Lowell Humanities Series

Ricardo Nuila
'The People's Hospital'
September 10 | Gasson 100

Dr. 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, Texas, 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. An associate professor of medicine, medical ethics, and health policy at Baylor College of Medicine, he directs its Humanities Expression and Arts Lab 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 numerous fellowships for his writing. His features and essays have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Review and The Atlantic, among others. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, and other magazines.

Cosponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series.

Melissa Lane
'Plato’s Republic on Motivating Ecological Guardianship'
September 18 | Devlin 110

Princeton University’s Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, Lane is an associated faculty member in classics and philosophy and has received awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize. She also currently holds a three-year appointment delivering periodic public lectures in London at Gresham College as the 50th Professor of Rhetoric. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as fellowships and visiting professorships at numerous institutions. Her most recent 2023 monograph, Of Rule and Office: Plato's Ideas of the Political, was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and her 2012 book Eco-Republic continues to be influential. Lane has been on BBC Radio Four and published in periodicals in the United States and internationally.

Supported by a major grant from the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Boston College.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa
'A Ghost in the Throat'
September 24 | Gasson 100

A poet and essayist, Ní Ghríofa’s most recent prose work, A Ghost in the Throat, has been sold in 20 languages and was a Book of the Year in The Guardian, The Irish Times, NPR, The New York Times, and the Irish Book Awards, as well as Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Year. It also won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, among other accolades. Her acclaimed books of poetry are explorations 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'
October 8 | Gasson 100

The Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University, Miles is the author of eight books, including four prize-winning histories about race and slavery in America. Her latest biography is Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Her National Book Award winner, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller and named a best book of the year by prominent outlets. Her other nonfiction works include Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, Tales from the Haunted South, and Ties That Bind. Miles has written for prominent publications, authored the novel The Cherokee Rose, and consulted at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Indigenous intertwined past. Her work has been supported by a MacArthur Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Cosponsored by the 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'
October 22 | Gasson 100

Metres is the author of 12 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 a John Carroll University professor of English and director of its Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Poetry Days Series.

Caitlin Dickerson
'Deported: The Price of Our Prosperity'
October 29 | Gasson 100

An award-winning investigative reporter and feature writer for The Atlantic, Dickerson won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Over nearly 15 years in journalism, she has also received Peabody, Edward R. Murrow, and Livingston awards, and the Silvers-Dudley Prize for her writing and reporting. Prior to The Atlantic, she spent five years as a The New York Times reporter and five years as a producer and investigative reporter for National Public Radio. Dickerson has reported on immigration, history, politics, and race in four continents and in 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'
November 05 | Devlin 100

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 cross-country road trips that counter the masculinist mythology of the American landscape, offering in its place a radical female imaginary. Her recent series of collages, SCUMB Manifesto, transforms books by celebrated male photographers through destruction and reparation. Kurland’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the U.S. and abroad. It 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.