Lowell Humanities Series

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Lowell Humanities Series Bringing distinguished writers, artists, performers, and scholars to Boston College since 1957.

“There is nothing like an author reading from his or her own works,” said Francis Sweeney, S.J., who founded what is now the Lowell Humanities Series in 1957. Among the distinguished writers, artists, performers, and scholars the series has brought to Boston College have been Robert Frost, Margaret Mead, T.S. Eliot, Maya Angelou, Robert Penn Warren, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Sontag, and Seamus Heaney.

Emily Knox is an expert on information access and intellectual freedom. In her latest project, she discusses book bannin...
10/01/2026

Emily Knox is an expert on information access and intellectual freedom. In her latest project, she discusses book banning in public schools and libraries. By tracing the marked increase in requests for the redaction, removal, relocation, and restriction of books in the 2020s, she asks how contemporary reading practices and interpretive strategies can lead to censorship.

Jeremy Frey comes from a long line of indigenous weavers, learning traditional Wabanaki methods from his mother and an a...
09/23/2026

Jeremy Frey comes from a long line of indigenous weavers, learning traditional Wabanaki methods from his mother and an apprenticeship at the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. Frey creates vessels woven from natural materials that he himself forages, such as sweetgrass and wood from black ash trees.

Legal scholar Margaret Burnham will discuss her acclaimed book By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, an acc...
04/01/2026

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...
03/19/2026

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 Di...
03/13/2026

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...
03/03/2026

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 “Techn...
02/19/2026

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.

02/02/2026

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....
02/02/2026

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 com...
11/03/2025

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.

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Chestnut Hill, MA

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