Fall 2024 - Spring 2025
Amy Stanley: “Stranger in the Shogun’s City: From the Archive to the Page”
Amy Stanley is the Wayne V. Jones Research Professor of History at Northwestern University. A social historian of early modern and modern Japan, she has special interests in global history, women's and gender history, and narrative. She is the author of Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan, as well as articles in the American Historical Review, The Journal of Japanese Studies, and The Journal of Asian Studies. Her most recent book, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in Biography and PEN/America Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award in Biography and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard in 2007, and she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Cosponsored by the Boston College History Department and the Program in Asian Studies.
Rita Duffy: “You Can’t Hope for a Better Past”
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 recognised 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.
Cosponsored by Irish Studies at Boston College and the Art, Art History, and Film Department.
Poetry Days Presents: An Evening with Camille Dungy
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.
Orna Guralnik: “Love and Ideology”
Dr. Orna Guralnik is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst practicing in New York. She is on the faculty at NYU PostDoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and at NIP (National Institute for the Psychotherapies), where she teaches courses on the trans-generational transmission of trauma, socio-politics/ideology and psychoanalysis, and on dissociation. Dr. Guralnik lectures and publishes on topics of couples treatment and culture, dissociation and depersonalization, as well as culture & psychoanalysis. She is on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender & Sexuality and co-founder of the Center for the Study of Dissociation and Depersonalization at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she was funded by NIH and NARSAD grants. She has completed the filming of several seasons of Showtime’s documentary series Couples Therapy.
Cosponsored by the Boston College Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics.
Gerson Family Lecture: Reuben Jonathan Miller: “Mass Incarceration, Voting Rights, & Citizenship”
MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and University of Chicago sociologist Dr. Reuben Miller is the author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. As a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and as a sociologist studying mass incarceration, he has spent years alongside prisoners, formerly incarcerated people, their families, and their friends to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work reveals is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison.Miller is an associate professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. Before coming to Chicago, he was an assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan, a faculty affiliate with the Populations Studies Center, the Program for Research on Black Americans, and the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a fellow at New America and the Rockefeller Foundation, and a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and Dartmouth College. A native son of Chicago, he lives with his wife and children on the city’s South Side.
Cosponsored by the Boston College PULSE Program for Service Learning, Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, Forum on Racial Justice in America, and Sociology Department.
Sy Montgomery: “The Secrets of the Octopus”
Sy Montgomery is the author of 34 books, including The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a New York Times best seller, The Good Good Pig, How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals, Becoming A Good Creature, Journey of the Pink Dolphins, Spell of the Tiger, and Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell. Her books for children include Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea and Kakapo Rescue: Saving The World's Strangest Parrot won Silbert Medals. She has scripted, directed, and appeared in a National Geographic segment “Spell of the Tiger” and “Mother Bear Man.” Her most recent book Secrets of the Octopus is the companion to National Geographic’s 2024 miniseries of the same name. She is the winner of the 2009 New England Independent Booksellers Association Nonfiction Award, the 2010 Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award, and the Henry Bergh Award for Nonfiction. She is a 1979 graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied Magazine Journalism, French Language and Literature, and Psychology. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates of Humane Letters from Keene State College in 2004 and Franklin Pierce University and Southern New Hampshire University in 2011. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and dog.
Gerson Family Lecture: Ed Yong: “What Pandemics Teach Us”
Named “the most important and impactful journalist" of 2020 by Poynter, Ed Yong was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his crucial coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. He anticipated the course of the virus, the complex challenges that the U.S. faced, and the government’s disastrous failure in its response. An accomplished speaker, Yong brings his vast scientific knowledge and engages his audiences through his insightful conversations about the pandemic, the animal kingdom, and the challenges of science journalism.
He is the best-selling author of I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us, a groundbreaking and entertaining examination of the relationship between animals and microbes. His second book An Immense World takes a comprehensive look at the fascinating sensory worlds of animals. A New York Times bestseller, An Immense World was longlisted for the PEN America 2023 Literary Award and has made many Best Books of the Year lists. A longtime science reporter for The Atlantic, Yong’s work has also appeared in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, and Scientific American.
Cosponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series, Boston College Asian American Studies Program, and Schiller Institute for
Annual Candlemas Lecture: Graham Ward: “Loneliness: A Theological Appraisal”
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.
Javier Zamora: “Solito: Home, Identity, and the Immigrant Experience”
Memoirist and poet Javier Zamora’s memoir Solito provides an intimate account of his near-impossible journey and the 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.
Zamora has been a Stegner fellow at Stanford University and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Zamora has also been granted fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Macondo, and Yaddo. His debut poetry collection Unaccompanied is rooted in the indelible experiences of a nine-year-old boy navigating politics, racism, war, and the impact of a border crossing on his family. Zamora holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and has earned an MFA from New York University. The recipient of 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. Javier Zamora lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Cosponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series and Boston College Romance Languages and Literatures Department.
Arthur Frank: “Polyphonic Suffering: Reading Shakespeare to Respond to Illness”
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.
Katherine McKittrick: “A Poetics of Declension”
Katherine 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.
John McNeill: “The Industrial Revolution as Global Environmental History”
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.
Fiction Days Presents Anne Berest: “Family Fictions: The Postcard, Gabriële, and Writing True Novels”
Anne Berest’s first novel to appear in English, The Postcard, was a national bestseller, a Library Journal, NPR, and TIME Best Book of the Year, a Vogue Most Anticipated Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Goncourt Prize in France. It was described as “stunning” by Leslie Camhi in The New Yorker, as a “powerful literary work” by Julie Orringer in The New York Times Book Review, and as “intimate, profound, essential” in ELLE magazine. With her sister Claire Berest, she is also the author 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. Berest lives in Paris with her family.
Cosponsored by the Boston College Fiction Days Series.