The first Memorial Lecture was delivered at the University of Akureyri, Iceland, on December 8th, 1998, by Dr. Oran Young, Professor and Director of Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA, and was titled  Creating an Arctic Sustainable Development Strategy. 

Professor Mark Nuttall, Department of Sociology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, delivered the 2nd Stefansson Memorial Lecture in Akureyri on November 3rd, 2000, at the advent of the 1st NRF Open Meeting, North Meets North, November 4-6. 
Title: Global Processes and community viability in the circumpolar North. 

The president of Iceland, Dr. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson delivered a lecture in commemoration of Vilhjálmur Stefansson at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA on November 1, 2002. 
Title: The Stefansson-Dartmouth Legacy and the Role of America, Russia and the Nordic Countries in the Future of the North.

The fourth Memorial Lecture was given by the Governor General of Canada, Mrs Adrienne Clarkson on Monday, October 13^th 2003, in the University of Akureyri Auditorium in the Oddfellow House at Sjafnarstigur. The lecture's  title was  A Threshold of the Mind: The Modern North.

The fifth Memorial Lecture was on Thursday, September 9^th 2004 in Oddfellow House in Akureyri. This time there were two Swedish lecturers: Laila Freivalds, the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs: Swedish Arctic Policy and professor Sverker Sörlin: The Human Arctic: Stefansson, Ahlmann, and the Quest for an Arctic within History.

The sixth Stefansson Memorial Lecture was organized by the Stefansson Arctic Institute in association with the Scott Polar Research Institute on 1^st November 2005, at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Lensfield Road, in Cambridge, England.
Dr Gísli Pálsson, Professor of Anthropology at University of Iceland gave a lecture called Travelling Passions: The Life and Legacy of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Arctic Explorer.

The seventh Stefansson Memorial Lecture was given at Dartmouth College on 1^st November 2006  by  Andrew C. Revkin from the New York Times who called his lecture The North Pole Was Here: On The Front Lines Of Climate Change, From The Arctic To The Beltway, .
Andrew Revkin is one of America's most honored science writers and has spent nearly a quarter century covering subjects ranging from Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami to the assault on the Amazon, from the troubled relationship of science and politics to climate change in the North Pole. He has been reporting on the environment for The New York Times since 1995, a job that has taken him to the Arctic three times in three years. In 2003, he became the first Times reporter to file stories and photos from the sea ice around the pole. He spearheaded a three-part Times series and one-hour documentary in 2005 on the transforming Arctic. In 2003, his climate coverage won the first National Academies Communication Award for print journalism, presented by the nation's eminent scientific body.

The 2007 Stefansson Memorial Lecture was delivered at the University of Akureyri on November 7^th 2007 by climate historian Astrid Ogilvie. Dr Ogilvie is Research Fellow, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) University of Colorado (further information here). The title of the lecture was “Interdisciplinary Explorations in the Climate, History and Human Ecology of Northern Iceland.” Co-sponsors with the Stefansson Arctic Institute of this year’s lecture were the University of Akureyri and Rannís – The Icelandic Centre for Research. The event is a joint contribution to the International Polar Year.  Lecture abstract here.