University Lecture Recording Series

Many renowned scholars, creative artists, public intellectuals, political leaders, and social reformers have spoken at Brandeis University, often as part of standing lecture series. Many of these talks (1950s-1960s) were originally recorded on reel-to-reel audiotape, and are currently housed in the University Archives. The Department seeks to preserve these master recordings and to provide digital access to them, as resources become available. Toward that end, we recently digitized three lectures given at Brandeis by well-known individuals: Eleanor Roosevelt, Abraham Maslow / Harry Rand (joint), and Martin Luther King, Jr. Please click on the green arrow to access these three lectures. Lectures given at Brandeis were given by faculty and renowned individuals including W.H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martin Luther King, Jr., Herbert Marcuse, Rollo May, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Paul Tillich (ca. 1952-1965).  Originals are formatted on reel-to-reel audiotape.  A small selection of lectures have been reformatted onto CD by the University's Audio-Visual Department: W.H. Auden (1959), Aaron Copland (1961), Lawrence Fuchs with Estes Kefauver (1956), Martin Luther King, Jr. (two lectures: 1957, 1963), and Eleanor Roosevelt (1958; reformatted by VidiPax).  Two others have been remastered (reel-to-reel) and reformatted (onto CD) by VidiPax as part of the VFinity pilot project: Martin Luther King, Jr. (1957) and Abraham Maslow/Harry Rand (joint lecture, 1965). A select number of audiotapes were cleaned and analyzed  (ca. 2001) for a possible reformatting grant, which never came to fruition.  These lectures were given by renowned individuals such as: Isaac Asimov, Sidney Hook, Max Lerner, Henry Cabot Lodge, Herbert Marcuse, Rollo May, Philip Rahv, and Paul Tillich.  See VidiPax inventory in Control File. A lecture given by R. Buckminster Fuller as part of the Ullman lecture series (1962) has been reformatted onto VHS by Benita Raphan, a New York documentary filmmaker who used a small portion of the footage in her film on Fuller, entitled "The Critical Path" (2004). Two lectures by Herbert Marcuse have also been reformatted (one from 1959 and one from 1960).