Rebecca Solnit, Charles Sennott, Ruth Rubio Marín, Marlon James, Michael Sandel, C. Dale Young, and Carrie Mae Weems will speak at the fall Lowell Humanities Series at Boston College.
Influential contemporary American artist Carrie Mae Weems will launch the fall Lowell Humanities Series at Boston College with a September 10 appearance titled “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely,” presented in conjunction with the McMullen Museum of Art exhibition “Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement,” which opens that day and remains on view until December 13.
Weems will be in residence at BC from September 10 to 12; she will meet with students and faculty to discuss the issues addressed in her work and the role of art in shaping a more enlightened future.
“In the tradition of the Lowell, we strive to bring to campus diverse and field-leading thinkers across various disciplines—including top writers—to continue important campus and national conversations,” according to series assistant director Lauren Wilwerding, a part-time English Department faculty member. “We are always seeking ways to offer events that are integrated into the curriculum and community; a number of them this fall are the result of collaborations across campus.”
Weems has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power through art, employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such major museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frist Center for Visual Art, and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and has received awards, grants, and fellowships, including the prestigious Prix de Roma, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Alpert. In 2012, she was presented with one of the first U.S. Department of State’s Medals of Arts; the following year, she received a MacArthur “Genius” grant and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She is currently artist in residence at the Park Avenue Armory.
Her lecture, which will be held at 7 p.m. in Devlin Hall 110, is co-sponsored by BC's Institute for the Liberal Arts.
Other Lowell Humanities Series lectures this semester include:
Charles Sennott
GroundTruth in the ‘Post-Truth’ Era
September 19, 7 p.m., Gasson 100
The founder and executive director of The GroundTruth Project, Sennott is an award-winning foreign correspondent, author, and editor with 30 years of journalism experience. His discussion of GroundTruth and the role of young journalists in the world is timely, organizers note, as a journalism minor is offered on campus for the first time. Sennott has reported on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in more than 15 countries, including the 2011 revolution in Cairo and the Arab Spring. His extensive international reporting experience led him to launch The GroundTruth Project and to dedicate himself to training the next generation of international journalists for the digital age. He also is the co-founder of GlobalPost, an acclaimed international news website. He served as the Boston Globe’s Middle East bureau chief based in Jerusalem from 1997 to 2001 and as Europe bureau chief based in London from 2001 to 2005.
Fiction Days presents Marlon James
A Brief History of Seven Killings
October 3, 7 p.m., Gasson 100
James won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for A Brief History of Seven Killings; he is first Jamaican author to take home the U.K.’s most prestigious literary award. The novel explores Jamaican history through the perspectives of multiple narrators and genres: the political thriller, oral biography, and classic whodunit are used to address the assassination attempt on reggae musician Bob Marley, and the country’s clandestine battles during the Cold War. James is the author of two other award-winning novels, John Crow’s Devil and The Book of Night Women. His essay “From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself” appeared in the New York Times Magazine and a 2016 video, “Are you racist? ‘No’ isn’t a good enough answer,” received millions of views. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches English and creative writing at Macalester College. His appearance is co-sponsored by African and African Diaspora Studies.
Poetry Days presents C. Dale Young
October 17, 7 p.m., Devlin 101
An award-winning poet and writer, Young—a 1991 Boston College alumnus--practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of four poetry collections including Torn (2011) and The Halo (2016) and his novel in stories, The Affliction (2018). He is a recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Young also received the 2017 Hanes Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, which recognizes a distinguished body of work by a poet in midcareer. He is the first Latino, and the first of Asian descent, to win the award. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including The Best American Poetry, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The Paris Review.
Rebecca Solnit
The Mother of All Questions
October 24, 7 p.m., Gasson 100
Writer, historian, and activist Solnit is the author of 20 books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, and hope and disaster. Her latest titles include the essay collections The Mother of All Questions (2017) and Men Explain Things to Me (2015). She has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and other awards. A Harper’s columnist, she is a frequent contributor to The Guardian.
Ruth Rubio Marín
Reparations for Historic Institutional Violence: Learning from Transitional Justice?
November 1, 7 p.m., Gasson 100
A University of Sevilla professor of constitutional law, Rubio also is a faculty member at New York University’s Hauser Global Law School Program. Her research represents an attempt to understand how public law creates categories of inclusion and exclusion around different axes including gender, citizenship, nationality, and ethnicity. She is the author of more than 40 articles and the author, editor or co-editor of eight books, as well as two in press. Her current book project is The Disestablishment of Gender in the New Millennium Constitutionalism. As a consultant and activist, Rubio has worked for national and international institutions and agencies including the United Nations and the European Union, and has extensive in-country experience in dealing with reparations in post-conflict societies, including in Morocco, Nepal, and Colombia. To honor her lifelong commitment to gender justice, her image will be included in the Legacy Wall to be installed in the new building of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Rubio’s lecture is part of a two-day conference, “Transitional Justice, Truth-telling, and the Legacy of Irish Institutional Abuse,” supported by the Institute for the Liberal Arts, Office of the Provost, Irish Studies Program, Jesuit Institute, Boston College Law School, and Center for Human Rights and International Justice.
Michael Sandel
Bioethics and the Common Good
November 13, 7 p.m., Gasson 100
A Harvard University political philosopher and bestselling author, Sandel challenges audiences to examine the ethical dilemmas confronted in politics and in daily life. Described by The New Republic as “the most famous teacher of philosophy in the world,” Sandel’s legendary course “Justice” has enrolled more than 15,000 students and was the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on public television. His latest work, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, invites readers to rethink the role that money and markets should play in our lives. He served for four years on the President’s Council on Bioethics, exploring the ethical implications of new biomedical technologies, which led him to write The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering--a book about the moral quandaries that arise when we seek to perfect our children and ourselves. He has appeared on The Colbert Report, the Today Show, and Morning Joe. His lecture is co-sponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series.
For more details on the series and speakers visit the Lowell Humanities Series website. Events are free and open to the public. The series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, BC's Institute for the Liberal Arts and the Provost's Office.
University Communications | September 2018