The annual History of the Spanish and Spanish American Theatre Lecture is usually given in March. It was founded by subscriptions made by colleagues and students in honour of the late Professor John Varey, who was founding director of the History of the Spanish Theatre research project in the Department of Hispanic Studies, and who founded the Department of Spanish at Westfield College in 1955.

The first nine lectures were published as Papers in Spanish and Latin American Theatre History, Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary, University of London:

• Town and Country in the Theatre of the Golden Age (J.E. Varey), 1994, 19pp., ISBN 0 904188 12 4, £3
• The Revealing Image: Stage Portraits in the Theatre of the Golden Age (Melveena McKendrick), 1996, 22pp., 0 904188 21 3, £3
• Madrid Goes to the Theatre: Audiences in the Golden Age Playhouses (Charles Davis), 0 904188 22 1, £3
• Black Wedding: García Lorca, Langston Hughes, and the Translation of Introjection (Paul Julian Smith), 1998, 27pp., 0 904188 23 X, £3
• From Golden Age to Silver Screen: the Comedia on Film (Peter Evans), 1998, 13pp., 0 904188 36 1, £3
• The Profane Nature of Calderón's Corpus Christi Theatre (Alan K.G. Paterson), 1999, 22pp., 0 904188 48 5, £3
• Thoughts on the Mexican Theatre of the Conquest (Peter Beardsell), 2000, 22pp., 0 904188 57 4, £3
• Inscription and Erasure on the Twentieth-Century Spanish Stage: The Popular Theatre of Enrique Rambal (Maria M. Delgado), 2001, 30pp., 0 904188 73 6, £3
• On Interpreting Time, Process and History in Latin American Theatre (Catherine Boyle), 2002, 20pp., 0 904188 88 4, £3

Lectures from 2002 onwards:

• 2002 Ángel María García Gómez: El teatro en Córdoba (1602-1694) : zonas de oscuridad y penumbra
• 2003 David George: The Reception of Enric Borras and Margarita Xirgu in Barcelona and Madrid
• 2004 Óscar Cornago Bernal: La teatralidad como paradigma de la Modernidad: aproximación a un proyecto de investigación
• 2005 Paul Heritage: Staging Human Rights: making theatre in Brazilian prisons
• 2006 Jonathan Thacker: 'Véote, y no te conozco': the unrecognizable form of Cervantes's El rufián dichoso
• 2007 David T. Gies: Genderama: performing womanhood in nineteenth-century Spanish theatre
• 2008 Marion Peter Holt (Emeritus Professor, City University of New York): ‘Plays in Search of Identity: Challenging the Canon’ (delivered on 14 November 2007)
• 2009 Dr Michael Thompson (Durham University): ‘The Order of the Visible and the Sayable: Theatre Censorship in 20th-Century Spain’
• 2010 Dr Emilio Peral Vega (Universidad Complutense de Madrid): ‘El teatro republicano durante la guerra civil’ (delivered on 7 October 2009)
• 2011 Professor Raquel Merino Álvarez (Universidad del País Vasco): ‘The History of Censored Theatre Translations in Franco’s Spain’

These have been, or will be, published in the Department's Hispanic Research Journal.