The Page-Barbour Lectures were founded in 1907 by Mrs. Thomas Nelson Page. The lectures, which may be in any field in the arts and sciences, are to present "some fresh aspect or aspects of the department of thought" in which the lecturer is a specialist, and are to possess such unity as to be published in book form by the University.

Past Page-Barbour Lecturers include President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft; poets T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden; philosophers Walter Lippman and John Dewey; and psychologists B.F. Skinner and Robert Coles.

Recent Page-Barbour Lectures include philosopher Richard Rorty, physicist Freeman Dyson, and anthropologist Maurice Godelier.

The James W. Richard Lectures are funded by an endowment established by the will of Este Coffinberry, probated in 1923. The will specifies that one lecture is to be in religion and another in history, especially comparative history. It also provides that the lectures are to be such that the University might publish them as a book.

Past James W. Richard Lecturers include theologians and philosophers Etienne Gilson, Paul Tillich, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Thomas Torrance, Nicholas Lash, and Langdon Gilkey; and historians Jaroslav Pelikan, Jacob Neusner, and Edmund Morgan.

Recent James W. Richard Lecturers include philosopher Stephen Mulhall, political theorist Quentin Skinner, historian Lynn Hunt, and religious studies scholar David Schulman.