#  Steve McQueen could lecture you, but he’s got other plans 

 





October 03, 2025

 

 

For Steve McQueen, live performance generates a force that no podium lecture can match.

It’s a conviction that shapes the Norton Lectures he is delivering this fall, in a series titled “Pulse,” featuring film, musical performances, and dialogue.

“There’s a certain kind of energy that could be produced by a performative idea of communication, and that’s what I’m interested in,” said the Academy Award-winning director of “12 Years a Slave.” “I’m not the kind of person who stands for an hour reading from a piece of paper. I think the audience needs more, and I feel I need to give more. I also feel the dialogue — the back-and-forth clash of two stones making a fire — could be thought-provoking for the audience as well as the participants.”

McQueen is recognized internationally for producing work that explores painful and challenging histories and exposes the fragility of the human condition. He directed the feature films “Blitz” (2024) and “Hunger” (2008), as well as the documentaries “Uprising” (2021) and “Occupied City” (2023).

The first of McQueen’s six Norton Lectures, delivered Tuesday, centered on the FBI files of legendary Black singer, actor, and political activist Paul Robeson. McQueen’s 2012-2022 video work “End Credits,” features a continuous projection of digitally scanned files from thousands of highly redacted, declassified documents kept on Robeson and his wife, Eslanda Goode Robeson, for most of the singer’s life, greatly damaging his career as a performer.  
  
Read more [here](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/10/steve-mcqueen-could-lecture-you-but-hes-got-other-plans/).



 

 

 



 

 

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