Lowell Humanities Series
Daniel Bowles, new co-director of the University’s Lowell Humanities Series, describes the speakers who will appear on campus during the fall semester in one word: "remarkable."
“Their work so compellingly helps us untangle and discern what makes us human, and, importantly, why that matters today," said the associate professor of German Studies.
Whether addressing current questions about AI (Kate Crawford), public health (Arline Geronimus), and intellectual freedom (Emily Knox), or mining human history, creativity, and experience for insights into our present (Mark Peterson, Jeremy Frey, and Victoria Chang), these award-winning thinkers offer Boston College and the greater Boston community "a broad disciplinary spectrum of approaches and big ideas for making sense of our world,” he added. “My hope is that audiences will find these lectures meaningful, thought-provoking, and illuminating.”
Mark Peterson
"The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution"
Wednesday, September 16, 2026
7 p.m. | Gasson Hall 100
The author of The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History, Peterson is the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of History at Yale University, where he teaches early American history and serves as the faculty director of Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library. He previously taught at the University of Iowa and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was History Department chair from 2015–2018.
He is also the author of The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865, and The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England.
Cosponsored by the BC History Department.
An Evening with Jeremy Frey
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
7 p.m. | Devlin Hall 110
Frey is one of the foremost Passamaquoddy craftspeople of his generation. A descendant of Indigenous weavers, he learned traditional Wabanaki methods from his mother and as a Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance apprentice.
Woven from natural materials he has foraged, Frey’s vessels are characterized by subtle forms, delicately layered colors, and elaborate weaves. His work is also in dialogue with contemporary sculpture’s emphasis on materiality, form, and variation within repetition. To create his basket relief prints, he developed a form of flat weaving that can be run through a printing press, preserving and sharing his techniques.
He is a 2025 MacArthur Fellowship recipient and the first two-time winner of Best of Show at the Heard Museum Indian Guild Fair and Market in Arizona. Frey’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and Denver Art Museum; the Farnsworth Art Museum and Portland Museum of Art in Maine, where he resides; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
Cosponsored by the BC Art, Art History, and Film Department.
Emily Knox: Book Banning in the 21st Century
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
7 p.m. | Devlin Hall 110
Interim dean and professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Knox is a member of the Mapping Information Access research team whose scholarly interests include information access and intellectual freedom and censorship.
The second edition of her work, Book Banning in 21st Century America, was published in January 2026. Her previous book, Foundations of Intellectual Freedom, won the 2023 Eli M. Oboler Prize for best published work in the area of intellectual freedom. She has been interviewed by prominent national media outlets and has testified on book banning before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Knox previously served on the boards of the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Freedom to Read Foundation, and is a former Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy editor.
Cosponsored by BC Libraries, the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, and the Communication Department.
Arline Geronimus: Weathering, Then and Now
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
7 p.m. | Gasson Hall 100
Arline Geronimus coined the term “weathering” to describe the effects of systemic oppression—including racism and classism—on the body. She argues in her book Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society, which is based on more than 30 years of research, that health and aging have more to do with how society treats people than with how well they takecare of themselves. She explains what happens to human bodies as they attempt to withstand and overcome the challenges and insults leveraged by society, and details how this process ravages health.
She is a professor in the School of Public Health and research professor in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, where she is affiliated with the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health, and an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science.
Cosponsored by the BC’s Park Street Corporation Series, Connell School of Nursing, and School of Social Work.
Poetry Days Presents: An Evening with Victoria Chang
Wednesday, October 28, 2026
7 p.m. | Gasson Hall 100
Chang’s recent books of poems include Tree of Knowledge and With My Back to the World, which received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. Her others include The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief.
She also has written several children’s books, among them Eureka. Chang has received awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.
Cosponsored by the BC Poetry Days Series and Asian American Studies Program.
Kate Crawford: Atlas of AI
Wednesday, November 4, 2026
7 p.m. | Gasson Hall 100
A leading scholar of artificial intelligence, Crawford is a University of Southern California professor, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research New York, and founder of the Knowing Machines Group. Her award-winning 2021 book, Atlas of AI, was named a best book of the year by The Financial Times, won three international prizes, and has been translated into 14 languages.
She also is an award-winning artist whose work explores the themes of technology, history, and power. She has had exhibitions in more than 100 museums worldwide and has works in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, and the Design Museum. Her latest work with Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 and the European Commission's grand prize for art and technology. TIME 100 named Crawford as one of the world’s most influential people in AI on its 2023 inaugural list.
Cosponsored by the BC Core Curriculum and Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics.
The Lowell Humanities Series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, BC's Institute for the Liberal Arts, and the Office of the Provost and Dean of Faculties. The series is co-directed by Professor of History SylviaSellers-Garcia.
All events are free and open to the public. Registration via Eventbrite is required for in-person attendance. To register for events, and for more information on the series and speakers, visit bc.edu/lowell.