Bryn Mawr College

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 College's Mary Flexner Lecture Series.

Established in honor of Mary Flexner, a Bryn Mawr graduate of the class of 1895, the Lectureship has brought some of the world's best-known humanists to campus. The pioneering Egyptologist James H. Breasted gave the first series of Mary Flexner Lectures in 1928-29, 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.

Holders of the Mary Flexner Lecturership typically give a series of talks that introduce their unique scholarship and present new chapters or developments in that work. While in residence, they often lead seminars or discussions with undergraduate and graduate students.  Lecturers publish their scholarship with Harvard University Press.

Flexner Lectureship News