By
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a celebrated satirical novelist, a distinguished classicist and a renowned music critic are on the fall schedule for the Lowell Humanities Series — one of Boston College’s most celebrated forums for intellectual, artistic and literary discourse.
The series, under the leadership of Professor of English and American Studies Program Director Carlo Rotella, next month will begin its 54th year of hosting eminent writers, artists, performers and scholars. A look at the fall line-up:
Oct. 5: 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.
Oct. 19: Gary Shteyngart won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction for his first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. 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. Shteyngart’s latest work, Super Sad True Love Story, was an instant New York Times bestseller.
Nov. 2: Beth Raymer studied offshore gambling operations in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama as a Fulbright fellow with an MFA from Columbia University. Her memoir, Lay the Favorite (2010), chronicles her 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.
Nov. 16: 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 16 languages. His second book, Listen to This, was published in 2010 and he is now working on a book titled Wagnerism.
Dec. 7: 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 the 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.”
Complete series details — including event times and locations, and the spring semester schedule — are available at www.bc.edu/lowellhs. Events are open to the public, free of charge.
The series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, BC's Institute for the Liberal Arts and the Office of the Provost.