Previous Farfel Lecture Speakers

Anna Deavere Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, and MacArthur Award recipient. She presented “Snapshots: Glimpses of America in Change,” about how issues of race, class and gender are shaping and transforming American culture. She is a university professor at New York University where she is appointed in the Tisch School of the Arts, with an affiliation at the New York University School of Law. 

Carlos Fuentes stands as Mexico’s most celebrated novelist and essayist, and one of the greatest literary figures in the Spanish-speaking world. He is renowned and celebrated in writing, academics and international relations, and served as Mexico’s ambassador to France in the 1970s.

Stephen Jay Gould was among the most influential paleontologists and evolutionary biologists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries before his death in 2002. He has been considered one of the most widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.



Walter Seff Isaacson has written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna, and Elon Musk. He is a professor at Tulane University, and chair and CEO of CNN. Isaccson has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization and president of Time magazine.



Raymond Kurzweil is an American author, inventor, futurist, and director of engineering at Google. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.


Alan Lightman is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur. He has served on the faculties of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently a professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic magazine.




David McCullough was an American popular historian and author. He was a two-time winner of both the Pulitzer Prize (Truman and John Adams) and the National Book Award (The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 and Mornings on Horseback). In 2006, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian award.



Stephen Pinker is a renowned cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.




John Venter was an American scientist, businessman, and genomics researcher. He is known for having led one of the first draft sequences of the human genome and led the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome.




James Watson was an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he and Francis Crick co-authored an academic paper in Nature proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, building on research by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling.