| 1978 | John Leighly, UC Berkeley: "Scholar and Colleague: Homage to Carl Sauer" |
| 1979 | John B. Jackson, Harvard University and UC Berkeley: "Landscape as Theater" |
| 1980 | Raymond Fosberg, Smithsonian Institution (Botany): "The Story of an Oceanic Mountain Range: The Evolution of Life on an 'Idealized' Pacific Archipelago" |
| 1981 | George F. Carter, Texas A&M: "Early Man in America" |
| 1983 | Donald W. Meinig, Syracuse University: "The Atlantic World Perspectives on the Making of Colonial America" |
| 1984 | Torsten E. Hägerstrand, University of Lund: "The Landscape as Overlapping Neighborhoods: Some Reflections on the Struggle for Existence" |
| 1985 | H. Clifford Darby, University of Cambridge: "Domesday Book and Domesday Geography" |
| 1986 | James J. Parsons, UC Berkeley: "A Geographer Looks at the San Joaquin Valley" |
| 1986 | David R. Stoddart, University of Cambridge: "To Claim the High Ground: Geography for the End of the Century" |
| 1988 | Woodrow Borah, UC Berkeley (History): "Identifying the Killers: Old World Diseases in 16th Century Meso-America and the Caribbean" |
| 1989 | Karl Butzer, University of Texas: "The Bajio: Mexico's Earliest Colonial Frontier" |
| 1990 | David Lowenthal, University College London: "Landscape Without Llamas: Celebrating a Sauerian Tradition" |
| 1992 | Peter Haggett, University of Bristol: "Sauer's Origins and Dispersals: Its Implications for the Geography of Disease" |
| 1994 | William Denevan, University of Wisconsin: "Prehistoric Riverine Settlement in Amazonia: A Revisionist Perspective, with Contemporary Implications" |
| 1995 | Robin Donkin, Cambridge University: "A Servant of Two Masters?" |
| 1996 | Yi-Fu Tuan, University of WisconsinMadison: "Escapism: Another Look at Nature and Culture" |
| 1998 | Ian Simmons, Durham University: "To Civility and Man's Use": History, Geography and Nature" |
| 2000 | Jan Morris, Author, Wales, U.K.: "Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere" |
