Professor Philip Smallwood, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of English, has received an American Library Association Outstanding Academic Title Award for his book The Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson: Forms of Artistry and Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2023). On 13th December 2025, at the annual commemoration in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, Philip laid a wreath on the tomb of Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth-century critic, lexicographer, editor and poet. At the invitation of the Society, he then delivered The Richard Thrale Memorial Lecture to the Johnson Society of London at Gough Square, in the house in which Johnson complied his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Philip's subject was '“A Time to Laugh”: Johnson’s Exuberance'.
For information on the book, click here.