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The Lowell Humanities Series, which sponsors campus appearances by high profile, distinguished authors, begins its spring semester schedule later this month. Here’s a look at the line-up:
Jan. 28: Sheri Fink
A New York Times correspondent, Fink is the author of that publication’s best-selling book, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, the Ridenhour Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her news reporting has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Overseas Press Club Lowell Thomas Award, among other journalism prizes.
Feb. 11: Alison Bechdel
An internationally acclaimed cartoonist, Bechdel’s darkly humorous graphic memoirs and evocative drawing have had wide appeal. Her 2006 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which focused on the suicide of her closeted bisexual father, was named Best Book of the Year by Time magazine and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and adapted into an award-winning musical that opened off-Broadway in 2013, with a Broadway premiere planned for 2015. Her work also includes a 2012 memoir, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, and her self-syndicated Dykes to Watch Out For, an award-winning generational chronicle, ran from 1983 to 2008. She is a Marsh professor-at-large at the University of Vermont.
March 11: Dennis Lehane
The appearance of critically acclaimed and popular author Lehane is made possible through the support of the Gerson Family Lecture Fund. Since the Dorchester native’s first novel, A Drink Before the War, won the Shamus Award, he has published nine more that have been translated into some 30 languages, won numerous honors and become international bestsellers, with three adapted into award-winning films. Among his works are Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; Moonlight Mile and Live by Night. His next, World Gone By, will be published this March. A writer for the HBO series “The Wire,” Lehane is currently a writer-producer on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” and is working on “Ness,” a drama series in development at WGN America.
March 18: Diarmaid Ferriter
One of Ireland’s leading historians and BC’s Burns Library Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies from 2008-2009, Ferriter is a professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin. His most recent book is Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s; his others include the bestsellers The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000; Judging Dev: A Reassessment of the Life and Legacy of Eamon de Valera; and Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland. In 2010 he presented a three-part television history of 20th-century Ireland on RTE.
March 25: Ira Berlin
Berlin is a distinguished historian of America and the larger Atlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly the history of slavery. His books – which have received many honors – include Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South; Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America; and Generations of Captivity: A History of Slaves in the United States. Berlin is the founding editor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, whose multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary history of Emancipation has twice been awarded the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government, among other awards.
April 8: Dinaw Mengestu
BC Fiction Days presents Mengestu, author of Los Angeles Times bestseller The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, as well as How To Read the Air and All Our Names. Two years after his birth in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he immigrated to the US with his mother and sister to join his father, who fled during the Red Terror. A graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program, Mengestu received a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and, in 2007, a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation.
All Humanities Series events, which are free and open to the public, take place at 7 p.m. in Gasson 100, with the exception of Mengestu’s April 8 appearance, which will be held in Devlin 101.
The series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, BC’s Institute for the Liberal Arts and the Provost’s Office.
Complete series details — including full speaker bios, directions and parking information — are at www.bc.edu/lowellhs.