William Wright (1830-1889) was Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge and was renowned as a Semiticist and a philologist. The Wright Lecture Series, named in his honour, is run by the Department of Middle Eastern Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, in association with the Centre of Islamic Studies. Reflecting the spread of the Department’s academic interests, the Wright Lecture Series addresses topics of relevance to the study and understanding of the Middle East, Iran and India, ancient and modern.