The economics academic lecture in the nineteenth century

This study investigates the economics lecture from a historical discursive perspective, focusing on the case of Marshall's lectures in Cambridge in 1873. The historical study of academic genres has primarily dealt with the research article and the textbook, while the academic lecture has been studied nearly exclusively from a pedagogical angle in spite of the fact that it is a genre perfectly suited to shed light on the lecturer/student relationship and ways of disseminating knowledge over time. The present analysis shows that the lecturer's persona is textually constructed through the use of interactional and evaluative discursive strategies, which include metadiscursive devices used to explicitly engage students' attention or to signal the lecturer's attitude to both the audience and the content of the lecture.