Will and Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys Lecture by Carla Pestana

Striving for Expertise

Guest Speaker: Carla Pestana (UCLA)

Scholars often refer to Samuel Pepys as an early example of a state bureaucrat, his career as a civil servant in the burgeoning Restoration bureaucracy offering documentation of an important shift in governance. Of equal note—and perhaps greater interest—is the way Pepys himself aimed for expertise. Not content to serve as a cog in a larger bureaucratic machine, Pepys sought to educate himself about the workings of the navy and of sailing ships, going beyond the demands of his own office to achieve a deeper understanding. In doing so, he once again revealed his insecurities, while he also indulged in personal rivalries and resisted the limitations placed him in his role as a civil servant.

Carla Gardina Pestana is Distinguished Professor of History and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World. Her research focuses on 17th and 18th century Atlantic worlds, especially the English Atlantic, the Caribbean, and U.S. religious history. Professor Pestana has published books on religion and empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most notably Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (2009).

Professor William Matthews, a member of UCLA’s English Department faculty and the Center’s second Director (1970-1972), was an authority on the life and writings of the seventeenth-century British wit and diarist Samuel Pepys. With the assistance of his wife Lois, Matthews and his co-editor Robert Latham produced the definitive edition (eleven volumes) of Pepys’s works, which was published incrementally between 1971 and 1983. The Matthewses’ will, which endows the Center’s annual lecture and also a festive dinner, specifies that the event should be scheduled to coincide with Pepys’s own annual celebration commemorating the surgery he endured on March 26, 1658.

More information about past William and Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys lectures can be found here.