Upcoming Lectures & Talks
31 upcoming lectures and talks from Boston College, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All lectures in Greater Boston →
Tue Oct 6 · 4:15pm
Ines Županov, senior research fellow emerita at the CNRS, receives the 2026 George E. Ganss SJ Award and gives a lecture called 'Truth and Storytelling'. Županov works on the Jesuit missions in South Asia and early modern Catholic missionary writing. The Feore series brings leading Jesuit Studies scholars to the university.
Tue Oct 6 · 5:30pm
William Ajayi, a clinically trained psychologist who has advised senior executives at Netflix, Google and YouTube on organisational health, runs the Brennan Symposium on moving from self-doubt to authentic leadership. His work spans mental health provision, benefits strategy, crisis response and workforce performance at large scale.
Thu Oct 8 – Sun Oct 11
Thu Oct 8 · 9:30am / Fri Oct 9 · 9:30am / Sat Oct 10 · 9am / Sun Oct 11 · 9am
A four-day conference on how revelation might be recognised: whether experiences of God can be told apart from aesthetic or other “transcendent” phenomena, and what hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches add to the propositional accounts of contemporary religious epistemology. Sessions run at Boston College and the Dover Retreat Center, co-sponsored by BC's theology and philosophy departments, Fordham University and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Registration is required.
Thu Oct 8 · 4pm
The Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy opens its 2026–27 theme, Democracy at Scale, which asks which problems democracies should solve locally, nationally or supranationally, “and, crucially, who decides?” The featured speaker is Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 2013 to 2022, now a professor at Howard Law School and author of On the Courthouse Lawn. Registration required; reception follows.
Thu Oct 8 · 5pm
Kirk J. Schneider, an existential-humanistic psychologist, makes the case for the “vibrant center,” an “awe-based alternative” to both the polarization and the “deadening moderation” of the times, the subject of his new book The Vibrant Center: A New Consciousness for Our Broken Age. Schneider, president of the Existential-Humanistic Institute and adjunct faculty at Saybrook University, also wrote The Polarized Mind and The Spirituality of Awe.
Wed Oct 14 · 11:00am
A lecture making the case for secession — that the divisions in the United States now run deep enough to make national politics unworkable, and that a negotiated separation between blue and red states would do less damage than continuing. The argument is presented as provocative by the university's own billing.
Wed Oct 14 · 5:00pm
Méabh Ní Fhuartháin gives the Dalsimer Lecture on Moving Hearts, the band whose first album appeared in 1981, reading it against the political, social and environmental pressures in Ireland at the opening of a decade that turned out to be a violent one. She is an alumna of the programme hosting her.
Wed Oct 14 · 7:00pm
Emily Knox, interim dean of the School of Information Sciences at Illinois, on book banning in American public schools and libraries — who brings the challenges, what happens procedurally once one is filed, and how the current wave compares with earlier ones. She researches information access, intellectual freedom and censorship.
Tue Oct 20 · 4:30pm
Colleen Shogan was the eleventh Archivist of the United States and the first woman appointed by a president and confirmed by the Senate to run the National Archives. A political scientist and author, she talks about leading the institution that holds the country's records, and about civics education.
Wed Oct 21 · 5:00pm
A talk on far-right mobilisation across Ireland, north and south — anti-immigration protests, disinformation campaigns, online radicalisation and the targeted harassment of public figures — and on how closely those developments track the wider European pattern rather than arising from anything specifically Irish about the two jurisdictions.
Wed Oct 21 · 7:00pm
Arline Geronimus coined the term 'weathering' for the physical toll that systemic racism and class disadvantage take on the body. Her book Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society draws on more than thirty years of research to argue that how a society treats people shapes their health and ageing.
Thu Oct 22 – Fri Oct 23 · 10am
Thu Oct 22 / Fri Oct 23 · 10am
A two-day conference for the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations brings Smith scholars together with experts on Catholic Social Thought. Harvard's Benjamin Friedman, author of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, gives the first plenary lecture and Jennifer Herdt of Yale Divinity School the second, "The Myth of Endless Growth and the Forfeiture of Happiness." Panelists include Charles Griswold of Boston University and Samuel Fleischacker.
Thu Oct 22 · 5:00pm
Pamela Nadell of American University and Flora Cassen of Brandeis, both historians of Jewish life, compare antisemitism in America and in Europe across past and present — whether the rise is the same phenomenon in both places or whether the different histories produce genuinely different things. Attendable in person or online.
Thu Oct 22 · 5:30pm
Fr Litoing SJ begins from a Fulani saying — the fire that cooks for the traveller never goes out — and builds from Sahelian traditions of hospitality toward a theology of welcome, treating African practice as a source for Christian thought rather than an illustration of it.
Mon Oct 26 · 11:30am
Peter De Costa of Michigan State speaks in the Lynch School's series on care and 'tough love' in the language classroom, and on using technology to teach through discomfort. The framing comes from Paulo Freire's humanising pedagogy, which treats education as oriented toward social justice rather than neutral transmission.
Wed Oct 28 · 5:00pm
A panel marking the first volume of the Atlas of Irish Sport from University College Cork Press, edited by John Crowley, Mike Cronin, Cormack Moore and Charlie Roche. It follows the same press's Atlas of the Irish Revolution and Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, which mapped their subjects rather than narrating them.
Wed Oct 28 · 7:00pm
Victoria Chang reads in the Lowell Humanities Series. Her recent collections include Tree of Knowledge and With My Back to the World, which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection; she also wrote OBIT, built from obituaries written after her mother's death, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief.
Thu Oct 29 · 5pm
Kate Williams, CEO of 1% for the Planet, talks about leadership; in more than a decade at its head she has grown the network's certified contributions to environmental causes past $939 million. Afterward she joins sociologist Juliet Schor and accounting professor Mary Ellen Carter for a fireside chat. The Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics presents it with the Environmental Studies Program and two other campus programs.
Fri Oct 30 · 10am
A one-day conference for research from underrepresented scholars and perspectives in the psychological and social sciences, presented by Marginalia Science and Boston College's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. Three early-career keynote speakers, a data blitz, poster sessions and roundtables on professional development make up the day. Faculty, researchers and students in psychology, sociology, education, political science, philosophy, neuroscience and related fields may attend; registration is free.
Wed Nov 4 · 5:00pm
Yutian Li speaks on resilience practices for young people facing mental health difficulties, under the title 'Healing in Community'. She arrived in the United States at eleven without English and has since given keynotes at the Massachusetts State House, MIT and Boston Children's Hospital as a human rights and youth advocate.
Wed Nov 4 · 7:00pm
Kate Crawford argues that artificial intelligence is a technology of extraction — of minerals, labour and data — rather than an abstraction running in the cloud. Her Atlas of AI was named a book of the year by the Financial Times, won three international prizes and has been translated into fourteen languages. She teaches at USC and founded the Knowing Machines group.
Thu Nov 5 · 11:00am
An account of Boston College's new interdisciplinary Design Studies minor and the Design Commons Collective built around it, both aimed at getting students to work across disciplines on problems that have no settled answer and to test ideas while the uncertainty is still there rather than after it resolves.
Tue Nov 10 · 7:00pm
Rita Charon founded the field of narrative medicine, which trains clinicians to read patients' accounts of illness as closely as a literary scholar reads a text. She holds an MD from Harvard and a PhD in English from Columbia, and speaks here on the phenomenology, aesthetics and science underlying the discipline.
Thu Nov 12 · 4:30pm
Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, chair of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies at Northeastern University, reads Edwidge Danticat's novel Claire of the Sea Light as one of her most deliberate portrayals of Haitian girlhood. She treats the title character as both visible and invisible, a doubleness that invokes a Vodou epistemology of balance. It is a New Directions lecture for African and African Diaspora Studies.
Fri Nov 13 · 12:00pm
L. Callid Keefe-Perry, who directs vocational discernment and ministerial readiness at Brite Divinity School, argues that 'work-life balance' sets ministers up to fail by holding out a static perfection nobody reaches. The session forms the annual Ministry Renewal Day and is aimed at people doing that work.
Mon Nov 16 · 4:30pm
Boris Lanin, a historian of Russian and East European utopian and dystopian literature, shaped how literature was taught in Russian schools until Putin's government banned his textbooks and forced him to emigrate. His series of school literature textbooks was published by Ventana-Graf. He now teaches at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, and lectures on why and how Russian schools teach literature.
Wed Nov 18 · 11:00am
Type 2 diabetes has gone within a few generations from rare to America's seventh leading cause of death, with more than one in ten Americans diagnosed and at least a hundred million more prediabetic. The lecture argues that the one-size-fits-all public health response has not worked and proposes what should replace it.
Wed Nov 18 · 5:00pm
East Germany opened its secret police archive to the people it had spied on after 1989, and that decision became the model for rights-based access to state records elsewhere. This panel sets it beside Ireland's National Centre for Research and Remembrance, and asks what opening intimate and painful files does for individuals and for a country.
Wed Dec 2 · 11:00am
Karen Bullock sets out the difference between hospice and palliative care — a distinction many families meet for the first time under pressure — and covers advance care planning as something done over time rather than at a crisis point, including how preferences for future treatment get recorded and revisited.
Wed Dec 16 · 11:00am
Retirement is generally treated as permanent, and for a substantial share of people it is not: they leave the labour force and later return. The lecture gives current figures on how large that group is and works through the reasons people go back, which are not only financial.
Thu Jan 21 · 4:30pm
Ted Widmer discusses his latest book, The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text. Widmer, a Distinguished Lecturer at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, formerly directed Brown’s John Carter Brown Library and was a senior advisor to President Bill Clinton. His Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington won the 2020 Lincoln Forum Book Prize, and he helped create the New York Times’s Disunion series on the Civil War.
