On Thursday, April 20, 2006, Aaron and Helen L. DeRoy Visiting Fellow Mark Helprin gave a lecture titled "A Sometimes Wild Narrative of My Life and Travels." The talk was open to the public. A reception and book signing followed the lecture.

Barbara Elliott was the fourth annual American Studies lecturer at Hillsdale College in 2004, following Ellis Sandoz, Eugene Genovese, and Allan Carlson. She is Founder of the Center for Renewal (a resource for faith-based organizations endeavoring to renew America’s cities); a Senior Fellow with the Hudson Institute; the author of Candles Behind the Wall: Heroes of the Peaceful Revolution that Shattered Communism; and a contributor to numerous publications, including Philanthropy, Policy Review, World, and Compassion and Culture.

On February 25, 2005 Elliott returned to campus to give a power point presentation on "Twentieth-Century Fragmentation: From Picasso Through the Wasteland and Back." Elliott's presentation featured the art of the Cubists, Schoenberg's music, T. S. Eliot's Wasteland, Ezra Pound and the Vorticists, but also the slow process of reclaiming order from various "heaps of broken images" (political, cultural, and religious).