With the World to Choose From: Celebrating Seven Decades of the Beatty Lecture at McGill University

The Beatty Lecture, established in 1952 in honour of former Canadian Pacific Railway president and McGill chancellor Sir Edward Beatty, is McGill University’s most anticipated annual event. Some of the series’ greatest lectures, delivered by Nobel Prize laureates, world leaders, and cultural icons, have been forgotten, carefully stowed away in the McGill Archives.

To help us understand some of the most significant moments and discoveries of our time, With the World to Choose From spotlights fifteen outstanding Beatty Lectures, spanning seven decades. Readers can discover – or rediscover – these important and inspiring lectures, all in print for the first time. One of the twentieth century’s most influential visionaries, the economist Barbara Ward, opens this anthology with her future-looking 1955 lecture. Lectures from acclaimed biologist Robert Sinsheimer, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, philosopher Charles Taylor, and author and social commentator Roxane Gay carry readers through the decades that followed and up to the present, treating subjects from the tensions of Cold War politics and the implications of genetic engineering to the origins of life in the universe and the watershed #MeToo movement. Some of today’s leading academics add contextual and biographical information to each chapter, and an introduction sheds light on the history of the Beatty Lecture and the life of its notable namesake.

Illustrated with a selection of photographs and ephemera, With the World to Choose From provides a historical and behind-the-scenes look at one of Canada’s longest-running lecture series.