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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

Caitlin Dickerson: Deported: The Price of Our Prosperity

Wed, Oct 29, 2025

Caitlin Dickerson is an award-winning investigative reporter and feature writer for The Atlantic. She won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Over nearly 15 years in journalism, Dickerson has also been awarded a Peabody, Edward R Murrow, Livingston, and Silvers-Dudley Prize for her writing and reporting. Before joining The Atlantic, she spent nearly five years as a reporter at The New York Times and five years as a producer and investigative reporter for NPR. Dickerson has reported on immigration, history, politics, and race in four continents and 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.

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

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Poetry Days Presents: An Evening with Philip Metres

Wed, Oct 22, 2025

Philip Metres is the author of twelve 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 professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. He lives with his family in Cleveland, Ohio.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Poetry Days Series.

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

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Tiya Miles: Eco-Consciousness in the Lives of Enslaved Black Women

Wed, Oct 8, 2025

Tiya Miles' scholarship examines enslavement in the U.S. South. In this lecture, she discusses the stories of several enslaved, Black women who drew upon their experiences and relationships with the natural world to find hope and help them achieve the lives they imagined.

Miles has consulted with colleagues at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Indigenous intertwined past, including, most recently, the “Fabric of a Nation” quilt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

She is a MacArthur Genius and an award-winning author who has published eleven books, essays and reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, as well as other publications. Her time-bridge novel The Cherokee Rose, is a ghost story set in the plantation South.

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This lecture is co-sponsored by Boston College 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.

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

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Melissa Lane: "Plato’s Republic on Motivating Ecological Guardianship"

Thu, Sep 18, 2025

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where she is also Associated Faculty in Classics and in Philosophy, and has received the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Stanley J. Kelley Teaching Award of the Department of Politics, and the Faculty Community Engagement Award of the Pace Center for Civic Engagement.

She currently also holds a three-year appointment dedicated to delivering periodic public lectures in London as the fiftieth Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Classics, as well as fellowships and visiting professorships at a number of institutions including the ANU, Auckland, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the American Academy in Rome, and the École Normale Supérieure. Lane was educated in Californian public schools, then at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, where she received an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy and then taught for fifteen years before moving to Princeton in 2009.

Her most recent monograph, titled Of Rule and Office: Plato's Ideas of the Political and published in 2023 by Princeton University Press, was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy; her 2012 book Eco-Republic continues to be widely discussed. Lane has appeared multiple times on ‘In Our Time’ on BBC Radio Four, and been published in periodicals in the US, UK, Italy and Germany.

This lecture is supported by an ILA Major Grant.

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

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Ricardo Nuila: The People's Hospital

Wed, Sep 10, 2025

Dr. Nuila is an associate professor of medicine, medical ethics, and health policy at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab (HEAL) 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 fellowships for his writing from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Logan Nonfiction Program, and the Texas Institute of Letters. His features and essays have appeared in Texas Monthly, The New York Times Sunday Review, VQR, The Atlantic, and The New England Journal of Medicine. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Guernica, and other magazines.

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, TX, 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.

The Lowell Humanities Series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, Boston College's Institute for the Liberal Arts, and the Provost's Office.
Cosponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series.

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Fiction Days Presents Anne Berest: “Family Fictions: The Postcard, Gabriële, and Writing True Novels”

Wed, Apr 23, 2025

Anne Berest’s first novel to appear in English, The Postcard, was a national bestseller, a Library Journal, NPR, and TIME Best Book of the Year, a Vogue Most Anticipated Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Goncourt Prize in France. It was described as “stunning” by Leslie Camhi in The New Yorker, as a “powerful literary work” by Julie Orringer in The New York Times Book Review, and as “intimate, profound, essential” in ELLE magazine. With her sister Claire Berest, she is also the author of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed, best-selling “true novel” based on the life of her great-grandmother Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, wife of Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse, a leader of the French Resistance, and an art critic. Berest lives in Paris with her family.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Fiction Days Series.

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

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Katherine McKittrick: “A Poetics of Declension”

Wed, Mar 19, 2025

Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, where she researches in areas of Black studies, anti-colonial studies, and critical-creative methodologies. She has authored multiple articles and is a former editor at Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Her books include Dear Science and Other Stories and Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. She also edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Recent and forthcoming projects include the limited-edition boxset Trick Not Telos, a collaboration with Liz Ikriko and Cristian Ordóñez, and the tryptic honoring NourbeSe Philip On the Declension of Beauty. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from York University.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Program in African and African Diaspora Studies.

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Arthur Frank: “Polyphonic Suffering: Reading Shakespeare to Respond to Illness”

Wed, Mar 12, 2025

Arthur Frank is professor emeritus at the University of Calgary, Canada. Since his retirement in 2013, he has been Professor II at VID Specialized University in Oslo, visiting professor in the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, and Francqui Fellow at the University of Ghent. His books on illness experience, ethics, clinical care, and narrative include At the Will of the Body, The Wounded Storyteller, The Renewal of Generosity, Letting Stories Breathe, and most recently King Lear: Shakespeare’s Dark Consolations as part of Oxford’s “My Reading” series. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and winner of the Society’s medal in bioethics. He has also been recognized with a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Bioethics Society.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics.

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John McNeill: “The Industrial Revolution as Global Environmental History”

Wed, Apr 2, 2025

Since 1985, John McNeill has taught history at Georgetown University. He has received two Fulbright awards, a Guggenheim fellowship, a MacArthur grant, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He has had visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Universities of Oslo, Bologna, Canterbury, Otago, and was a Guest Professor at Peking University. Since 2011, he has served as a member of the Anthropocene Working Group. He has served as President of the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association.

He has authored or co-authored eight books including The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History and Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World, which was the co-winner of book prizes from the World History Association and the Forest History Society and runner-up for the BP Natural World Book Prize. It was listed by The Times among the best science books ever written and translated into nine languages. His book Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 won the Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association. His most recent books are The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene, 1945–2015, The Webs of Humankind, and Sea & Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean. He has edited or co-edited 17 other books. He is co-editor of the Cambridge book series Studies in Environment and History.

Cosponsored by the Boston College History Department and the University Core Curriculum.

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Annual Candlemas Lecture: Graham Ward: “Loneliness: A Theological Appraisal"

Wed, Feb 5, 2025

Graham Ward is the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and Extraordinary Professor of Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology at the University of Stellenbosch. Among his books are Cities of God, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice, True Religion, Christ and Culture, The Politics of Discipleship, Unbelievable, and Unimaginable. For the last ten years he has been working on Ethical Life, a major four-volume systematic theology, which includes two already-published volumes How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal and the upcoming Salus.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Theology Department.

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

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Boston College