The Ingersoll Lectures is a series of lectures presented annually at Harvard University on the subject of immortality.
The Ingersoll Lectureship was established by a bequest by Caroline Haskell Ingersoll, who died in 1893, leaving $5000 for the institution of a series of lectures to be read annually in memory of her father, George Goldthwait Ingersoll. The lectures were to take place at Harvard University on the subject of "the immortality of man".[1] The lectures were initiated by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot in 1896. They are now generally known as The Ingersoll Lectures on Human Immortality.
On May 21, 1979, the Ingersoll Lecture Fund was transferred to the endowment of Harvard Divinity School, which continues to organize and host the lectures.[2]
The lectures were to be published. From 1896 to 1912 they were issued by the Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston and New York. From 1914 to 1935 Harvard University Press published them. Since then, the lectures have been published primarily in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin or the Harvard Theological Review.
The chosen lecturers were as follows [3]
Harvard Divinity School Library website for the Ingersoll Lectures