April 17, 2013

Michael Chabon: Telegraph Avenue
Murray Function Room
7:00 p.m.

Michael Chabon is a novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer, best known for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. Chabon, who earned an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Irvine, began writing and publishing short stories between 1987 and 1990, mostly in The New Yorker but also in GQ and Mademoiselle. His debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, made him an instant literary sensation, and his second novel, Wonder Boys, was made into a critically acclaimed movie of the same name. His distinguished body of work also includes Werewolves in Their Youth, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Gentlemen of the Road, Summerland, Manhood for Amateurs, and Telegraph Avenue. Michael Chabon comes to us thanks to the generous support of the Marianacci family.

March 20, 2013

Carol Gluck: Past Obsessions: World War II in History and Memory
Murray Function Room
7:00 p.m.

Nearly seventy years after it ended, the Second World War remains a contested issue in history and memory in many countries around the world. In her forthcoming book Past Obsessions: World War Two in History and Memory, Carol Gluck considers examples from Europe, Asia, and North America that help us to understand both how public memory works and the challenge that the present preoccupation with memory poses to what we used to think of as history. Gluck, the George Sansom Professor of History at Columbia University in New York, is also the author of Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (1985); Showa: The Japan of Hirohito (1992); Asia in Western and World History (1997); Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (2009); and Thinking with the Past: Japan and Modern History (forthcoming in 2013).

February 21, 2013

Teju Cole: The Senses of the City
Devlin 101
7:00 p.m.

Teju Cole is a writer, art historian, street photographer, and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. He was born in the US (1975) to Nigerian parents and raised in Nigeria. Cole is the author of two books, a novella, Every Day is for the Thief, and the novel Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, and the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. Cole lives in Brooklyn.

February 6, 2013

Karen Russell: SWAMPLANDIA!
Gasson 100
7:00 p.m.

Karen Russell, author of the celebrated debut novel Swamplandia! and the prize-winning story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, has been featured in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and its 20 Under 40 list. She was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and in 2009 received the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. Three of her short stories have been selected for the Best American Short Stories volumes. She is currently writer-in-residence at Bard College. Her new collection of stories will be published in February.

January 31, 2013

Elaine Pagels: Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation
Devlin 101
7:00 p.m.

Elaine Pagels, the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, will deliver this year's Candlemas lecture. Professor Pagels is the author of a major body of work on religious subjects, including The Gnostic Gospels (1979); Adam, Eve and the Serpent (1988); The Origin of Satan (1995); Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003); Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (2007); and, most recently, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (2012).  After receiving her doctorate from Harvard University in 1970, she taught at Barnard College and Columbia University, where she chaired the department of religion. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981.

December 5, 2012

Laurent Dubois: Haiti: The Aftershocks of History
Gasson 100
7:00 p.m.

Laurent Dubois, the Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University, is the author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (Metropolitan 2012), Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (U. California Press, 2010) and Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard Univ. Press, 2004), and is currently writing a history of the banjo. Born in Belgium and raised in Bethesda, Maryland, he graduated from Princeton in 1992 and received a doctorate in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan in 1998. He taught at Harvard and Michigan State University before coming to Duke.

Watch Laurent Dubois's lecture on Front Row.

November 29, 2012

Susan Choi
Higgins 300
7:00 p.m.

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. With David Remnick she co-edited the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker, and her nonfiction has appeared in publications including Vogue, Tin House, Allure, O and The New York Times and in anthologies including Money Changes Everything and Brooklyn Was Mine. After studying literature at Yale and writing at Cornell, she worked for several years as a fact-checker for The New Yorker. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, Pete Wells, and their sons Dexter and Elliot. Choi will be reading from her upcoming, yet-untitled new novel.

November 28, 2012

Jane Mayer
Gasson 100
7:00 p.m.

Jane Mayer has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1995. Based in Washington, DC, she writes about politics for the magazine, and has distinguished herself with her coverage of the “war on terror.” Recent subjects include Alberto Mora and the Pentagon’s secret torture policy, how the United States outsources torture (rendition), the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the legality of CIA interrogations. She has also written about George W. Bush, the bin Laden family, Sarah Palin, and the television show 24. Mayer is the author of the best-selling 2008 book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, which was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year, and by the Economist, Salon, Slate, and Bloomberg as one of the best books of the year. She is currently writing about elections and campaign reform.

November 15, 2012

Anthony Grafton: The Florentine Renaissance Portrait:
Cultural Origins of a New Art Form
Devlin 101
7:00 p.m.

Anthony Grafton, the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton, pursues special interests that include the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Among his books, two remarkably wide-ranging collections of essays, Defenders of the Text (1991) and Bring Out Your Dead (2001), cover many of the topics and themes that appeal to him. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993), the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities (2002), and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2003), and is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy. In 2011 he served as President of the American Historical Association.

October 17, 2012

Paul Muldoon: Presented by Poetry Days
Devlin 101
7:00 p.m.

Paul Muldoon is the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker and the Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. His poetry has garnered both the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Among his books of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010). Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College.

October 3, 2012

Katherine Boo: Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Gasson 100
7:00 p.m.

Over twenty-five years as a journalist, Katherine Boo has established herself as a fearless, honest writer dedicated to telling the stories of the poor and disadvantaged on the pages of our most esteemed publications. Writing for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Washington City Paper and The Washington Monthly, Boo has profiled marginalized populations in the United States and abroad: from Denver to the Gulf of Mexico to Mumbai. Boo continues her quest to give voice to those without one in her New York Times bestselling book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the world’s great, unequal cities: Mumbai, India.

This event is presented in collaboration with the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics.

April 25, 2012

Rebecca Skloot: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Murray Function Room
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Award-winning science writer Rebecca Skloot has made a career of probing the intersections between hard science and human experience; the resulting stories have been as varied as cellular research and cancer, medical care for pet goldfish, and the science behind personal motivation. In her bestselling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), Skloot tells the story of a young black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 and left behind an inexplicably immortal line of cells known as HeLa. Skloot spent more than ten years researching Henrietta Lacks, whose cells—harvested without her knowledge or consent—contributed to scientific advancements as varied as the polio vaccine, treatments for cancers and viruses, in-vitro fertilization, and our understanding of the impact of space travel on human cells. Part detective story, part scientific odyssey, and part family saga, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks raises fascinating questions about race, class, and bioethics in America. This event is presented in partnership with the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics.

April 11, 2012

Brenda Wineapple: On the Brink of War – Literary Boston in 1860
Devlin 101
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Brenda Wineapple’s most recent book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2008), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, a winner of the Washington Arts Club National Award for arts writing, and a New York Times "Notable Book"; it was also ranked among the best nonfiction of the year in The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, among other publications. She is also the author of Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner; Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein; and Hawthorne: A Life, which received the Ambassador Award of the English-speaking Union for the Best Biography of 2003 and the Julia Ward Howe Prize from the Boston Book Club. Currently Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at The Graduate School, City University of New York, Wineapple also teaches in the MFA programs at The New School and Columbia University's School of the Arts. This event is presented in conjunction with the Forgotten Chapters project.

March 28, 2012

Téa Obreht: The Tiger’s Wife
Devlin 101
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 pm.

Téa Obreht is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller The Tiger's Wife. She was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1997, and she attended the University of Southern California and received her M.F.A. from Cornell. Her fiction debut—an excerpt from The Tiger's Wife in The New Yorker—was selected for the 2010 Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her short story “The Laugh” was published in The Atlantic, and appears in the 2010 Best American Short Stories. She has also published nonfiction about vampire hunting in Harper's. She was the youngest writer named to The New Yorker's "Best 20 Writers Under 40" and was also named a "Best 5 Writers Under 35" by the National Book Foundation. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Watch Téa Obreht's lecture on Front Row.

March 21, 2012

Claudia Kinmonth: Rural Ireland – The Inside Story
Devlin 101
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Claudia Kinmonth, author of Rural Irish Interiors in Art (2006), presents this lecture sponsored by the Lowell Humanities Series, the McMullen Museum of Art, and the Institute for Liberal Arts, and given in conjunction with the exhibition Rural Ireland: The Inside Story at the McMullen Museum. Kinmonth discovered and analyzed dozens of previously unknown works depicting the homes and lives of Ireland's poorer classes. Her work revealed a little known tradition of Irish genre painting and helped make it available for further investigation by social historians, archaeologists, and scholars of visual culture. The Lowell Humanities Series is pleased to welcome Dr. Kinmonth on March 21st. The McMullen Museum will be open for additional hours the evening of this lecture, from 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm. Kinmonth will conduct a tour of the exhibition after her lecture for those interested in further viewing of Rural Ireland: The Inside Story.

March 1, 2012

The Lowell Humanities Series and Poetry Days Present Billy Collins
Gasson 100
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar; he is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” In June 2001, Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate for 2001-2003.  In January 2004, he was named New York State Poet Laureate for 2004-06. Billy Collins is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, as well as a Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College.

Watch Billy Collins read from his work on Front Row.

February 15, 2012

The Lowell Humanities Series and Fiction Days Present Junot Diaz
Murray Function Room
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), Pushcart Prize XXII, and The O'Henry Prize Stories 2009.

Watch Junot Díaz read from from two of his short stories on Front Row.

February 8, 2012

James T. Fisher: A “Fallen-Away” Catholic's Monastic Vocation in Autismland
Devlin 101
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
 

This year’s annual Candelmas Lecture features James T. Fisher, who holds a PhD from Rutgers University and is a professor of theology at Fordham University. Fisher’s research interests include the cultural history of religion and ethnicity in the United States as well as American Catholic studies. His most recent book, On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York, not only offers a fresh reading of Kazan’s famous film but also gives a detailed social history of the New York/New Jersey waterfront. Fisher is also an autism advocate, and was one of the organizers of the recent Autism and Advocacy conference at the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham.

Watch James Fisher's lecture on Front Row.

December 7, 2011

Mary Lefkowitz: Why We Can't Understand Greek drama: Some Theological and Practical Considerations.
Devlin 101
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Mary Lefkowitz, who was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College from 1979 until her retirement in 2005, is one of the best-known classical scholars in this country.  In her recent work Lefkowitz has sought to restore the gods to their original and frequently misunderstood role in ancient narratives. According to The New York Times Book Review, the “thought-provoking Greek Gods, Human Lives is precisely an attempt to write the gods back into Greek myths.”

Watch Mary Lefkowitz's lecture on Front Row.

November 16, 2011

Alex Ross: Listen to This
Gasson 100
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, became an international bestseller and has been translated into sixteen languages. His second book, Listen to This, appeared in 2010. He is now working on a book entitled Wagnerism.

November 2, 2011

Beth Raymer: Lay the Favorite
Devlin 101
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

As a Fulbright fellow with an MFA from Columbia University, Beth Raymer studied offshore gambling operations in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama. Her memoir, Lay the Favorite (2010), tells the story of Raymer’s years in the high-stakes, high-anxiety world of sports betting. Focus Features and Random House Films acquired the rights to produce a film adaptation, which is slated for release in 2012.

Watch Beth Raymer's lecture on Front Row.

October 19, 2011

Gary Shteyngart: Super Sad True Love Story
Gasson 100
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was a national bestseller, named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, and several other publications. His latest novel, Super Sad True Love Story, was an instant New York Times bestseller.

Watch Gary Shteyngart's lecture on Front Row.

October 5, 2011

Isabel Wilkerson: The Warmth of Other Suns
Gasson 100
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Isabel Wilkerson, Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University, was the first black woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and the first black American to win for individual reporting. She received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to complete the research for The Warmth of Other Suns, her epic account of the Great Migration, which also won the Mark Lynton History Prize.

Watch Isabel Wilkerson's lecture on Front Row.