Alfred North Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas, I.A. Richards' The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Erwin Panofsky's Studies in Iconology and Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending are among the very influential books that have emerged from Bryn Mawr's Mary Flexner Lecture Series. That tradition will continue in 2007, thanks to an agreement between the College and Harvard University Press to publish the Flexner Lectures. Rashid Khalidi's three talks on the United States, the Middle East and the Cold War will follow K. Anthony Appiah's 2005 lectures, to be released by HUP as Experiments in Ethics in January 2008.

The lecture series, established in honor of Mary Flexner, a Bryn Mawr graduate of the class of 1895, has brought some of the world's best-known humanists to campus. The pioneering Egyptologist James H. Breasted gave the first series of Flexner Lectures in 1928-29, to be followed in later years by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Arnold Toynbee, Isaiah Berlin, Paul Henry Lang, Douglas Cooper, Natalie Zemon Davis and Harold Bloom, among others.

Flexner lecturers typically give a series of three to four talks that introduce their unique scholarship and present some new chapters or developments in that work. While in residence, they often lead seminars or discussions with undergraduate and graduate students.