Fall 2023 - Spring 2024
Robert Samuels: His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
September 13, 2023
Award-winning national political enterprise reporter and staff writer for The New Yorker, Robert Samuels is the lead author of the highly-anticipated and Pulitzer Prize-winning landmark biography His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.
This stunning new work is a poignant exploration of the life of George Floyd and how his tragic experience brought about a global movement for change. It metaphorically uses George Floyd's story to put into context America's deeply troubled history of institutional racism. Inspired by The Washington Post's award-winning six-part series “George Floyd’s America,” the book delves deeper into how systemic racism influenced Floyd's life and legacy. Drawing on over 400 interviews, including with friends and family who knew him best and those who were with him when he died, it provides insight into who he was, how inequality and insufferable systemic pressures changed him, and how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.
During his 12-year tenure as a highly-regarded reporter for The Washington Post, Robert Samuels traveled to 41 states and three countries, chronicling how political discussions in the nation's capital affect the lives of everyday Americans. He has also been a guest essayist and serves as the Post's go-to commentator on figure skating.
His work has been a part of teams that have won the George Polk Award, the Peabody Award, and the National Association of Black Journalists Award for Investigative Reporting. He has also been a finalist for the Toner Prize for National Political Reporting and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, and he has won several statewide awards for his work while at The Miami Herald. As an adjunct faculty member at Wake Forest University, Mr. Samuels teaches a seminar on the history of race reporting and its impact on democracy.
Cosponsored by the Boston College Forum on Racial Justice in America and the African and African Diaspora Studies Program.
Suzanne Simard: Finding the Mother Tree
September 27, 2023
Suzanne Simard is a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and the author of the book Finding the Mother Tree. She is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence and has been hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls in James Cameron’s Avatar) and her TED Talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide. Suzanne is known for her work on how trees interact and communicate using below-ground fungal networks, which has led to the recognition that forests have hub trees, or Mother Trees, which are large, highly connected trees that play an important role in the flow of information and resources in a forest. Her current research investigates how these complex relationships contribute to forest resiliency, adaptability, and recovery and has far-reaching implications for how to manage and heal forests from human impacts, including climate change. Suzanne has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and presented at conferences around the world. She has communicated her work to a wide audience through interviews, documentary films, and her TED Talk “How trees talk to one another.”
Cosponsored by the Boston College Environmental Studies Program, Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, Biology Department and The Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society.
Matthew Desmond: Poverty, By America
October 11, 2023
MacArthur “Genius” and Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond was launched onto the national stage as an expert on contemporary American poverty with the publication of his Pulitzer Prize winning bestseller Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Combining years of embedded fieldwork with painstakingly gathered data, Evicted transformed our understanding of inequity and economic exploitation in America. A former member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, he is also the author of the award-winning book On the Fireline, the coauthor of two books on race, and the editor of a collection of studies on severe deprivation in America. He has written essays on educational inequality, dangerous work, political ideology, race and social theory, and the inner-city housing market. His work has been supported by the Gates, Horowitz, Ford, JBP, MacArthur, National Science, Russell Sage, and W.T. Grant Foundations, as well as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He is a Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and The Chicago Tribune. Desmond’s latest book, the instant #1 New York Times bestseller Poverty, by America investigates why the United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
In clear and compelling prose, Desmond draws on history research, and original reporting to conclude that poverty persists in this nation because the rest of us benefit from it. Those of us who are financially secure knowingly and unknowingly exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. Prioritizing the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, our welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Praised by Esquire as “another paradigm-shifting inquiry into America’s dark heart,” Poverty, by America introduces Desmond’s startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty: he calls on us to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.
Cosponsored by the Boston College Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, the PULSE Program for Service Learning, and the Sociology Department.
Linda Villarosa: Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation
October 18, 2023
Journalist Linda Villarosa is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, where she covers race, inequality and public health. A former executive editor of Essence Magazine, she is the author of the book Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation.
Under the Skin is a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America by revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and public health. In 2018, Villarosa’s New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis” caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa’s article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth-grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore.
A member of the Association of LGBTQ Journalists (NLGJA) Hall of Fame, Villarosa has been recognized with numerous awards from organizations including The American Medical Writers’ Association, the Arthur Ashe Institute, Lincoln University, the New York Association of Black Journalists, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center.
Villarosa is the editor of Body & Soul: The Black Women’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being. Her novel, Passing for Black, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. She is a graduate of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, where she is a professor and journalist in residence. She also teaches journalism, English, and Black Studies at the City College of New York.
Cosponsored by the Boston College Park Street Corporation Speaker Series.
Kate Brown: "The Interminable Cycles of Chernobyl’s Catastrophes: War, Accident, and War Again"
October 25, 2023
Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013). Her latest book Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton 2019), translated into six languages, won the Marshall Shulman and Reginald Zelnik Prizes for the best book in East European History, plus the Silver Medal for Laura Shannon Book Prize. Manual for Survival was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage.
Cosponsored by the Boston College History Department and The Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society.
Fintan O’Toole: “Political Heaney”
November 16, 2023
Fintan O’Toole, one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, is a columnist for The Irish Times and Leonard L. Milberg ’53 visiting lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University. He also contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. His books on theater include works on William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Thomas Murphy. His books on politics include the bestsellers We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland; Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain; Ship of Fools; and Enough is Enough. In 2011, The Observer named O’Toole one of “Britain’s top 300 intellectuals.” He has received the A.T. Cross Award for Supreme Contribution to Irish Journalism, the Millennium Social Inclusion Award, the Journalist of the Year award from TV3 Studios in 2010, the Orwell Prize, the European Press Prize, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the spring of 2023. In 2021, he published the #1 bestseller We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, which won the Book of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards and was selected for the New York Times's “10 Best Books of 2022.” O’Toole’s History of Ireland in 100 Objects, which covers 100 highly charged artifacts from the last 10,000 years, is currently the basis for Ireland’s postage stamps. He has recently been appointed official biographer of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.
This Lowell lecture will herald the opening of Seamus Heaney’s Afterlives, Boston College’s international symposium marking the tenth anniversary of the poet’s death.
Cosponsored by the Boston College Irish Studies Program and with the support of an ILA Major Grant.
Roya Hakakian: "The Plight of Women in Israel and Iran, and the Silence of Feminists"
January 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.
Annual Candlemas Lecture: James Alison: “Catholicity, Sacrifice, and Shame: Subverting Polarization in Our Contemporary Ecclesial and Political Cultures”
February 07, 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.
Poetry Days Presents Joy Harjo: “Indigenous Poetry and Native Literature”
February 21, 2024
In 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position and only the second person to serve three terms in the role. Harjo’s nine books of poetry include Weaving Sundown in a Scarlett Light, An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. She is also the author of two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, which invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her “poet-warrior” road. She has edited several anthologies of Native American writing including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Living Nations, Living Words, the companion anthology to her signature poet laureate project. Her many writing awards include the 2022 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2019 Jackson Prize from Poets & Writers, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally; her most recent album is I Pray For My Enemies. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Cosponsored by the Boston College Poetry Days Series, American Studies Program, English Department, Creative Writing Discretionary Fund, and the Boston College Forum on Racial Justice in America.
Daniel Alarcón: “Stories Everywhere: Listening to Latin America”
February 28, 2024
Daniel Alarcón is a writer and radio producer exploring the social, cultural, and linguistic ties that connect people across Latin America and Spanish-speaking communities in the Americas. His powerful narrative storytelling—in English and Spanish, fiction and nonfiction, print and audio—chronicles individual lives and underreported topics against the backdrop of broader geopolitical and historical forces in the United States and Central and South America.
He received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. He was Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College and an investigative reporting fellow at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 2014 and is currently an associate professor in the School of Journalism. Since 2012, he has served as co-founder and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, and he is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where he covers Latin America. He is the author of the novels At Night We Walk in Circles and Lost City Radio, short story collections The King is Always Above the People and War by Candlelight, and his writing has appeared in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 and the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2021.
This event is supported by an ILA Major Grant.
Ada Ferrer: Cuba: An American History
March 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.
Ferrer graduated from Vassar College with an AB degree in English. She holds a Master’s in History from University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. She has taught at New York University since 1995, where she is currently the Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and has received support for her research from organizations including the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, and more. She is also the co-curator of “Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom,” an exhibit on carpenter and artist José Antonio Aponte, that has been housed at NYU, Duke University and Havana’s Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales.
Cosponsored by the Boston College History Department, Romance Languages and Literatures Department, the Heinz Bluhm Memorial Lecture Series, and the McMullen Museum of Art.
Bill Rauch: “Adaptation: A Lifetime of Building Bridges”
April 03, 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.