Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 2006, visited Stanford on October 22. Pamuk is described as someone "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the class and interlacing of cultures." He drew an audience of 1600 at Memorial Auditorium.

The S.T. Lee Lecture was co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Office of the Provost and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.