Assembly Series Lectures

The Assembly Series Lectures in University Archives is a collection of public lectures held at WashU. The Assembly Series is WashU’s signature lecture series, featuring speakers who inspire discourse, complement curriculum, reflect contemporary interests, and engage the greater St. Louis community.

The lecture series began in 1949 before officially being established and branded as the Assembly Series in 1953 and continues today. Speakers include leaders, visionaries, pioneering scientists and public intellectuals, genre-breaking artists and performers, Nobel Laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners, Supreme Court justices, and entrepreneurs.

Online Exhibition

See the Echoes of Voices Past online exhibition highlighting some of the lectures digitized as part of a preservation grant courtesy of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).

Preservation Grant

The WashU Libraries was awarded a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to fund the project “Echoes of Voices Past: Preserving the Public Lectures of WashU’s Assembly Series.” The project digitized more than 1400 audio records from the Assembly Series Lectures collection.

For further details about the preservation grant, please see the “Washington University Libraries Awarded Grant to Preserve Assembly Series Recordings” article.

Related News

You can read more about the Assembly Series project in the Libraries’ Fall 2022 Off the Shelf magazine article “Assembly Series Lectures: Recorded Voices Digitized and Revived.”

Learn more about the Assembly Series digitization project in the Fall 2022 Washington Magazine article “Preserving a university tradition.”

For more information on famous figures participating in the Assembly Series and their impact on the WashU community, see the Washington Magazine article “Echoes of voices past.”

Virtual Event

The Libraries hosted a virtual event on November 3, 2022, about the impact of the Assembly Series on the WashU community across the years and to hear more about the grant work.