Lowell Humanities Series

Legal scholar Margaret Burnham will discuss her acclaimed book By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, an account of the everyday violence of white supremacy, the legal structures that allow it, and Black resistance before the civil rights movement. She will also discuss the relevance of these cases to today, probing arguments for reparations and legal reforms.

Historian Sherene Seikaly joins the Lowell Humanities Series to present her work which offers an escape from nationalist histories and historiographies by exploring how one Palestinian man was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, an enslaver and a refugee, a figure whose trajectory from nineteenth-century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth-century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. She argues the neat divisions between the colonized and colonizer and collaborator and patriot fail to capture any of our life experiences, least of all that of one peripatetic Palestinian medical doctor.

Sociologist Rogers Brubaker joins the Lowell Humanities Series for a lecture entitled “Politics and Governance in the Digital Era: Between Populism and Technocracy.” Brubaker, who has addressed questions about ethnic, racial, and gender identities, has also theorized about society and digital hyperconnectivity. His talk will discuss the (im)possibilities for democratic governance in a hyperconnected digital communications ecology.

Writer and journalist John Vaillant joins the Lowell Humanities Series to discuss his work on the history between humans and fire and the threats posed by fire in the context of climate change and North America’s oil and gas industries, work he published in his award-winning book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World.

Acclaimed novelist, essayist, and story writer Yiyun Li joins the Lowell Humanities Series for a lecture entitled “Techniques and Idiosyncrasies.” She is the author of the novel ‘The Book of Goose,’ the short story collection ‘Wednsday’s Child,’ and the recent memoir ‘Things in Nature Merely Grow.’ Her lecture is co-sponsored by the Boston College Fiction Days Series and Asian American Studies Program.

Lowell Humanities Series The new season brings a distinguished array of speakers to campus

Emilie Townes inaugurates our spring-semester series with a lecture entitled “Facing (In)Justice with the Power of Hope.” Townes is a Baptist clergywoman and has taught at numerous divinity schools, and her scholarship has pioneered a womanist approach to theological questions.

Justine Kurland is an acclaimed photographer known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. She discusses her work in an upcoming lecture as part of the Lowell Humanities Series.

Caitlin Dickerson is an American journalist and investigative reporter for The Atlantic. Her work focuses on immigration, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. She joins the Lowell Humanities Series for a lecture entitled “Deported: The Price of Our Prosperity.”

Philip Metres is an American poet and essayist. His recent book Fugitive/Refuge follows the journey of his refugee ancestors from Lebanon to Mexico to the United States in a vivid exploration of what it means to long for home.

Tiya Miles is a historian and Professor of History at Harvard, where she works at the intersection of Black, indigenous, and women’s histories. She has become increasingly focused on ecological questions, environmental storytelling, and ways of articulating and enlivening Black environmental consciousness. Her lecture is entitled “Eco-Consciousness in the Lives of Enslaves Black Women.”

Irish poet and author Doireann Ní Ghríofa joins the Lowell Humanities Series to read from her latest book A Ghost in the Throat, the author’s prose debut that blends memoir, autofiction, and literary analysis to explore the life of an 18th-century Irish woman.