The Schweich Lectures

The first series of Schweich Lectures were delivered in the spring of 1908 by Canon S. R. Driver, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and one of the founding Fellows of the British Academy. But the process which led to this began some eighteen months earlier, when at a Council meeting on 31 October 1906 the Secretary of the Academy, Israel Gollancz, read out a letter dated 10 October offering a gift of £10,000 ‘for the furtherance of research in the Archaeology and art, the history, languages, and literature of Ancient Civilization, with reference to Biblical Archaeology’. In all sixty-seven series of Schweich Lectures have been given so far. Sixty-six of these were given by men, and only one by a woman (Kathleen Kenyon in 1963). The shortfall in the total number is due to the fact that in 1951 Council decided, for financial reasons, that the lectures should be biennial and in 1976 that they should be triennial, as they are now. The chapter includes appendices with a copy of the Trust Deed and a list of the Schweich Lectures 1908–2007, with details of their publication.