The Lowell Humanities Series at Boston College welcomes Sherene Seikaly to discuss themes from her forthcoming book project, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine, and raise the question: How do we understand conflicting claims to land and its relationship to colonialism?

Cosponsored by the Boston College History Department.

The Lowell Humanities Series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, Boston College’s Institute for the Liberal Arts, and the Provost’s Office.

The American story is often packaged as a linear climb toward a “more perfect union.” But for many Black families, history feels less like a ladder and more like a pendulum—swinging between hard‑won breakthroughs and the inevitable backlashes that follow.

Join Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and commentator Eugene Robinson for an exploration of this rhythmic history. Moving beyond headlines and isolated shocks, Robinson draws on the two‑century journey of his own family—the heart of his memoir Freedom Lost, Freedom Won—to show how national politics are lived, felt, and carried across generations.

This is not a traditional book talk, but a guided conversation. Together, we’ll consider how a single family’s story can illuminate the country’s larger cycles, why progress so often provokes retrenchment, and what it means to experience the same historical moments from perspectives that are too often overlooked. Most of all, we’ll ask what it might take to imagine a future that doesn’t simply repeat the past, and place our present moment within a much longer arc of American history.

Moderated by Anissa Durham.

The Lowell Humanities Series at Boston College welcomes Rogers Brubaker, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and author to discuss how digital hyper-connectivity has reshaped political life by transforming ways of knowing, feeling, and governing. He explores the tension between the technocratic premises of algorithmic governance and the populist regimes of digitally mediated knowing and feeling, and specifies how hyper-connectivity can promote both populism and its seeming antithesis, technocracy.

The Lowell Humanities Series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, Boston College’s Institute for the Liberal Arts, and the Provost’s Office.

Bob Crawford—bassist for the Grammy-nominated band The Avett Brothers, and creator of the iHeart Curiosity podcast series, Founding Son: John Quincy’s America and The SiriusXM Volume Channel Docuseries Concerts of Change: The Soundtrack of Human Rights— sits down with Jennifer Moore—Senior Statewide & Features Editor at GBH News— for a discussion of his new book, America's Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick.

During the tumultuous period between the era of the Founding Fathers and the disunion of the Civil War, John Quincy Adams was the man standing in the breach. After an unsuccessful presidential reelection campaign, he was left reckoning with his political legacy. But Adams would be dragged back into the fray in ways he never expected, pitting him against the slavocracy and Southern congressmen and solidifying him as a key ally to the antislavery cause.

America’s Founding Son tells the tale of Adams’s turbulent government career and his evolving views on slavery. Adams, along with lesser-known abolitionists Benjamin Lundy and Theodore Weld, found himself at the center of the coalition that leveled the first blow against slave power in the United States. The battles they fought would be foundational in the push for emancipation to follow. An entertaining deep dive into an under explored period in American history, America’s Founding Son shows how John Quincy Adams and the grassroots activism of the 1830s and ’40s shifted American politics forever.

Mac Whatley, historian, and Director of Local History and Genealogy Resources at the Randolph County Public Library, takes us on a deep dive into the rich history of the power loom.

The rise of GLP‑1s raises deep questions: What happens when medication becomes one of the most effective ways to navigate a food system built around overconsumption? How might these drugs change what we eat, how companies design and sell food, and the broader incentives that shape our choices?

Chet Michalak, Raytheon historian and archivist, tracks women's participation in U.S. labor in this lecture.

One Voice, Many Frequencies brings together boundary-pushing artists, educators, and cultural leaders to explore how contemporary solo work is breaking down the walls between music, theater, and storytelling, and what that means for artists and audiences right now.

At the center of the conversation is Ahamefule J. Oluo, whose acclaimed solo performance The Things Around Us blends live trumpet, looping, humor, and storytelling to explore identity, memory, and connection. Their work is known for its emotional range, musical sophistication, and ability to transform deeply personal material into shared experience.

Oluo is joined by artists who represent a creative core of Boston’s music and performance scene as performers, builders of platforms, communities, and futures: Amanda Shea, Tim Hall, and Cliff Notez.

Rooted in lived artistic practice and real-world experimentation, One Voice, Many Frequencies offers a rare look at how solo performance is being reimagined right now by artists who are making the work shaping scenes, building communities, and inspiring the next generation of performers.

This program explores Shakespeare’s radical influence across time and place. We’ll trace how his language and political vision helped inspire the rhetoric of the American Revolution, even echoing in the Declaration of Independence. We’ll consider the historical forces that transformed Shakespeare into a cultural authority whose work could be enlisted for causes of liberation, often speaking to those on the margins of power. And we’ll look far beyond the eighteenth century to moments when Shakespeare became a clandestine ally, such as his use by the French Resistance during World War II to carry coded messages of defiance.

Chief Curator and Director of Collections at MAAH, Dr. Nedra Lee, will discuss the process of assembling and curating the Black Voices of the Revolution exhibit currently running at the museum.