Lowell Humanities Series
archived series
Spring 2012 Programs
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.
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.
Fall 2011 Programs
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.
Spring 2011 Programs
April 29, 2011
Chuck Hogan - "Prince of Thieves and The Town: A Boston Crime Story as Novel and Movie"
Devlin Hall, room 008 – 7:00 p.m.
Chuck Hogan '89 is the New York Times bestselling author of several acclaimed novels, including Devils in Exile, The Killing Moon, and The Standoff. His novel Prince of Thieves was awarded the Hammett Prize for "literary excellence in the field of crime writing," and in 2010 was adapted into the film The Town, directed by and starring Ben Affleck, with Jeremy Renner, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, and Blake Lively. His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, and his short fiction has twice been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories annual. He is also the co-author, with Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) of the international bestsellers The Strain and The Fall, published worldwide in twenty-nine languages. He lives outside Boston with his family.
Mr. Hogan will be joined in conversation by Christopher Wilson and Carlo Rotella of BC's English Department. Professor Wilson is a leading expert on American crime fiction; Professor Rotella, director of the Lowell Humanities Series, specializes in urban literature and culture.
Mr. Hogan is the recipient of the 2011 Arts Council Alumni Award for artistic achievement. This event is being presented in conjunction with the BC Arts Festival and co-sponsored by the BC Alumni Association, BC Arts Council, and the Lowell Humanities Series.
Watch Chuck Hogan's conversation on Front Row.
April 12, 2011
Poetry Days presents Brian Turner
Higgins Hall, room 300 - 7:30 p.m.
Brian Turner is a soldier-poet who served seven years in the US Army, including one year as an infantry team leader in Mosul, Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Before that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. His debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, which won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection in 2005. It also won the 2006 Pen Center USA "Best in the West" award, and the 2007 Poets Prize. Alice James published Turner’s second book of poetry, Phantom Noise, in the spring of 2010. Recently selected one of 50 United States Artists Fellows for 2009, Turner is a contributor to “Home Fires,” a New York Times Opinionator blog that features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military. He is the recipient of the 2009-2010 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and teaches at Sierra Nevada College.
Watch Brian Turner's lecture on Front Row.
March 22, 2011
Chang-rae Lee
Yawkey Center, Murray Function Room - 7:00 p.m.
Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999), Aloft (2004), and The Surrendered, which was published in March 2010. His novels have won numerous awards and citations, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the American Book Award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. He has also has also written stories and articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time (Asia), Granta, Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, and many other publications. He is currently Director of the Program in Creative Writing and Professor of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.
Watch Chang-rae Lee's lecture on Front Row.
March 15, 2011
Suketu Mehta
Corcoran Commons, Heights Room - 7:00 p.m.
Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harpers Magazine, Time, and Condé Nast Traveler. An associate professor of journalism at New York University, Mehta is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York. He has also written an original screenplay for The Goddess, a Merchant-Ivory film starring Tina Turner, and Mission Kashmir, a Bollywood movie.
Watch Suketu Mehta's lecture on Front Row.
February 28, 2011
Christopher Browning - "Holocaust History and Survivor Testimonies: The Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camps"
Devlin Hall, room 101 - 7:00 p.m.
A cultural critic and historian of the Holocaust, Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He is known for his 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution of Poland, and as an expert witness in two “Holocaust denial” cases: the second Zündel trial in Toronto in 1988 and David Irving’s libel suit against Deborah Libstadt in London in 2000. Browning has served as the J. B. and Maurice Shapiro Senior Scholar (1996) and Ina Levine Senior Scholar (2002-3) at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial.
Watch Christopher Browning's lecture on Front Row.
February 14, 2011
Mark Massa, S.J. - "A Pox on Both Your Houses: Moving beyond the 'Liberal' and 'Conservative' Labels in Catholic Theology"
Devlin Hall, room 101 - 7:00 p.m.
Fr. Massa’s Candlemas Lecture explores a theme of his latest book, The American Catholic Revolution: How the ’60s Changed the Church Forever. A respected theologian, scholar, and culture critic, Massa is also author of the award-winning Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team, and Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice? A theology professor and founder-director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University, Fr. Massa is now dean of the Boston College School of Theology & Ministry.
February 8, 2011
***EVENT CANCELLED
A personal emergency has obliged Rebecca Skloot to cancel travel and appearances next week; therefore, this visit to Boston College has been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Rebecca Skloot, presented in partnership with the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics
Yawkey Center, Murray Function Room - 7:00 p.m.
It took science writer Rebecca Skloot more than a decade to research and write The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her debut book. Skloot’s story of the legacy of a 31-year-old black mother of five who died of cervical cancer in 1951, and whose cancerous cells – taken without her knowledge – launched a biomedical revolution, became an instant New York Times bestseller. It is now being made into an HBO movie produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. A science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, O, the Oprah Magazine, Discover and many other publications, Skloot has written about goldfish surgery, race and medicine, tissue ownership rights, and packs of wild dogs in Manhattan. Her essays have been widely anthologized, and she is the guest editor of The Best American Science Writing 2011. She is also a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine, and has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s RadioLab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW.
January 25, 2011
Richard Slotkin - "After the Fact: Writing the Battle of the Crater (1864) as Fiction and as History"
Yawkey Center, Murray Function Room - 7:00 p.m.
Cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin is best known for his award-winning trilogy on the mythology of the American frontier: Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation. He has also written three historical novels: The Crater: A Novel of the Civil War, The Return of Henry Starr, and Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln, which received the 2000 Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction and a 2000 Salon Book Award. Slotkin is Olin Professor of American Studies (Emeritus) at Wesleyan University. He is a frequent consultant on-air commentator on violence, racism, popular culture, the Civil War, and the West.
Watch Richard Slotkin's lecture on Front Row.
Fall 2010 Programs
November 9, 2010
Gish Jen
Gish Jen is the author of three novels – “Typical American,” “Mona in the Promised Land” and “The Love Wife,” – as well as a collection of stories, “Who’s Irish?” Named one of the eight most important contemporary American women writers by critic Elaine Showalter, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her new novel, entitled World and Town, will be published by Knopf in fall 2010.
October 26, 2010
Eric Klinenberg
Eric Klinenberg is Professor of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, which won six scholarly and literary prizes and is currently being adapted as a documentary film, and Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media, which has been widely cited in debates about the future of media. In addition to his books and scholarship, Klinenberg appears frequently on television and radio, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The London Review of Books, and NPR’s This American Life.
Watch Eric Klinenberg’s lecture on Front Row.
October 13, 2010
Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman was born in New York City, grew up in New Jersey, and now lives in San Francisco. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and has written for The New Yorker and the London Review of Books on subjects ranging from comedy traffic school, Thai boxing, and graphic novels to psychoanalytic criticism. Her current journalistic projects include a profile of a Turkish master chef, which she reported while recently spending two months in Istanbul; she is also working on a piece about the 700-year-long civic aftermath of Dante Alighieri’s exile from Florence. She teaches at Stanford University.
Watch Elif Batuman’s lecture on Front Row.
September 28, 2010
Jane Brox
Jane Brox is the author of Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm; Five Thousand Days Like This One, which was a 1999 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction; and Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She has received the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in many anthologies including Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has been awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Watch Jane Brox’s lecture on Front Row.
September 21, 2010
Dexter Filkins
Dexter Filkins is an foreign correspondent for the New York Times. Filkins’ work in Iraq and Afghanistan has received a number of awards, including a George Polk award for his coverage of the assault on Falluja in November 2004. During the attack on Falluja, Filkins accompanied a company of Marines, a quarter of whom were killed or wounded in eight days. He has been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize twice, from Iraq and Afghanistan.
September 13, 2010
Governor Deval Patrick
Governor Patrick was elected in November of 2006, bringing a broad range of leadership experience at the top levels of business, government, and non-profits. Hoping for the best and working for it, as his grandmother used to counsel him, his life has traced a trajectory from the South Side of Chicago to the U.S. Justice Department, Fortune 500 boardrooms, and now the Massachusetts State House.
Watch Governor Patrick’s lecture on Front Row.
Spring 2010 Programs
January 21
James MacMillan
"Reflections of a Composer"
Gasson 305 - 4:30 p.m.
February 4
Vishaka Desai, Asia Society
Asian Journeys Lecture
Devlin 101 - 7:30 p.m.
February 11
Michael Suarez, S.J.
Devlin 101 - 7:30 p.m.
February 18
Lewis Hyde
Guestbook Lecture
Higgins 300 - 7:00 p.m.
February 22
George Saunders
A Reading, Fiction Days
Gasson 100 - 7:30 p.m.
March 9
Atul Gawande
McGuinn 121 - 7:30 p.m.
March 15
Harold Bloom
Guestbook Lecture, "Shakespeare and Strangeness"
This event was canceled
April 7
Jim Hevia, University of Chicago
Asian Journeys Lecture, "Whose Art Is It Anyway? The Continuing Saga of Summer Palace Loot"
Devlin 101 - 4:30 p.m.
April 16
Anne Carson in performance with Robert Curie and Peter Cole
"The Fall of Rome: A Traveler's Guide"
Devlin 101 - 7:00 p.m.
April 21
Kevin Young
A Reading, Poetry Days
Gasson 100 - 7:30 p.m.
April 26
Andy Rotman, Smith College
Asian Journeys Lecture, “Liberation through Images: Seeing the Buddha in Indian Art and Architecture”
Devlin 101 - 4:30 p.m.