Lowell Humanities Series
Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and best-selling author Ed Yong leads the roster of prominent thought leaders who will appear on campus this semester under the auspices of the Boston College Lowell Humanities Series.
Established in 1957, the series brings distinguished writers, artists, performers, and scholars to Boston College each semester. All events are free and open to the public.
“Our speakers promise rigor and inspiration in equal measure,” said Professor of History Sylvia Sellers-García, the series director. “We are delighted to be hosting several leading thinkers and writers who write compellingly across disciplines. Some, like Javier Zamora, an accomplished poet and memoirist, write in multiple genres. Others, like Anne Berest, bend genre conventions by writing ‘true’ fiction. And still others, like Ed Yong and John McNeill, incorporate the sciences into their humanistic writings.
“These speakers also offer powerful theoretical tools for thinking about our world. Graham Ward proposes that we think about loneliness from a theological perspective; Arthur Frank considers suffering through the lens of Shakespeare, and Katherine McKittrick demonstrates the possibilities for anti-colonialism.”
The Lowell Humanities Series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, BC’s Institute for the Liberal Arts, and the Office of the Provost and Dean of Faculties; individual events have additional cosponsors.
Events begin at 7 p.m. and take place in Gasson 100, with the exception of the final event on April 23, which will be held in Devlin 110.
Though each event is free, registration via Eventbrite is required for in-person attendance, either through the BC Events Calendar or the Lowell Humanties Series website.
SPRING 2025 SCHEDULE
Ed Yong
Ed Yong
“What Pandemics Teach Us” | Gerson Family Lecture
January 29
Named “the most important and impactful journalist" of 2020 by The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, Yong was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.
An engaging speaker, he is the best-selling author of I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us, a groundbreaking examination of the relationship between animals and microbes. An Immense World—a New York Times bestseller which was longlisted for the PEN America 2023 Literary Award and made many best books of the year lists—examines the sensory worlds of animals. A longtime science reporter for The Atlantic, Yong also has published in National Geographic, The New Yorker, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, and Scientific American.
Cosponsored by BC’s Park Street Corporation Speaker Series, the Asian American Studies Program, and Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society. Made possible by the Gerson Family Lecture Fund, established by John A. and Jean N. Gerson, P'14, and Jaclyn Gerson Rossiter ’14.
Graham Ward
Graham Ward
“Loneliness: A Theological Appraisal” | Annual Candlemas Lecture
February 5
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 decade 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 Theology Department.
Javier Zamora
Javier Zamora
“Solito: Home, Identity, and the Immigrant Experience”
February 26
Memoirist and poet Zamora’s Solito is an account of his near-impossible journey and unexpected moments of kindness, love, and joy scattered across perilous boat trips, desert treks, arrests, and betrayals. Longlisted for the PEN America 2023 Literary Awards, Solito was a New York Times bestseller and a 2023 American Book Award winner. His debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, is rooted in the experiences of a nine-year-old boy navigating politics, racism, war, and the impact of a border crossing on his family.
Zamora has been a fellow at Stanford and Harvard among several others, and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. His honors include the 2017 Narrative Prize, the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, and the 2020 Pushcart Prize. Zamora has been published in Granta, the Kenyon Review, American Poetry, the New Republic, The New York Times, and Poetry, among other publications.
Cosponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series and Romance Languages and Literatures Department.
Arthur Frank
Arthur Frank
“Polyphonic Suffering: Reading Shakespeare to Respond to Illness”
March 12
A professor emeritus at the University of Calgary, Frank has written on illness experience, ethics, clinical care, and narrative, in books such as At the Will of the Body, The Wounded Storyteller, The Renewal of Generosity, Letting Stories Breathe, and King Lear: Shakespeare’s Dark Consolations. Since his 2013 retirement, he has taught at VID Specialized University in Oslo, been a visiting professor in the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University and Francqui Fellow at the University of Ghent. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and winner of its medal in bioethics, he was recognized with a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Bioethics Society.
Cosponsored by the Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics. NOTE: Seating is limited; in-person attendance must be reserved in advance via Eventbrite. Those seeking Continuing Education credits and/or to watch the lecture remotely, register here.
Katherine McKittrick
Katherine McKittrick
“A Poetics of Declension”
March 19
Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, McKittrick 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.
Cosponsored by the African and African Diaspora Studies Program.
John McNeill
John McNeill
“The Industrial Revolution as Global Environmental History”
April 2
McNeill, who has taught history at Georgetown University since 1985, has received two Fulbright awards, a MacArthur grant, Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson Center fellowships, and has held several international visiting appointments. 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, the co-winner of prizes from the World History Association and the Forest History Society and runner-up for the BP Natural World Book Prize. His 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.
Cosponsored by the History Department and the University Core Curriculum.
Anne Berest
Fiction Days Presents Anne Berest
“Family Fictions: The Postcard, Gabriële, and Writing True Novels”
April 23
French writer Berest’s first novel in English, The Postcard, was a national bestseller that garnered book of the year honors from NPR, TIME, Library Journal, and Vogue, and a finalist for the Goncourt Prize in France. It was described as “stunning” by The New Yorker, as a “powerful literary work” by The New York Times Book Review, and as “intimate, profound, essential” by ELLE magazine.
Berest and her sister are co-authors of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed, best-selling “true novel” based on the life of her great-grandmother Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, wife of Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse, a leader of the French Resistance, and an art critic.
Cosponsored by BC’s Fiction Days Series.
For more information about the Lowell Humanities Series, visit bc.edu/lowell.