Forum Network

Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

Funding provided by:

Boston College

Boston College is a coeducational university with undergraduate and graduate students hailing from every state and more than 95 countries. Founded in 1863, it is one of the oldest Jesuit, Catholic universities in the United States.

Since its founding in 1957, the Lowell Humanities Series has brought distinguished writers, artists, performers, and scholars to Boston College. Follow the series on Twitter at @BCLowellHS .

http://www.bc.edu

Katherine McKittrick: “A Poetics of Declension”

Wed, Mar 19, 2025

atherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, where she researches in areas of Black studies, anti-colonial studies, and critical-creative methodologies. She has authored multiple articles and is a former editor at Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Her books include Dear Science and Other Stories and Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. She also edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Recent and forthcoming projects include the limited-edition boxset Trick Not Telos, a collaboration with Liz Ikriko and Cristian Ordóñez, and the tryptic honoring NourbeSe Philip On the Declension of Beauty. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from York University.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Program in African and African Diaspora Studies.

Forum Network

Partner:

Boston College
Arthur Frank: “Polyphonic Suffering: Reading Shakespeare to Respond to Illness”

Wed, Mar 12, 2025

Arthur Frank is professor emeritus at the University of Calgary, Canada. Since his retirement in 2013, he has been Professor II at VID Specialized University in Oslo, visiting professor in the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, and Francqui Fellow at the University of Ghent. His books on illness experience, ethics, clinical care, and narrative include At the Will of the Body, The Wounded Storyteller, The Renewal of Generosity, Letting Stories Breathe, and most recently King Lear: Shakespeare’s Dark Consolations as part of Oxford’s “My Reading” series. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and winner of the Society’s medal in bioethics. He has also been recognized with a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Bioethics Society.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics.

Forum Network

Partner:

Boston College
In Person

John McNeill: “The Industrial Revolution as Global Environmental History”

7:00pm Wed, Apr 2, 2025

Since 1985, John McNeill has taught history at Georgetown University. He has received two Fulbright awards, a Guggenheim fellowship, a MacArthur grant, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He has had visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Universities of Oslo, Bologna, Canterbury, Otago, and was a Guest Professor at Peking University. Since 2011, he has served as a member of the Anthropocene Working Group. He has served as President of the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association.

He has authored or co-authored eight books including The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History and Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World, which was the co-winner of book prizes from the World History Association and the Forest History Society and runner-up for the BP Natural World Book Prize. It was listed by The Times among the best science books ever written and translated into nine languages. His book Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 won the Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association. His most recent books are The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene, 1945–2015, The Webs of Humankind, and Sea & Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean. He has edited or co-edited 17 other books. He is co-editor of the Cambridge book series Studies in Environment and History.

Cosponsored by the Boston College History Department and the University Core Curriculum.

Forum Network

Partner:

Boston College
Annual Candlemas Lecture: Graham Ward: “Loneliness: A Theological Appraisal"

Wed, Feb 5, 2025

Graham Ward is the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and Extraordinary Professor of Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology at the University of Stellenbosch. Among his books are Cities of God, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice, True Religion, Christ and Culture, The Politics of Discipleship, Unbelievable, and Unimaginable. For the last ten years he has been working on Ethical Life, a major four-volume systematic theology, which includes two already-published volumes How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal and the upcoming Salus.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Theology Department.

The Lowell Humanities Series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, Boston College's Institute for the Liberal Arts, and the Provost's Office.

Forum Network

Partner:

Boston College
Poetry Days Presents: An Evening with Camille Dungy

Wed, Oct 9, 2024

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade, which won the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Poetry Days Series, American Studies Program, and English Department.

Forum Network

Partner:

Boston College
Rita Duffy: “You Can’t Hope for a Better Past”

Wed, Sep 25, 2024

Rita Duffy was born in Belfast and graduated with an honorary BA and MA in Fine Art from the University of Ulster in 1985. One of Ireland's groundbreaking visual artists, she has produced acclaimed public art projects, including her early project Thaw, inspired by the Belfast ship Titanic. This post-conflict project explored Belfast’s relationship with the iceberg and aimed to connect local experiences of colonialism and sectarianism with a universal climate crisis. In 2011, she was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to work at the Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster. She was recognized for her contribution to visual arts in Ireland in 2018 and elected to Aosdana, Ireland’s elected “people of the arts.” She was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Architects and was an associate at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she looked at the role of art in post-conflict societies. In 2024, she was appointed the Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Irish South Africa Research Chair at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.

Her recent projects include The Shirt Factory Project, The Souvenir Shop, Soften the Border, and The Raft. She has held residencies at the Long Room Hub at Trinity College in Dublin and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Duffy’s work is held in museum and private collections worldwide and her public art projects continue to grow in scale and ambition, exploring issues of female identity, history and politics, and borders.

Produced by Boston College Lowell Humanities Series, cosponsored by Irish Studies at Boston College and the Art, Art History, and Film Department.

Forum Network

Partner:

Boston College
Bill Rauch: “Adaptation: A Lifetime of Building Bridges”

Wed, Apr 3, 2024

Bill Rauch is the inaugural Artistic Director of The Perelman Center for the Performing Arts (PAC NYC) at the World Trade Center. His work has been featured on Broadway in the Tony Award-winning production of Robert Schenkkan’s “All The Way” and its companion play “The Great Society,” as well as at many of the largest regional theaters in the country.

From 2007 to 2019, Bill was Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the country’s oldest and largest rotating repertory theater, where he directed seven world premieres as well as innovative productions of classic musicals, including a queer reenvisioning of “Oklahoma!” Among his initiatives at OSF, he committed to commissioning new plays that dramatized moments of change in American history. “American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle” resulted in such plays as Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat” (winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize), Paula Vogel’s “Indecent,” the 1491s’ “Between Two Knees,” Lisa Loomer’s “Roe,” Universes’ “Party People,” Culture Clash’s “American Night,” and Robert Schenkkan’s plays about Lyndon B. Johnson.

Bill is also co-founder of Cornerstone Theater Company, where he served as artistic director from 1986 to 2006, directing more than 40 productions, most of them collaborations with diverse communities nationwide. He has directed world premieres at Portland Center Stage, Center Theater Group, and South Coast Rep, as well as at American Repertory Theater, Yale Rep, the Guthrie, Arena Stage, Seattle Rep, Long Wharf Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Pasadena Playhouse, and Great Lakes Theater Festival. His production of “The Pirates of Penzance” performed at Portland Opera. He was a Claire Trevor Professor at the University of California Irvine and has also taught at the University of Southern California and UCLA.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Theatre Department, English Department, and the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.

Forum Network

Partner:

Boston College
Ada Ferrer: Cuba: An American History

Wed, Mar 13, 2024

Ada Ferrer is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuba: An American History. The book chronicles more than five hundred years of Cuban history and its relations with the United States. She is also the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, which won the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University as well as the Frederick Katz, Wesley Logan, and James A. Rawley prizes from the American Historical Association. Her essay “My Brother’s Keeper,” published by The New Yorker, tells the story of her and her family’s relationship with the Cuban Revolution. In her lectures and keynote talks, Ferrer discusses Cuba’s past and its complex ties with the United States, giving audiences unexpected insights into the history of both countries and helping them to imagine a new relationship with Cuba.

Cosponsored by the Boston College History Department, Romance Languages and Literatures Department, the Heinz Bluhm Memorial Lecture Series, and the McMullen Museum of Art.

Forum Network

Partner:

Boston College
Annual Candlemas Lecture: James Alison: “Catholicity, Sacrifice, and Shame: Subverting Polarization in Our Contemporary Ecclesial and Political Cultures”

Wed, Feb 7, 2024

James Alison is a Catholic theologian, priest, and author who has written on issues of polarization, reconciliation, and LGBTQ people. He has studied, lived and worked in Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Spain, the United States, and his native England. He earned his doctorate in theology from the Jesuit Faculty in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1994 and is a systematic theologian by training. He is the author of several books, including Knowing Jesus, Raising Abel, The Joy of Being Wrong, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, On Being Liked, Undergoing God, Broken Hearts and New Creations: Intimations of a Great Reversal. His most recent book, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice, follows the insight into desire from French thinker René Girard. He serves as a Fellow and Chair of the Education Committee at IMITATIO, an organization focusing on René Girard’s insights into mimetic desire.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Theology Department.

Forum Network

Partner:

Boston College
Roya Hakakian: “The Plight of Women in Israel and Iran, and the Silence of Feminists”

Wed, Jan 31, 2024

Roya Hakakian is an Iranian-American writer, journalist, and public speaker. Her opinion columns, essays, and book reviews appear in leading English language publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. A founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, she has spoken on a variety of news outlets, from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS to MSNBC, as well as in Washington D.C. for the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and the State Department with U.S. Secretary Antony Blinken. Her latest book A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious has been called a contemporary Tocquevlllian account by The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe.
She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship among many other prizes and has been called one of “the most important activists, academics and journalists of her generation.”

Cosponsored by the Boston College International Studies Program, Islamic Civilization and Societies Program, and with the support of an ILA Major Grant.

Forum Network

Partner:

Boston College

What matters to you.