Fall 2025 - Spring 2026

Ricardo Nuila: The People's Hospital

Nuila’s stunning debut The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine, which details the stories of five Houstonians unable to access healthcare in his hometown of Houston, TX, was selected as a semi-finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon, Kirkus Reviews, and The Washington Post. Dr. Nuila is an associate professor of medicine, medical ethics, and health policy at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab (HEAL) program. His work and research on the use of arts and humanities in medical practice have been supported by the Association of American Medical Colleges, and he has received fellowships for his writing from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Logan Nonfiction Program, and the Texas Institute of Letters. His features and essays have appeared in Texas Monthly, The New York Times Sunday Review, VQR, The Atlantic, and The New England Journal of Medicine. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Guernica, and other magazines.

Cosponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series.

Melissa Lane: "Plato’s Republic on Motivating Ecological Guardianship"

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where she is also Associated Faculty in Classics and in Philosophy, and has received the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Stanley J. Kelley Teaching Award of the Department of Politics, and the Faculty Community Engagement Award of the Pace Center for Civic Engagement. She currently also holds a three-year appointment dedicated to delivering periodic public lectures in London as the fiftieth Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Classics, as well as fellowships and visiting professorships at a number of institutions including the ANU, Auckland, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the American Academy in Rome, and the École Normale Supérieure. Lane was educated in Californian public schools, then at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, where she received an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy and then taught for fifteen years before moving to Princeton in 2009. Her most recent monograph, titled Of Rule and Office: Plato's Ideas of the Political and published in 2023 by Princeton University Press, was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy; her 2012 book Eco-Republic continues to be widely discussed. Lane has appeared multiple times on ‘In Our Time’ on BBC Radio Four, and been published in periodicals in the US, UK, Italy and Germany.

This lecture is supported by an ILA Major Grant.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa: A Ghost in the Throat

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist. Her most recent prose work is A Ghost in the Throat, which has been sold in twenty languages. A Ghost in the Throat was a Book of the Year in The Guardian, The Observer, The Irish Times, The Globe and Mail, NPR, and The New York Times. It won Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Year, the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, among other accolades. Ní Ghríofa is also the author of a number of acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Ostana Prize, a Seamus Heaney Fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

Cosponsored by Boston College Irish Studies.

Tiya Miles: Eco-Consciousness in the Lives of Enslaved Black Women

Tiya Miles is the author of eight books, including four prize-winning histories about race and slavery in the American past. Her latest work is the biography Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Her 2021 National Book Award winner All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes, including the Cundill History Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. All That She Carried was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Atlantic, Time, and more. Her other nonfiction works include Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, The Dawn of Detroit, Tales from the Haunted South, The House on Diamond Hill, and Ties That Bind. Miles has published essays and reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and other publications, and she is the author of the time-bridge novel The Cherokee Rose, a ghost story set in the plantation South. She has consulted with colleagues at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Indigenous intertwined past, including, most recently, the “Fabric of a Nation” quilt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been supported by a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Miles was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.

Cosponsored by Boston College History Department, American Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s Studies, Environmental Studies, the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, and the Forum for Racial Justice in America.

Poetry Days Presents: An Evening with Philip Metres

Philip Metres is the author of twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge, Shrapnel Maps, The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance, Sand Opera, and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky. His work—poetry, translation, essays, fiction, criticism, and scholarship—has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Watson Foundation. He is the recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original.” He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. He lives with his family in Cleveland, Ohio.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Poetry Days Series.

Caitlin Dickerson: Deported: The Price of Our Prosperity

Caitlin Dickerson is an award-winning investigative reporter and feature writer for The Atlantic. She won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Over nearly 15 years in journalism, Dickerson has also been awarded a Peabody, Edward R Murrow, Livingston, and Silvers-Dudley Prize for her writing and reporting. Before joining The Atlantic, she spent nearly five years as a reporter at The New York Times and five years as a producer and investigative reporter for NPR. Dickerson has reported on immigration, history, politics, and race in four continents and dozens of American cities. She is currently writing a book about the systemic impact of deportation on American society.

Cosponsored by the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics.

An Evening with Justine Kurland

Justine Kurland is an artist known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the alternative communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit it. Her early work comprises photographs taken during many cross-country road trips that counter the masculinist mythology of the American landscape, offering a radical female imaginary in its place. Her recent series of collages SCUMB Manifesto continues to make space for women by transforming books by canonized male photographers through destruction and reparation. Kurland’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Museum, Getty Museum, Jewish Museum in New York; National Gallery of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Art, Art History, and Film Department.

Annual Candlemas Lecture: Emilie Townes: Facing (In)Justice with the Power of Hope

Emilie M. Townes is an American Baptist clergywoman and native of Durham, North Carolina. She holds a Doctor of Ministry degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Religion in Society and Personality from Northwestern University. Townes is the Dean Emerita and the former University Distinguished Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and the College of Arts and Science, becoming the first African American to serve as Dean of the Divinity School in 2013. Townes has taught at numerous other institutions, including Yale Divinity School, Union Theological Seminary, and Saint Paul School of Theology. She was elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 and served as the first Black woman of the American Academy of Religion in 2008. She also served a four-year term as president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion from 2012 to 2016, and in 2025 is serving as the first Black woman President of the Society of Christian Ethics.

She is the editor and co-editor of numerous collections of essays, including A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering; Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation; Faith, Health, and Healing in African American Life; Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, and Walking Through the Valley: Essays: Womanist Explorations in the Spirit of Katie Geneva Cannon. She has also authored Womanist Ethics, Womanist Hope, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness, Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care, and Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Theology Department.

Yiyun Li: Techniques and Idiosyncrasies

Yiyun Li is the author of eleven books, including Things in Nature Merely Grow, The Book of Goose, Where Reasons End, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, and Tolstoy Together, 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. Li’s honors and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, a PEN/Jean Stein Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Nabokov Award, and others. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, an independent film directed by Wayne Wang and adapted by Li from her short story, was the winner of Golden Shell for best film at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. She is a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the Program in Creative Writing.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Fiction Days Series and Asian American Studies Program.

John Vaillant: Fire Weather

John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer based in Vancouver, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Guardian. His journalism, fiction, and non-fiction explores collisions between human ambition and the natural world. His latest book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World is the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in General Nonfiction and a stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind. Through the lens of an apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—Vaillant warns that the 2016 fires at Fort McMurray were not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. In addition to winning the British Baillie Gifford Prize (“the non-fiction Booker”), the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, and the John Wesley Dafoe Book Prize, Fire Weather was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, and Canada’s Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize. It has been named one of the best books of 2023 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, Slate, and Smithsonian. The book earned Vaillant a nod as number four on MacLean’s Power List for Climate in 2024.

Cosponsored by the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, the University Core Curriculum, and Environmental Studies.

Rogers Brubaker: Politics and Governance in the Digital Era: Between Populism and Technocracy

Rogers Brubaker is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA, where he holds the UCLA Foundation Chair. He has written widely on social theory, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, populism, and digital hyperconnectivity. His recent books include Grounds for Difference, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities, and, most recently, Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents, which treats digital hyperconnectivity as a “total social fact” and addresses transformations of the self, social interaction, culture, economics, and politics.

Brubaker has taught at UCLA since 1991 and was previously a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. He has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Sociology Department and the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.

Sherene Seikaly: From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine

Sherene Seikaly is a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2024–25) and Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her 2016 book Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine explores economy, territory, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine tells a global history of capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UCSB and co-editor of the Stanford Studies Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and Jadaliyya.

Cosponsored by the Boston College History Department.

Margaret Burnham: By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

Renowned legal scholar, civil rights advocate, and former judge Margaret A. Burnham is the founder of Northeastern University School of Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) and author of By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners. Through CRRJ, Burnham has led teams of law students in investigating acts of racial violence in the Jim Crow era, including hundreds of unsolved murders of Black people among other historical failures of the criminal justice system. The project serves as a resource for scholars, policymakers and organizers involved in initiatives seeking justice for these crimes.

Burnham began her career at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In the 1970s, she represented civil rights and political activists, including Angela Davis. In 1977, she became the first African American woman to serve in the Massachusetts judiciary, when she joined the Boston Municipal Court bench as an associate justice. In 1993, South African president Nelson Mandela appointed Burnham to serve on an international human rights commission to investigate alleged human rights violations within the African National Congress, a precursor to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

She was a former fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Studies and in 2016 was selected for the prestigious Carnegie Fellows Program. She was among four scholars from across the country appointed by President Biden to serve on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board, a national initiative charged with reviewing the records of murders and other acts of racially motivated violence that occurred between 1940 and 1979. Burnham is a University Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University, where she has been on faculty since 2002.

Cosponsored by the Boston College PULSE Program for Service Learning, the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, and the Gerson Family Lecture Fund in the Lowell Humanities Series, established by John A. and Jean N. Gerson, P’14, and Jaclyn Gerson Rossiter ’14.