Besides commemorating the scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), the series of lectures aims to continue and publicise research in the fields he represented and their neighbouring philological-historical disciplines. In the course of his life, Julius Wellhausen conducted research in three fields: the Old Testament, the New Testament and ancient Arabia, or to put it another way: Judaism, Christianity and early Islam. The annual lectures, named after Wellhausen, are held by the Centrum Orbis Orientalis et Occidentalis (CORO), which is jointly supported by the Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.