The Whidden Lectures are a lecture series at McMaster University, funded in 1954 by E. Carey Fox.^[1] They commemorate Howard P. Whidden, who was Chancellor of the university from 1923 to 1941.^[2] They were first given in 1956. Many of the lectures have been published in book form, by Oxford University Press.

• 1956 C. W. de Kiewiet: The Anatomy of South African Misery^[3]
• 1957 Vijaya Lakshmi Nehru: The Evolution of India^[4]
• 1958 Ronald Syme: Colonial Elites: Rome, Spain and the Americas^[4]
• 1959 Charles De Koninck: The Hollow Universe^[5]
• 1960 George Norman Clark: Three Aspects of Stuart England^[6]
• 1961 William Foxwell Albright: New Horizons in Biblical Research^[7]
• 1962 J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises for Physicists^[8]
• 1963 Ian Ramsey: Models and Mystery^[9]
• 1964 David Daiches: The Paradox of Scottish Culture: the Eighteenth Century Experience^[9]
• 1965 William Arthur Lewis: Politics in West Africa^[10]
• 1966 Anthony Blunt: Picasso's 'Guernica'^[11]
• 1967 Northrop Frye: The Modern Century^[12]
• 1970 Eric Ashby: Masters and Scholars: Reflections on the Rights and Responsibilities of Students
• 1973 Edward Togo Salmon: The Nemesis of Empire^[13]
• 1974 Richard Stockton MacNeish
• 1975 Noam Chomsky: Reflections on Language
• 1983 A. J. Ayer: Freedom and Morality
• 1986 John Rupert Martin
• 1988 Tom Stoppard: The Event and the Text
• 1993 Alan James Ryan
• 1997 Elizabeth Loftus: You Must Remember This: Illusions of Memory^[14]
• 2000 Bruce Meyer: Canadian Literature and the Western Tradition
• 2001 Steven V. W. Beckwith, Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, "Rocket Science and Little Green Men"
• 2002 Cancelled
• 2003 Jean-Daniel Stanley, Deltas Global Change Program, Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, "World Deltas: Archeological and Environmental Perspectives"
• 2005 Donna Haraway, Professor of the History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, "We Have Never Been Modern"
• 2006 Brian Massumi, Professor of Communication, Université de Montréal, "The Ideal Streak—Why Visual Representation Always Fails," "Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption," and "Affect and Abstraction"
• 2007 Mervyn Morris, Poet and Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and West Indian Literature, University of the West Indies, "Playing with the Dialect of the Tribe: West Indian Poetry"
• 2008 Mahmood Mamdani, Professor of Government in the Departments of Anthropology and Political Science at Columbia University, "Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror"
• 2009 Sean B. Carroll, Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, University of Wisconsin, "Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species" and "Endless Forms Most Beautiful: Evo-Devo and an Expanding Evolutionary Synthesis"
• 2011 Sara Ahmed, Professor of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, "On Being Included: On Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life" and "Wilful Subjects: On the Experience of Social Dissent"
• 2012 Ray Jayawardhana, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics, University of Toronto, "Rocks, Ice and Penguins: Searching for Clues to Planetary Origins in Antarctica"
• 2013 Jasbir Puar, Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, "Ecologies of Sensation,Sensational Ecologies: Sex and Disability in the Israeli Occupation of Palestine"
• 2014 Joanna Aizenberg, Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, "Stealing from Nature: Bioinspired Materials of the Future"
• 2016 Amber Miller, Professor of Physics and Dean of Science at Columbia University, "Nature's Ultimate Time Machine: Photographing the Infant Universe", "Cosmological Observations from the Stratosphere"
• 2017 Daphne Brooks, Professor of African American Studies, Theater Studies, and American Studies at Yale University, "The Knowles Sisters' Political Hour: Black Feminist Sonic Dissent at the End of the Third Reconstruction", "If You Should Lose Me": The Archive, the Critic, the Record Shop & the Blues Woman"
• 2018 Joanna Bryson, Associate Professor in the Department of Computing at the University of Bath, "The Good, the Bad, and the Synthetic"