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“First, let me thank you for warning me we’re being taped, and we know where the machine and recording is,” Former White House Counsel to President Richard Nixon John Dean said. Dean and Nixon historian Timothy Naftali discussed the Watergate Scandal and its greater impact on American government and society last night at Kresge Auditorium.
On Monday afternoon, Alexa McCarthy ’09 returned to Bowdoin to speak about her research on handmade blue paper in the Baroque period in a talk sponsored by the Department of Art History and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA).
Dr. David Badre, a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University—and whose name is pronounced “better”—delivered a talk entitled “How Our Brains Get Things Done” last night. The lecture shares a name with his 2020 book, which a book club of around 30 students, led by Stephanie Dailey ’23, recently read.
The Department of Environmental Studies (ES) celebrated its 50th anniversary with a symposium honoring the legacy of the coordinate major and exploring its future at Bowdoin. Last Thursday evening, Teona Willaims ’12 kicked off the symposium with a keynote lecture on her journey as an environmental justice advocate at Bowdoin and her current work as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the geography department at Rutgers University.
Yesterday evening, 15 students were joined by Associate Professor of Digital Humanities Crystal Hall for an informal discussion on one of this year’s most contentious topics: artificial intelligence (AI). The discussion, hosted by the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common Good and MacMillan House, centered around questions regarding the biases of AI programs, potential interferences with the creative process and proper uses of the technology.
On Tuesday night, Professor of Romance Languages and Literature Hanétha Vété-Congolo gave her inaugural lecture as the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow chair on the influence of language on the history of the Caribbean, entitled “Ethicalizing Caribbean Thought: An African Contribution.” The endowed chair is granted to an exemplary faculty member for their research and dedication to the studies of romance language.
Aleksandra Cichocka, a professor of political psychology at the University of Kent in Canterbury, U.K., believes that psychology has failed to account for narcissistic behaviors in rising right-wing populists. In the VAC Beam classroom Monday, Cichocka explained that for the past half century, researchers have largely believed that selfish desire is the primary motivator of human behavior.
Last night, Teona Williams ’12, environmental activist and current presidential postdoctoral fellow in the geography department at Rutgers University, gave the keynote address to commemorate 50 years of Environmental Studies (ES) at the College. An environmental studies-history coordinate major and Africana studies minor, Williams returned to Bowdoin in Kresge Auditorium to speak about her interdisciplinary approach to her work and teaching at the intersection of environmental and racial justice.
As a continuation of a series highlighting Joseph McKeen 2022–23 visiting Fellow Toshi Reagon, artists Daniel Minter and Abigail DeVille convened in front of an eager audience in Kresge auditorium on Wednesday evening to discuss their art and involvement in Parable Path Maine, an organization dedicated to artistic expression and community engagement based on Octavia E.
Though roughly two millennia and 4000 miles separate present-day Bowdoin from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the text assumed new life on Wednesday evening as Stephanie McCarter, a professor of classical languages at the Sewanee: the University of the South, delivered a lecture on her 2022 translation of the Roman epic.
This past Monday, dozens of current and former students, faculty members and other community members filled Kresge Auditorium to celebrate the career of Professor of Art Mark Wethli. Wethli gave a talk in honor of his career at Bowdoin entitled “Arrivals & Departures: An Artist’s Talk,” where he enumerated eighteen vignettes that framed his career at Bowdoin through a term he referred to as “patterns of making.” The talk was varied in style, including everything from Wethli recalling the story of the life-sized model of a Piper Cub aircraft he created out of wood with his father to him reading singular jokes, which were met with laughter from the audience as he delved into his next topics without pausing.
For Frank Drummond, a professor of insect ecology at the University of Maine, Orono, studying bees represents not only a career, but a lifelong passion. “I started raising honey bees when I was 12,” Drummond said.
Editor’s note 04/07/2023 at 1:26 p.m.: This article mistakingly reported that Abby Wang ’23 is an ASA co-president. This version of the article has been corrected to reflect that Jacey Song ’23 is co-president. As the weather warms and the days grow longer, the Asian Students Alliance (ASA) is celebrating Asian and Pacific Islander History Month.
When Marpheen Chann tells people that his first book is a memoir, he is usually met with confusion. “I kind of get this quizzical look,” Chann said. “‘You wrote a memoir at age 30, 31?’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ve experienced a lot.’” Chann is a gay, first-generation Cambodian adoptee of a white, Christian, working-class Maine family.
On Tuesday evening, the Department of Psychology invited Harvard Medical School assistant professor and Massachusetts General Hospital clinical psychologist Dr. Kate Bentley to campus. In her lecture, Bentley presented her ongoing research on identifying risk factors for suicide and using technology to predict and prevent suicide attempts.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Kathryn Huether delivered a lecture on Wednesday entitled “Sounding Trauma, Mediating Memory: Holocaust Economy and the Politics of Sound.” The talk centered on how Holocaust memorial sites employ music and human voices to elicit emotions in attendees and how musical signifiers of the Holocaust have infiltrated popular culture.
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.
