Past Lectures

Visit the Beatty Lecture digital archive to access transcripts, photographs and audio or video recordings of the lectures listed below. You can also directly access the Beatty Lecture playlist on YouTube.

2023 – Alanis Obomsawin
2022 – Maria Ressa
, "The Battle for Facts: Critical for a Sustainable Future"
2021 – Anthony Fauci, “COVID-19: Lessons Learned and Remaining Challenges”
2020 – Steven Pinker, “Progress and Enlightenment in the 21st Century”
2019 – Jane Goodall, "Journey from the Jungle"
2018 – Roxane Gay, "Difficult Women, Bad Feminists and Unruly Bodies"
2017 – Charles Taylor, "The Challenge of Regressive Democracy"
2016 – Margaret Atwood, "Humanities in an Age of Environmental Crisis"
2015 – John Wood, "Whose Version of the Future is Going to Win?"
2014 – Karl Deisseroth, "Illuminating the Brain"
2013 – Witold Rybczynski, "Architecture and the Passage of History"
2012 – Kerry Courneya, "Physical Activity in Cancer Survivors: A Field in Motion"
2011 – Alfred Brendel, "Does Classical Music Have to be Entirely Serious?"
2010 – Muhammad Yunus, "Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity's Most Pressing Needs"
2009 – Marc Tessier-Lavigne, "Brain Development and Brain Repair: The Life and Death of Nerve Cells"
2008 – James Gustave Speth, "Capitalism and the Environment: From Crisis to Sustainability"
2007 – Anna Tibaijuka, "Divided Cities: Caught Between Hope and Despair"
2006 – Richard Dawkins, "Queerer Than We Suppose: The Strangeness of Science"
2006 – Deepak Chopra, "Religion and Spirituality"
2005 – Michael Ignatieff, “Canada in the World: The Challenges Ahead”
2004 – Steven Sanderson, "Global Poverty Alleviation and the Impoverishment of Wild Nature"
2004 – Shirin Ebadi, "Democracy: The Precondition to Peace"
2003 – Herman E. Daly, "Uneconomic Growth and The Illth of Nations: Defining the Optimal Scale of the Macro Economy"
2002 – Sandra Steingraber, "Protecting the First Environment: The Ecology of Pregnancy and Childbirth"
2002 – Richard John Neuhaus, "Liberal Democracy and Acts of Faith"
2002 – William Galston, "Religion and Liberal Society"
2002 – Queen Noor of Jordan, "Creating a Culture of Peace"
2002 – John Maddox, "What Remains to be Discovered"
2002 – Wangari Maathai, "Standing up for the Environment"
2000 – Vartan Gregorian, "Libraries and Reading in the Computer Age"
2000 – Jonathan Miller, "Laughing Matters: Humour and Comedy"
2000 – Paul Crutzen, "The Importance of the Tropics in Atmospheric Chemistry"
1999 – Steven Mithen, "Becoming Human: The Evolution of Mind and Language"
1999 – Paul Ewald, "What's Catching: The Darwinism of Disease"
1999 – Eugenie C. Scott, "The Great Controversy"
1999 – Carl Djerassi, "Science-in-fiction Is Not Science Fiction"
1998 – Luc Montagnier, "AIDS on the Threshold of the Year 2000: Merging Western Experiences and African Realities"
1997 – Cicely Saunders, "Lessons in Living from the Dying"
1997 – Oliver Sacks, "Neurology and the Soul"
1997 – John Horgan, "The End of Science"
1996 – Bernard Kouchner, "Right of Interference: Progress and Failure in Conflict Prevention in an Age of Global Anxiety"
1996 – Roger Schank, "Why Most Schooling Is Irrelevant: Computers and the Future of Learning"
1995 – Yves Coppens, "From Africa, the Cradle, to America, the New World: The Prehistory of Man and the Peopling of the Earth"
1995 – Catherine Bertini, "Women Eat Last"
1994 – Paul Sacher, "Paul Sacher Remembers Béla Bartók"
1994 – Nancy Wexler, "Huntington's Disease: Member of an Expanding Family of Disorders"
1994 – David Akers-Jones, "Hong Kong Horizons"
1994 – Rudolph Marcus, "Life in Science: Interaction of Theory and Experiments"
1994 – Margaret Drabble, "The Corpse in the Garden: Concealments and Disclosures in Fiction and Biography"
1993 – Barbara Ehrenreich, "Can Feminism Change the World?"
1993 – Witold Lutoslawski, "About the Element of Chance in Music"
1993 – Mikhail Gorbachev, "The New World Order"
1993 – Jacques Attali, "Europe on the World Stage in the Twenty-First Century"
1992 – Arthur Ashe, "Living with AIDS"
1991 – Pierre Boulez, "Répons: How to Develop a Musical Idea"
1991 – Yang Cheng-Ning, "Symmetry and Physics"
1990 – Daniel Boorstin, "America: Discovery, Invention or Creation?"
1990 – Francis Bretherton, "Understanding the Earth System"
1990 – Norman Myers, "Safeguarding the Biosphere: What Cost? What Payoff?"
1990 – Gerald Edelman, "Morphology and Mind"
1989 – Sally Falk Moore, "Nationalism, Cultural Pluralism and the State"
1988 – Kirk Varnedoe, "Fine Disregard: Inventions in Early Modern Art"
1987 – Christopher Hill, "Milton and the English Revolution"
1987 – John Mortimer, "The Art of Advocacy / Clinging to the Wreckage"
1985 – Francis Crick, "How Do We See Things? / The Search-Light Hypothesis/ The Problem of Awareness"
1984 – William McCarthy, "The Limits of Trade Union Power"
1983 – I. F. Stone, "The Trial of Socrates Revisited: What Plato Doesn't Tell Us"
1982 – Gwendolen Carter, "Apartheid: Dying or Resurgent / The African States Seek Economic Liberation"
1981 – Saunders Mac Lane, "How Mathematicians Get New Ideas / Distortion of Science by Politics"
1981 – Ralf Dahrendorf, "A Swing to the Right? Socio-political Changes in the Western World / The European Community at the Beginning of the 1980s"
1979 – Ved Mehta, "Mahatma Gandhi and Modern India"
1979 – Richard Feynman, "Light and Matter, The Modern View: Photons - Particles of Light / Quantum Behaviour/Interaction of Light and Matter"
1979 – Jane Goodall, "Chimpanzees in the Wild: Perspectives on Primate Behaviour"
1977 – E. O. Wilson, "The Evolution of Social Behaviour"
1977 – Edwin Reischauer, "Japanese-American Relations"
1976 – Derek de Solla Price, "Craftsmanship and Jigsawpuzzling in Science"
1976 – Alexander King, "A New Economic Order: Is it Necessary or Feasible?"
1975 – Yehudi Menuhin, "Interpretation in Music and in Life"
1975 – Fred Hoyle, "The Emergence of Intelligence in the Universe / Cosmological Theories and Controversies / The History of Matter"
1974 – Robert N. Bellah, "Relevance of Man's Religious Experience"
1973 – Saul Bellow, "Joyce's Ulysses: A Personal View"
1972 – Robert Sinsheimer, "Genetic Engineering: Ambush or Opportunity"
1971 – Peter Ritchie-Calder, "Science and Social Change: Science and International Relations / Science and Human Rights / Science and Posterity"
1968 – Han Suyin, "Asia Today" / "Asia Yesterday" / "Asia Tomorrow"
1967 – Max Beloff, "Commonwealth Weakness, Britain"
1964 – E. E. Rich, "Montreal and the Fur Trade: The French Background / The American Frontier / The Northwest Company"
1963 – A. L. Rowse, "The Political Uses of History / The Role of Germany in Modern History / The Responsibility of the Historian"
1961 – Douglas Copland, "The Changing Structure of the Western Economy"
1961 – Arnold Toynbee, "The Present Day Experiment in Western Civilization: The Experiment in Hellenization/ The Attraction of the Western Way of Life / Parliamentary Democracy on Trial"
1959 – Morris Bishop, "The Great River at the White Man's Coming / The Missionary and the Coureur du Bois: Sagard and Brandûlé / Champlain"
1956 – Julian Huxley, "The Possibilities of Life, Mind, Man"
1955 – Barbara Ward, "Interplay of East and West, Points of Conflict and Cooperation"
1954 – Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, "India and World Affairs"

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