Since 1936, nearly 200 artists, scholars, intellectuals, and leaders have shared their ideas with Indiana University and the Bloomington community as part of the Patten Lecture series. See the full list of lecturers below, or view a list you can sort alphabetically or by year.
Past Lectures
- 1936 Alfred Manes
- 1938 Raymond Pearl
- 1939 Harold J. Laski
- 1940 Robert Triastram Coffin
- 1942 Bernard DeVoto
- 1943 Herbert Spencer Jennings
- 1944 Gilberto Freyre
- 1947 Carleton Sprague Smith
- 1948 Henri Frankfort
- 1949 Douglas Bush
- 1949 L. Dudley Stamp
- 1950 Julian Huxley
- 1952 Louis B. Wright
- 1954 George Sarton
- 1955 Brock Chisholm
- 1956 Aziz S. Atiya
- 1957 Roy Ellsworth Harris
- 1958 Edmundo O'Gorman
- 1959 Bruno Snell
- 1960 Meyer Schapiro
- 1961 Morris Bishop
- 1962 James David Ebert
- 1963 Ernest J. Simmons
- 1964 Elder Olson
- 1965 Dexter Perkins
- 1966 Harry Tuchman Levin
- 1967 Alexander Coburn Soper III
- 1968 Samuel Noah Kramer
- 1970 Thomas D. Clark
- 1971 John C. Eccles
- 1972 C. R. Rao
- 1973 Kenneth E. Boulding
- 1973 Rene Welleck
- 1974 Martin Kamen
- 1974 Ralph W. Tyler
- 1975 Barbara Hardy
- 1975 Fred Hoyle
- 1975 H. C. Robbins Landon
- 1975 S. Dillon Ripley
- 1976 Mary Boyce
- 1976 Garrett Hardin
- 1977 Henry Steele Commager
- 1977 Michael Harrington
- 1977 Arnaldo Dante Momigliano
- 1977 Joseph Needham
- 1977 Marcel Ophuls
- 1978 Adrien Albert
- 1978 Ann Cornelisen
- 1978 James M. Fallows
- 1978 Edwin O. Reischauer
- 1979 Jorge Luis Borges
- 1979 Stanley Cavell
- 1979 Russell Kirk
- 1979 Andrew Porter
- 1979 Lee N. Robbins
- 1979 Rene Thom
- 1979 Darwin T. Turner
- 1979 Cao Yu
- 1980 Norman Corwin
- 1980 Manfred Eigen
- 1980 Stanley Kauffman
- 1980 Yuan Kejia
- 1980 Theodore J. Lowi
- 1980 Eugen Joseph Weber
- 1980 Theodore J. Ziolkowski
- 1981 John Barth
- 1981 David Brion Davis
- 1981 Stanley Engerman
- 1981 Irving Howe
- 1981 Saul Kripke
- 1981 Ralph Manheim
- 1981 Czeslaw Milosz
- 1981 Colin Renfrew
- 1981 Israel Scheffler
- 1981 George Steiner
- 1981 P.J. Vatikiotis
- 1981 Gavin Wright
- 1982 Umberto Eco
- 1982 Sheldon Glashow
- 1982 Gerald Holton
- 1982 Olwen Hufton
- 1982 Robert Hughes
- 1982 Stanislaw Ulam
- 1983 Robert Darnton
- 1983 Toni Morrison
- 1983 Robert Shaw
- 1983 Denis Mack Smith
- 1983 Michael Walzer
- 1983 Chen Ning Yang
- 1984 Raymond Boudon
- 1984 Ralph Cohen
- 1984 Lawrence R. Klein
- 1984 Sir Edmund R. Leach
- 1984 Leondard B Meyer
- 1984 Marvin Minsky
- 1985 Vina Deloria, Jr.
- 1985 Linda K. Kerber
- 1985 Flora Lewis
- 1985 Jeremiah P. Ostriker
- 1985 Janet T. Spence
- 1985 David Del Tredici
- 1986 John C. Caldwell
- 1986 Stanley Fish
- 1986 John Hope Franklin
- 1986 May Sarton
- 1986 Lester C. Thurow
- 1986 Richard Wilbur
- 1987 Natalie Zemon Davis
- 1987 Herbert Robbins
- 1988 Rex Nettleford
- 1988 Roger Shattuck
- 1988 Malcom Toon
- 1989 Evelyn Fox Keller
- 1989 Paule Marshall
- 1990 Donna Haraway
- 1990 Richard C. Lewontin
- 1990 Jonathan Spence
- 1991 Sir John Boardman
- 1991 Wilem J.M. Levelt
- 1991 Meir Sternberg
- 1992 J. M. Coetzee
- 1992 Michael J. Sandel
- 1992 Sir John Meurig Thomas
- 1993 Peter Lamont Brown
- 1993 Noam Chomsky
- 1993 John Rochard Krebs
- 1994 Amy Gutmann
- 1994 Gregor E. Morfill
- 1994 Gregory Nagy
- 1994 Frank Press
- 1995 Lawrence M. Friedman
- 1995 Jerome J. McGann
- 1995 Edward W. Said
- 1996 Etel Adman
- 1996 Richard Wightman Fox
- 1996 Michael B. Katz
- 1996 Christopher A. Sims
- 1997 Robert A. Ferguson
- 1997 Bernard McGinn
- 1997 Majorie Perloff
- 1997 Wole Soyinka
- 1998 Alexander W. Astin
- 1998 Oleg Grabar
- 1998 Tony R. Judt
- 1998 Joan Tower
- 1999 Robert H. Bates
- 1999 Jorge Castaneda
- 1999 Lynn Hunt
- 1999 Elizabeth Loftus
- 2000 Benjamin Bagby
- 2000 Elizabeth A. Clark
- 2000 Joel Smoller
- 2000 Catharine R. Stimpson
- 2001 Anthony Grafton
- 2001 Amos Oz
- 2001 Jay Winter
- 2002 Oscar Arias
- 2002 Uchang Kim
- 2002 Laurence J. Kotlikoff
- 2002 Patricia J. Williams
- 2003 Persi Diaconis
- 2003 Darlene Clark Hine
- 2003 Millicent Hodson
- 2003 Fernando Nottebohm
- 2004 Geoffrey W. Marcy
- 2004 Adam Phillips
- 2004 Claude M. Steele
- 2005 Mary Beard
- 2005 Daniel C. Dennett
- 2005 David Levering Lewis
- 2005 Charles Rosen
- 2006 Bruce Alberts
- 2006 Amartya Sen
- 2006 Fritz Stern
- 2007 Neta Bahcall
- 2007 Gillian Beer
- 2007 Martha Nussbaum
- 2007 Strobe Talbott
- 2007 Richard N. Zare
- 2008 James O'Donnell
- 2008 Thomas Schelling
- 2008 Werner Sollors
- 2009 Andrew Knoll
- 2009 W. J. T. Mitchell
- 2009 Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth
- 2010 Wendell Berry
- 2010 Nancy Fraser
- 2010 Jean Palutikof
- 2011 Peter Galison
- 2011 Charles Hill
- 2011 Ray Jackendoff
- 2012 Werner Herzog
- 2012 Barbie Zelizer
- 2013 William Bialek
- 2013 Sarah Hrdy
- 2014 David Finkel
- 2014 Gerd Gigerenzer
- 2015 Nancy Folbre
- 2015 Amitav Ghosh
- 2015 Naomi Oreskes
- 2015 John Searle
- 2016 Jill Lepore
- 2016 James Scott
- 2016 Paul Slovic
- 2017 Franco Moretti
- 2017 Paul Muldoon
- 2017 Michael Watts
- 2018 Yannis Behrakis
- 2018 Michael Burawoy
- 2018 Kathleen Hall Jamieson
- 2018 Gene Robinson
- 2019 Imani Perry
- 2020 Susan Neiman
- 2020 Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake
- 2021 Frances Moore-Lappé
- 2022 Frances Moore-Lappé
- 2022 Cherríe Moraga
- 2022 Dame Alison Richard
- 2023 Francis Fukuyama
- 2023 Susan Neiman
- 2023 Michael Oppenheimer
- 2024 Jad Abumrad