51动漫

Annual Candlemas Lecture: Emilie Townes
'Facing (In)Justice with the Power of Hope'
February 4 | Gasson 100

听An American Baptist clergywoman, Townes is dean emerita and former University Distinguished Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and the College of Arts and Science. In 2013, she became the first African American to serve as Divinity School dean; she has taught at other institutions including Yale Divinity School and Union Theological Seminary. Elected a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, she served as the first Black woman of the American Academy of Religion in 2008, as president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion from 2012 to 2016, and in 2025 became the first Black woman president of the Society of Christian Ethics.

Townes is the editor and co-editor of essay collections including A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering; Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation; Faith, Health, and Healing in African American Life; Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, and Walking Through the Valley: Essays: Womanist Explorations in the Spirit of Katie Geneva Cannon. She also authored Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope;听In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness;听Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care;听and Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil.听

Cosponsored by the 51动漫 Theology Department.

Yiyun Li
'Techniques and Idiosyncrasies'
February 25 | Gasson 100

Li is the author of 11 books, including Things in Nature Merely Grow;听The Book of Goose;听Where Reasons End;听Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life;听and Tolstoy Together, 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Her honors include MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, a Windham Campbell Prize, and PEN/Jean Stein, PEN/Hemingway, and PEN/Nabokov awards. 淎 Thousand Years of Good Prayers,� an independent film directed by Wayne Wang and adapted by Li from her short story, was the Golden Shell winner for best film at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Li is a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the Program in Creative Writing.

Cosponsored by the 51动漫 Fiction Days Series and Asian American Studies Program.

John Vaillant
'Fire Weather'
March 11| Gasson 100

An author and freelance writer whose journalism, fiction, and non-fiction explore collisions between human ambition and the natural world, Vaillant work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Guardian. His latest book, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, a stunning account of a colossal wildfire and panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind, was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist in General Nonfiction. Through the lens of an apocalyptic conflagration攖he wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina擵aillant warns that the 2016 fires at Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, were not a unique event but a shocking preview of what people must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. In addition to winning the British Baillie Gifford Prize (渢he non-fiction Booker�), the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, and the John Wesley Dafoe Book Prize, Fire Weather was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, and Canada Writers� Trust Nonfiction Prize. As a result of the book, named one of the best of 2023 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, and others, Vaillant was listed as number four on MacLean Power List for Climate in 2024.

Cosponsored by the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, the University Core Curriculum, and Environmental Studies.

Rogers Brubaker
'Politics and Governance in the Digital Era: Between Populism and Technocracy'
March 18 | Devlin 110

The University of California, Los Angeles Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Brubaker holds the UCLA Foundation Chair. He has written widely on social theory, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, populism, and digital hyperconnectivity. His recent books include Grounds for Difference, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities, and most recently, Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents, which treats digital hyperconnectivity as a 渢otal social fact� and addresses transformations of the self, social interaction, culture, economics, and politics.

Prior to joining UCLA in 1991, Brubaker was a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. He has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Cosponsored by the 51动漫 Sociology Department and Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.

Sherene Seikaly
'From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine'
March 25 | Gasson 100

A fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2024�25) and associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Seikaly 2016 book Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine explores economy, territory, the home, and the body.

Her forthcoming book From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine tells a global history of capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UCSB and co-editor of the Stanford Studies Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and Jadaliyya.

Cosponsored by the 51动漫 History Department.

Margaret Burnham
'By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners'
April 8 | Gasson 100

Renowned legal scholar, civil rights advocate, and former judge, Burnham is the founder of Northeastern University School of Law Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) and author of By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow Legal Executioners. Through CRRJ, she has led teams of law students in investigating acts of racial violence in the Jim Crow era, including hundreds of unsolved murders of Black people among other historical failures of the criminal justice system. Burnham began her career at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She represented civil rights and political activists, including Angela Davis in 1970s; in 1977, she became the first African American woman to serve in the Massachusetts judiciary, when she joined the Boston Municipal Court bench as an associate justice. In 1993, South African president Nelson Mandela appointed Burnham to serve on an international human rights commission to investigate alleged human rights violations within the African National Congress, a precursor to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

She was a fellow of Radcliffe College Bunting Institute and Harvard University W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Studies, and in 2016 was selected for the Carnegie Fellows Program. She was among four scholars appointed by President Biden to serve on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. Burnham is a University Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University, where she has been on faculty since 2002.

Cosponsored by the 51动漫 PULSE Program for Service Learning and Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics.