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Boston College

Boston College is a coeducational university with undergraduate and graduate students hailing from every state and more than 95 countries. Founded in 1863, it is one of the oldest Jesuit, Catholic universities in the United States.

Since its founding in 1957, the Lowell Humanities Series has brought distinguished writers, artists, performers, and scholars to Boston College. Follow the series on Twitter at @BCLowellHS .

http://www.bc.edu

Bill Rauch: “Adaptation: A Lifetime of Building Bridges”

Wed, Apr 03, 2024

Bill Rauch is the inaugural Artistic Director of The Perelman Center for the Performing Arts (PAC NYC) at the World Trade Center. His work has been featured on Broadway in the Tony Award-winning production of Robert Schenkkan’s “All The Way” and its companion play “The Great Society,” as well as at many of the largest regional theaters in the country.

From 2007 to 2019, Bill was Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the country’s oldest and largest rotating repertory theater, where he directed seven world premieres as well as innovative productions of classic musicals, including a queer reenvisioning of “Oklahoma!” Among his initiatives at OSF, he committed to commissioning new plays that dramatized moments of change in American history. “American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle” resulted in such plays as Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat” (winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize), Paula Vogel’s “Indecent,” the 1491s’ “Between Two Knees,” Lisa Loomer’s “Roe,” Universes’ “Party People,” Culture Clash’s “American Night,” and Robert Schenkkan’s plays about Lyndon B. Johnson.

Bill is also co-founder of Cornerstone Theater Company, where he served as artistic director from 1986 to 2006, directing more than 40 productions, most of them collaborations with diverse communities nationwide. He has directed world premieres at Portland Center Stage, Center Theater Group, and South Coast Rep, as well as at American Repertory Theater, Yale Rep, the Guthrie, Arena Stage, Seattle Rep, Long Wharf Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Pasadena Playhouse, and Great Lakes Theater Festival. His production of “The Pirates of Penzance” performed at Portland Opera. He was a Claire Trevor Professor at the University of California Irvine and has also taught at the University of Southern California and UCLA.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Theatre Department, English Department, and the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.

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Ada Ferrer: Cuba: An American History

Wed, Mar 13, 2024

Ada Ferrer is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuba: An American History. The book chronicles more than five hundred years of Cuban history and its relations with the United States. She is also the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, which won the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University as well as the Frederick Katz, Wesley Logan, and James A. Rawley prizes from the American Historical Association. Her essay “My Brother’s Keeper,” published by The New Yorker, tells the story of her and her family’s relationship with the Cuban Revolution. In her lectures and keynote talks, Ferrer discusses Cuba’s past and its complex ties with the United States, giving audiences unexpected insights into the history of both countries and helping them to imagine a new relationship with Cuba.

Cosponsored by the Boston College History Department, Romance Languages and Literatures Department, the Heinz Bluhm Memorial Lecture Series, and the McMullen Museum of Art.

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Annual Candlemas Lecture: James Alison: “Catholicity, Sacrifice, and Shame: Subverting Polarization in Our Contemporary Ecclesial and Political Cultures”

Wed, Feb 07, 2024

James Alison is a Catholic theologian, priest, and author who has written on issues of polarization, reconciliation, and LGBTQ people. He has studied, lived and worked in Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Spain, the United States, and his native England. He earned his doctorate in theology from the Jesuit Faculty in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1994 and is a systematic theologian by training. He is the author of several books, including Knowing Jesus, Raising Abel, The Joy of Being Wrong, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, On Being Liked, Undergoing God, Broken Hearts and New Creations: Intimations of a Great Reversal. His most recent book, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice, follows the insight into desire from French thinker René Girard. He serves as a Fellow and Chair of the Education Committee at IMITATIO, an organization focusing on René Girard’s insights into mimetic desire.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Theology Department.

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Roya Hakakian: “The Plight of Women in Israel and Iran, and the Silence of Feminists”

Wed, Jan 31, 2024

Roya Hakakian is an Iranian-American writer, journalist, and public speaker. Her opinion columns, essays, and book reviews appear in leading English language publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. A founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, she has spoken on a variety of news outlets, from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS to MSNBC, as well as in Washington D.C. for the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and the State Department with U.S. Secretary Antony Blinken. Her latest book A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious has been called a contemporary Tocquevlllian account by The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe.
She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship among many other prizes and has been called one of “the most important activists, academics and journalists of her generation.”

Cosponsored by the Boston College International Studies Program, Islamic Civilization and Societies Program, and with the support of an ILA Major Grant.

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Fintan O’Toole: “Political Heaney”

Thu, Nov 16, 2023

Fintan O’Toole, one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, is a columnist for The Irish Times and Leonard L. Milberg ’53 visiting lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University. He also contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. His books on theater include works on William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Thomas Murphy. His books on politics include the bestsellers We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland; Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain; Ship of Fools; and Enough is Enough. In 2011, The Observer named O’Toole one of “Britain’s top 300 intellectuals.” He has received the A.T. Cross Award for Supreme Contribution to Irish Journalism, the Millennium Social Inclusion Award, the Journalist of the Year award from TV3 Studios in 2010, the Orwell Prize, the European Press Prize, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the spring of 2023. In 2021, he published the #1 bestseller We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, which won the Book of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards and was selected for the New York Times's “10 Best Books of 2022.” O’Toole’s History of Ireland in 100 Objects, which covers 100 highly charged artifacts from the last 10,000 years, is currently the basis for Ireland’s postage stamps. He has recently been appointed official biographer of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.

This Lowell lecture will herald the opening of Seamus Heaney’s Afterlives, Boston College’s international symposium marking the tenth anniversary of the poet’s death.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Irish Studies Program and with the support of an ILA Major Grant.

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Kate Brown: "The Interminable Cycles of Chernobyl’s Catastrophes: War, Accident, and War Again"

Wed, Oct 25, 2023

Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013). Her latest book Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton 2019), translated into six languages, won the Marshall Shulman and Reginald Zelnik Prizes for the best book in East European History, plus the Silver Medal for Laura Shannon Book Prize. Manual for Survival was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage.

This talk is part of the Boston College Lowell Humanities Series and is cosponsored by the Boston College History Department and The Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society.

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Dipesh Chakrabarty - Boston College Lowell Humanities Series

Thu, Apr 13, 2023

Dipesh Chakrabarty holds a BSc degree from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a postgraduate Diploma in management from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a PhD in History from the Australian National University. He is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations. He is the Faculty Director of the University of Chicago Center in Delhi, a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, an associate of the Department of English, and by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School. His publications include several monographs and many articles including Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000; 2008); The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021); and One Planet, Many Worlds (Brandeis, forthcoming 2023). He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a consulting editor of Critical Inquiry, a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies and has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture. He was one of the founding editors of the series South Asia Across the Disciplines. He served on the Board of Experts for non-Western art for the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Center for Global Cooperation Research (Bonn and Essen) for a few years from 2012. He is also an Associate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, 2018-2022. Chakrabarty is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Foundation Prize for his contributions to global history and of the 2019 Tagore Memorial Prize awarded by the Government of West Bengal for his book The Crises of Civilization. He was awarded the degree of DLitt (Honoris Causa) by the University of London (conferred at Goldsmiths) in 2010 and an honorary doctorate by the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in 2011. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta (conferred on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute in 2011). He was elected an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2006 and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. Co-sponsored by The Park Street Corporation Speaker Series.

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Kim Stanley Robinson -Boston College Lowell Humanities Series

Wed, Mar 29, 2023

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently New York 2140, Aurora, Shaman, Green Earth, and 2312, which was a New York Times bestseller nominated for all seven of the major science fiction awards—a first for any book. He was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995 and returned in their Antarctic media program in 2016. In 2008 he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and UC San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. His work has been translated into 25 languages, and won a dozen awards in five countries, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. In 2016 he was given the Heinlein Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction, and asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.” In 2017, he was given the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. A prolific writer and speaker, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Nature, and Wired, among many others, and he has lectured at more than one hundred institutions over the last 25 years. His novel, The Ministry for the Future, was selected as one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2020. His most recent book, The High Sierra: A Love Story (May 2022) is a non-fiction exploration of Robinson’s years spent hiking and camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains, one of the most compelling places on Earth. Cosponsored by the Boston College Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies Program, the Lynch School's Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics, and English Department ### Resources [INTERVIEW - The New York Times: Ezra Klein Interviews Kim Stanley Robinson (transcript and podcast) ](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-kim-stanley-robinson.html) [REVIEW: The Guardian: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson review – how to solve the climate crisis ](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/20/the-ministry-for-the-future-by-kim-stanley-robinson-review-how-to-solve-the-climate-crisis) [OP ED/ PUBLIC WRITTING: Bostonia: Kim Stanley Robinson on the Importance of Imagination ](https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/kim-stanley-robinson-the-importance-of-imagination/) [EXCERPT : EW: Sustainability is possible in this excerpt from climate change novel The Ministry for the Future]( https://ew.com/books/the-ministry-for-the-future-chapter-excerpt/)

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Natsu Saito: Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists

Thu, Oct 06, 2022

Taking Indigenous sovereignty seriously can help dismantle the structural racism encountered by other people of color in the United States. Natsu Taylor Saito's book, _Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists,_ provides a timely analysis of structural racism at the intersection of law and colonialism. Noting the grim racial realities still confronting communities of color, and how they have not been alleviated by constitutional guarantees of equal protection, this book suggests that settler colonial theory provides a more coherent understanding of what causes and what can help remediate racial disparities. By providing a functional analysis that links disparate forms of oppression, this book makes the case for the oft-cited proposition that racial justice is indivisible, focusing particularly on the importance of acknowledging and contesting the continued colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands. ([Book review on Perlego](https://www.perlego.com/book/1364570/settler-colonialism-race-and-the-law-why-structural-racism-persists-pdf?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&campaignid=15825112969&adgroupid=132780871355&gclid=CjwKCAjw7eSZBhB8EiwA60kCW0AkGCT0O6l1i5HilKV1s8cLAXB0Tk20XaCYvSIRbVyrLPK_c7BYnRoCL5IQAvD_BwE) ) Cosponsored by the [Boston College Center for Human Rights and International Justice.

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Drug Use for Grownups: A Human Rights Perspective

Thu, Nov 14, 2019

Dr. Carl Hart is currently investigating the behavioral and neuropharmacological effects of psychoactive drugs in human research participants. A major focus of his laboratory-based research is to understand factors that mediate drug self-administration behavior and to develop effective treatments.

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