréal, Canada, where he grew up, and his MSc and PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

He has held positions at the Australian National University, the University of York (UK), the University of Toronto and, for more than twenty years, at the University of Sydney.

Duncan has taught and published extensively across political and moral philosophy. He was awarded the 1993 Robert Mackenzie Prize at LSE for his thesis, the 2004 CB Macpherson Prize for the best book in political theory in 2002/3 (awarded by the Canadian Political Science Association) and is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (2007) and the Royal Society of New South Wales (2015). He was Laurance S Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Human Values at Princeton University (2002–3), as well as Visiting Professor, most recently, at the ANU (2023) and Nuffield College, Oxford (2023).

During his time at the University of Sydney, Duncan held a series of senior leadership roles, including Head of the School of Humanities (2007–10), Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (2010–2015), and Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) (2015–2022). He has also held a wide range of leadership roles across the Australian higher education sector, and has been a regular contributor to major debates about the future of universities, research and innovation, and economic development.

Duncan has a particular passion for public engagement and building partnerships between universities, community organizations, industry, and governments.

He and his partner, Diana Irving, have two children, Hamish and Isobel.

Thomas Percival

Thomas Percival was the Manchester Lit&Phil’s first President, and the Percival Lecture was established in 1947 to celebrate his legacy.

In 1780, Percival started hosting meetings at his house, attended by ‘literary characters’, the principal inhabitants and ‘occasional strangers’. This gang of characters, many of them radical reformers and slave abolitionists, became the ‘Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester’. The society’s first official meeting took place on 28th February 1781.

Percival himself was a remarkable physician, moralist and a non-conformist, responsible for sweeping changes to public health. He was on a mission to improve the living and working conditions in the city, establishing the Manchester Board of Health in 1795.

The Percival Lecture is hosted in turn by the University of Manchester, the University of Salford, and Manchester Metropolitan University.