Lowell Humanities Series
A wide range of leading voices in the humanities—representing social history, art, poetry, psychology, sociology, and more—will be welcomed to campus this fall by the venerable Boston College Lowell Humanities Series, which begins on September 11.
“As usual, we have aimed for diverse fields in the humanities, and I'm especially thrilled that almost all of our speakers work in multiple genres or address more than one discipline,” said Professor of History Sylvia Sellers-García, who now leads the series following an interim directorship during the last academic year. “These talented thinkers demonstrate how some of the most influential work in the humanities is not neatly contained by disciplinary boundaries.
"With the upcoming presidential election, I was hoping to feature speakers that could address politics in imaginative ways,” she added. “Orna Guralnik's lecture will focus on how politics affects our interpersonal relationships, and Reuben Jonathan Miller will address the important topic of voting rights. I hope this year's lectures will stimulate rewarding conversations both in and out of the classroom.”
All events—which are co-sponsored by a number of University departments, programs, and initiatives—begin at 7:00 p.m. and will take place in Gasson 100.
Amy Stanley
Amy Stanley
“Stranger in the Shogun’s City: From the Archive to the Page”
September 11
A social historian of early modern and modern Japan with special interests in global history, women's and gender history, and narrative, Stanley is the Wayne V. Jones Research Professor of History at Northwestern University. Her most recent book, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, won the biography categories of the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN/America Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
She also is the author of Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan, and articles in the American Historical Review, The Journal of Japanese Studies, and The Journal of Asian Studies.
Stanley has held fellowships at the Guggenheim Foundation, Japan Foundation, Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, and National Endowment for the Humanities.
Cosponsored by the BC History Department and the Asian American Studies Program.
Rita Duffy
Rita Duffy
“You Can’t Hope for a Better Past”
September 25
A Belfast native, Duffy is one of Ireland's groundbreaking visual artists. Her public art projects include Thaw, inspired by the Belfast ship Titanic, which explored Belfast’s relationship with the iceberg and aimed to connect local experiences of colonialism and sectarianism with a universal climate crisis.
In 2011, she was awarded a fellowship to work at her alma mater, the University of Ulster, in its Transitional Justice Institute. She was honored for her contribution to visual arts in Ireland and elected to Aosdana, Ireland’s “people of the arts.” In 2024, she was appointed the Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Irish South Africa Research Chair at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Recent projects include Soften the Border and The Raft. She has held residencies at Trinity College Dublin and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Her work is held in museum and private collections worldwide, while her public art projects continue to grow and explore issues of female identity, history and politics, and borders.
Cosponsored by Irish Studies at Boston College and the Art, Art History, and Film Department.
Camille Dungy
Poetry Days Presents Camille Dungy
“Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden”
October 9
The most recent of Dungy’s four collections of poetry, Trophic Cascade, won the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.
A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, her other honors include National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, and many other anthologies. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.
Cosponsored by the Boston College Poetry Days Series, American Studies Program, and English Department.
Orna Guralnik
Orna Guralnik
“Love and Ideology”
October 16
A clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in New York, Guralnik is on the faculty at New York University and at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, where she teaches courses on the trans-generational transmission of trauma, socio-politics/ideology and psychoanalysis, and dissociation. She lectures and publishes on topics of couples’ treatment and culture, dissociation and depersonalization, culture and psychoanalysis.
Guralnik is on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender & Sexuality and co-founder of the Center for the Study of Dissociation and Depersonalization at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She has completed the filming of several seasons of Showtime’s documentary series Couples Therapy.
Cosponsored by the Boston College Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics.
Reuben Jonathan Miller
Reuben Jonathan Miller
“Mass Incarceration, Voting Rights, and Citizenship”
November 13
MacArthur fellow and sociologist at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice, Miller is the author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. As a chaplain at Cook County Jail in Chicago and a sociologist studying mass incarceration, he has spent years alongside prisoners, formerly incarcerated people, their families and friends, to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. His work reveals that life after incarceration is its own form of prison.
Miller also is an American Bar Foundation research professor and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a New America and Rockefeller Foundation fellow, and University of Texas at Austin and Dartmouth College visiting scholar.
Cosponsored by the PULSE Program for Service Learning, Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, Forum on Racial Justice in America, and Sociology Department.
Sy Montgomery
Sy Montgomery: “The Secrets of the Octopus”
November 20
The author of 34 books, Montgomery has scripted, directed, and appeared in the National Geographic segments “Spell of the Tiger” and “Mother Bear Man.” Her most recent book, Secrets of the Octopus, is the companion to National Geographic’s 2024 miniseries of the same name.
Her other books include The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness—a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction, The Good Good Pig, How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals, and Becoming A Good Creature. Her books for children include Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea and Kakapo Rescue: Saving The World's Strangest Parrot, which won Silbert Medals.
She has won the New England Independent Booksellers Association Nonfiction Award, the Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award, and the Henry Bergh Award for Nonfiction.
The Lowell Humanities Series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Boston College, and the Office of the Provost and Dean of Faculties.
All events are free and open to the public. They will be on Eventbrite, an event management and ticketing website; there also will be the option to scan a QR code at the door.
For more information about the Lowell Humanities Series, visit bc.edu/lowell.