Upcoming Lectures & Talks
19 upcoming lectures and talks from Boston University, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All lectures in Greater Boston →
Tue Oct 6 · 3:00pm
Seth Gershenson, an economist of education at American University, takes the second of BU's autumn education policy seminars. His research covers teacher expectations, the effects of matching students with same-race teachers, and absenteeism. The series is aimed at an academic audience and includes detailed discussion, but the department has opened it to the public.
Tue Oct 6 · 7pm
Akemi Martin, a master papermaker with 20 years of collaborating with artists on limited editions in handmade paper, speaks at the invitation of BU’s MFA Painting program. Formerly Creative Director of Pace Paper and Artistic Collaborator at Dieu Donné, she has worked with Robert Ryman, Shepard Fairey and Derek Fordjour, and on over 100 projects with sculptor Leonardo Drew. She runs her own studio in Lincoln.
Wed Oct 7 · 6:00pm
Mark A. Johnson discusses American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon, which follows bacon from early modern Britain through the Civil War, fad diets and today's craft producers, tying it to race, class and gender. Johnson, a historian of the U.S. South and African American history, also wrote An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue and Rough Tactics. Part of BU's Pépin Lecture Series, and also streamed on Zoom.
Wed Oct 14 · 7:00pm
Christina Michelon, the Museum of Fine Arts' curator of prints and drawings, speaks in the 808 Gallery as part of the Boston Printmakers 2026 North American Print Biennial. The talk is free and drop-in, with no booking, and takes the works currently hanging in the biennial as its subject.
Tue Oct 20 · 3:00pm
Christina Weiland studies early childhood education and has evaluated Boston's public pre-kindergarten programme over many years. She takes the third seminar in BU's autumn education policy series, run by the Wheelock Educational Policy Center. The sessions are built for an academic audience with extended discussion, and are open to anyone who wants to attend.
Tue Oct 20 · 5:00pm
Artists Mickey Smith, Anne Eastman, Clare Strand and Toni Pepe discuss Between the Bylines with Susan Bright moderating. The exhibition, in BU's Stone Gallery, gathers fourteen artists who take the newspaper as material and subject — a form whose physical daily existence is now largely behind it.
Wed Oct 21 · 6:00pm
Madhushree Ghosh discusses Safar: Finding Home, History, and Culture through Punjabi Food in the American West, which blends memoir and history to follow South Asian refugees and immigrants who settled the Southwest as farmers, truck drivers and diner cooks, told through four Punjabi women and their recipes. Ghosh, who holds a PhD in biochemistry, wrote Khabaar and founded the literary salon and supper club KhabaarCo.
Wed Oct 21 · 7:00pm
Tam Ochiai, born in Yokohama and working in New York since the early nineties, speaks in BU's Tuesday Night Lecture Series, organised by the MFA Painting programme. He has shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions over three decades, with a further one-person show opening at Ulrik in New York.
Sat Oct 24 · 3pm
Artists exhibiting in the Boston Printmakers 2026 North American Print Biennial give a series of short talks about their work. Esther Adler, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, juried the show, choosing 120 prints from 2017 entries: etching, lithography, woodcut, linocut, screenprint, digital printmaking, artists' books and dimensional works by emerging and established artists from across North America. The exhibition runs through November 21.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:00pm
Coral Saucedo Lomeli, born in Mexico City and now working in Brooklyn, talks about work that takes material relationships, labour and failing systems as its subject, drawing on domestic objects, the city, poetry and craft. BU's MFA Sculpture programme organises the lecture in the Tuesday Night series.
Tue Nov 3 · 7:00pm
Josephine Halvorson paints from direct observation, in real time and on site — the work is made in front of the thing it depicts, and is as much about the act of noticing as the object noticed. She also works in sculpture. BU's MFA Painting programme organises the lecture.
Wed Nov 4 · 12:00pm
Jelena Diab Golubović discusses Inner Zone, on the violence committed inside besieged Sarajevo rather than from the hills around it — a history the city's own account of the siege largely leaves out. She is assistant professor of anthropology and international affairs and did her fieldwork across the former Yugoslavia.
Sun Nov 8 · 5:00pm
Rhiannon Giddens talks about her life and work in BU’s Center for the Humanities public conversation series, which asks artists about ethics and the imagination. A singer and multi-instrumentalist, Giddens co-founded the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music with Michael Abels for the opera Omar. Admission is free, with registration to ensure a seat.
Tue Nov 10 · 6pm
Artist Lucy Kim, associate professor of art at Boston University, discusses her work across painting, sculpture and biological media with Narayan Khandekar, director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums. Kim won the 2017 ICA Boston James and Audrey Foster Prize and a 2022 Creative Capital Award for printing images with bacteria genetically modified to produce melanin. A Q&A and reception follow.
Tue Nov 10 · 7:00pm
Elizabeth Rudy oversees the Harvard Art Museums' print collection, which runs from the Renaissance to the present, and juried the 2023 North American Print Biennial. She returns to talk about the prints in this year's show, at BU's 808 Gallery, working from the objects on the wall rather than a prepared survey.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:30pm
The novelist Claire Messud gives a reading and audience Q&A as Boston University's Ha Jin Visiting Lecturer, with a reception, book sale and signing to follow. Messud is the author of the best-selling The Emperor's Children and The Woman Upstairs, and teaches creative writing at Harvard.
Tue Nov 17 · 7:00pm
Carrie Yamaoka works across painting, drawing, sculpture and photography, on surfaces and their topography, the tactility of what is barely visible, and the run of planned and accidental events that decides how a piece ends up. BU's MFA Painting and Sculpture programmes organise the lecture together.
Thu Dec 3 · 7:30pm
The poet Claudia Rankine gives a reading in Boston University's Bay State Road Reading Series, followed by a catered reception and a book signing. Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, and a MacArthur Fellow.
Sat Dec 5 – Sun Dec 6 · 11am
Sat Dec 5 / Sun Dec 6 · 11am
MICE brings several hundred independent comics artists and small presses to BU's School of Visual Arts for a weekend of tabling, panels and workshops. It is the largest event of its kind in New England and is free to attend, with the programme aimed at readers and makers rather than collectors.
