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Laughter filled Searles 315 on Wednesday evening as writer Elif Batuman read from her 2022 novel, “Either/Or,” a sequel to her 2018 Pulitzer Prize Finalist novel, “The Idiot.” “‘I had tried, on multiple occasions, to put in a tampon,’” Batuman read aloud in the voice of Selin, the novels’ protagonist.
On Tuesday night, members of the Bowdoin community dusted the snow off their jackets and poured into Kresge Auditorium for the long-awaited arrival of Alison Bechdel, who delivered this year’s Kenneth V. Santagata Memorial Lecture. Bechdel is a celebrated cartoonist and graphic memoirist whose notable works include “Dykes to Watch Out For,” “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” and “Are You My Mother?” Her graphic memoirs are considered by many to be touchstones of the form and have found particular resonance with queer audiences, so much so that “Fun Home” was adapted into a critically-acclaimed Broadway musical in 2015.
This year, hip hop celebrates its 50th anniversary. From basement block parties in the South Bronx to the Olympics at Paris 2024, hip hop as a culture has come incredibly far. This poses the exciting question of what more innovation could come in the next decade or two?
On January 9, 2022, French television broadcast a live news interview with renowned Belgian singer Paul van Haver, better known as Stromae. During the last few minutes of the broadcast, Stromae answered the final question of the interview, which was directed towards his struggles with depression, by singing his latest song “L’enfer.” A year later and 3,398 miles away in Brunswick, Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at Simon Fraser University Roxanne Panchasi hosted a talk at the College discussing the significance of the moment.
On Thursday, the Association of Bowdoin Friends and members of the Bowdoin community gathered in Moulton Union for the fourth event in their community lecture series. The guest speaker was Professor of Government Andrew Rudalevige who gave a talk entitled “The State of the Union: Trends and Tremors in American Politics.” The topic was chosen in anticipation of the State of the Union Address on February 7 and included discussions on topics such as the 2022 midterm elections, the 2023 speakers battle, recent Supreme Court cases and predictions for the 2024 election.
Yesterday, Associate Professor of Government Henry Laurence launched his book, “The Politics of Public Broadcasting in Britain and Japan: The BBC and NHK Compared.” At an event in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library’s Nixon Lounge, Laurence described the structures of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK), compared their roles in their respective countries and highlighted key moments in their histories.
On Wednesday, Artist-in-Residence Abigail DeVille explored the relationship between marginalized communities and America’s past of oppression through a lecture on her sculptures and site-specific installations. DeVille is a Halley K Harrisburg ’90 and Michael Rosenfeld Artist-in-Residence—the sixth artist to participate in this program.
The Environmental Studies department partnered with the Nature Conservancy to host a panel entitled “Women in Climate: Community” yesterday in Kresge Auditorium. State Director of the Nature Conservancy in Maine Kate Dempsey ’88 led the discussion alongside three female panelists involved in fighting climate change.
Editor’s Note November 18, 2022 at 8:52 p.m.: An earlier version of this article used the word “vindicated” meaning “to justify and to clear something from criticism.” That was not the intended meaning of that sentence as it did not represent the meaning of the event discussed.
Editor’s Note November 18, 2022 at 9:30 a.m.: An earlier version of this article was missing parts of the first paragraph. This has been corrected and is not a problem in the print edition. Author Homeira Qaderi didn’t think she could make it to the Kabul airport in time until she received a call on the final day of U.S.
On Monday evening, Dr. Charles Gammie, Professor of Astronomy and Donald Biggar Willett Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign described the mathematics behind the Event Horizon Telescope’s recent imaging of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy in Kresge Auditorium.
On Tuesday evening, students, faculty and members of the Brunswick community gathered in the Beam Classroom to hear Bukola Koiki’s talk “On Motifs and Meaning.” Koiki, who is a multimedia, fiber-focused artist, received her BFA in communication design from the University of North Texas and her MFA in applied Craft and Design from the Oregon College of Art and Pacific Northwest College of Art.
On Tuesday evening, an audience filled the Visual Art Center’s Beam Classroom to watch a screening of the one-man play “American Moor,” written and performed by Keith Hamilton Cobb, a critically acclaimed playwright and classically trained actor.
On Monday, author, journalist and conversational bridge-builder Mónica Guzmán ’05 delivered a talk at Kresge Auditorium about her best-selling book “I Never Thought About It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.” The “Fireside Chat” was hosted by the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common Good and facilitated by Alondra Romero ’24 and Samuel S.
Author, educator, classicist and tattooer Phuc Tran visited Bowdoin on Thursday as part of the Alpha Delta Phi Society’s Visiting Writers Series. After briefly overviewing his adult life and work, he read passages from his 2021 memoir “Sigh, Gone,” followed by a question-and-answer session.
On Wednesday evening, the Latin American Student Organization (LASO) hosted critically-acclaimed writer Gabby Rivera in the Kresge Auditorium as part of their celebration of Latinx Heritage Month. Rivera is the author of the young adult novel “Juliet Takes a Breath,” a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story with a queer Latin American woman as its protagonist.
Students gathered in the Shannon Room on Wednesday afternoon to hear from Magali Armillas-Tiseyra on author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s modern literary influence. Armillas-Tiseyra is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University and the author of “The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South.” In her speech, “The Legacies of the Latin American ‘Boom,’” Armillas-Tiseyra discussed the legacy of Garcia Marquez’s 1967 “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which students in a Hispanic Studies seminar on Garcia Marquez are reading now.
On Monday, the Department of Philosophy hosted Dr. Carissa Veliz, associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute of Ethics in AI and a fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. Her talk, titled “Why Privacy is Power,” used a mix of historical and modern examples to discuss the dangers of personal data collection and exploitation.
Ahead of the midterm elections this fall, the College hosted Karlyn Bowman, a distinguished senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, who discussed public opinion polling in a talk on Monday night in Kresge Auditorium.
On Thursday afternoon, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art hosted the lecture “Thinking about migration through Latinx art” given by Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Charlene Villaseñor Black.
Professor of Art at Washington University in St. Louis and publication designer Ken Botnick spoke on the creative process and structure of artist books on Wednesday afternoon. The talk was part of the “Bowdoin and the Book” lecture series in the new Special Collections Learning Lab in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.
Last night, Dr. Bettina Love, the William F. Russel Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, gave the education department’s annual Brodie Family Lecture. Her talk, entitled “We Gon’ Be Alright, But That Ain’t Right: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Education Freedom,” focused on committing to educational freedom by taking an abolitionist approach to education, moving beyond reform to create an educational system that allows all students to thrive.
Editor’s note 05/18/2022 at 12:28 p.m. EDT: A previous version of this article included the lecturer’s photograph and name in its headline. The article has been updated to remove both inclusions at the lecturer’s request. Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College Rebecca Herzig addressed the increasing conversation about and presence of trigger warnings in higher educational spaces in a lecture on Monday in the Moulton Union Main Lounge.
On Monday evening, author and photographer Teju Cole visited the College to deliver the Kenneth V. Santagata Memorial Lecture, titled “A View of A View.” Cole walked the audience through his work, ranging from his tenure as a photography critic for the New York Times to his most recent book, “Black Paper: Writing in A Dark Time.” His main interest lies in exploring the relationship between words and photographs, a topic he currently teaches at Harvard University.
On Thursday evening, glaciologist and artist Jill Pelto visited the Roux Center for the Environment to discuss her use of art to communicate ideas about climate science. The event was a collaboration between the Bowdoin Outing Club (BOC), the Earth and Oceanographic Science and the Visual Arts departments.
