Upcoming Lectures & Talks
19 upcoming lectures and talks from Brandeis 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 · 11:00am
A community discussion built around Patricia Hill Collins's lecture 'Black Women's Intellectual Activism, Social Justice and Radical Hope', on intellectual activism as the centre of Black women's long struggle for social justice. Collins graduated from Brandeis twice, wrote Black Feminist Thought, and was the first Black woman to lead the American Sociological Association.
Tue Oct 6 · 12:30pm
Anat Ovadia-Rosner, a Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Law School, examines Israel's short-lived Ministry of Minority Affairs, set up to deal with the Palestinians who remained inside Israeli territory during the 1948 war, and argues that the institution shaped how their citizenship is understood today.
Tue Oct 6 · 7:30pm
Alice Edwards, the first woman to serve as UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, asks why some survivors are believed while others are doubted, and why sexual violence and torture remain so hard to investigate. As rapporteur she documented the October 7 attacks, called for the release of all hostages and asked Israel to investigate alleged torture of Palestinian detainees. It is the Diane Markowicz Memorial Lecture.
Wed Oct 7 · 9am
The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and Bar-Ilan University's Dinah Project convene a conference on holding perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence accountable under international law, applying those tools to women in Israel subjected to it on October 7, 2023 and as hostages, and setting the Israeli experience beside Kosovo, Rwanda and Ukraine. Panels cover international perspectives; silence and denial; radical ideologies and joint responsibility; and the Dinah Project's findings and recommendations.
Wed Oct 7 · 4:00pm
Steve Leveen, who founded the America the Bilingual Project, argues that adults well past college can become bilingual and stay that way, using what he calls the Adopted Language Method — built on living in a language rather than studying it. The talk is aimed at people outside formal language courses.
Tue Oct 13 · 12:45pm
Marc Herman presents “The Lives and Afterlives of Maimonides's ‘Book of Commandments,’” on the work in which Maimonides enumerated the 613 commandments of the Torah, written in Judeo-Arabic as groundwork for his legal code, the Mishneh Torah. The Tauber Institute's Jewish Studies Colloquium is a forum for Brandeis faculty, graduate students and visiting scholars to present research in progress. It is also streamed on Zoom.
Thu Oct 15 · 3:00pm
The second of three Crown Center for Middle East Studies events on the long-term consequences of 9/11 asks how the years of war after 2001 changed the way the Middle East is reported. Hannah Allam, a ProPublica national security reporter and former McClatchy bureau chief in Baghdad and Cairo, joins C.J. Chivers, a two-time Pulitzer winner of The New York Times Magazine. Neil Swidey, who directs Brandeis's Journalism Program, moderates.
Thu Oct 22 · 2:30pm
Dancers of Lowell's Khmer Urban Ballet perform seven poetic scenes tracing a Cambodian-American family through separation, migration and deportation after years of genocide and war. The piece opens with kbach, the fundamental gestures of classical Cambodian dance, which the dancers slowly turn into a symbolic tree. Peter Veth wrote the story and Chummeng Soun staged it, to music by Him Sophy and Cambodian Living Arts.
Sat Oct 24 · 2:00pm
The Boston Conservatory Faculty Woodwind Quintet (Sarah Brady, flute; Rob Sheena, oboe; Jan Holloran, clarinet; Sarah Sutherland, horn; Margaret Phillips, bassoon) plays chamber music by Irving Fine (1914–1962), who taught at Harvard and Tanglewood and founded the Brandeis School of Creative Arts. Aaron Copland praised his music’s “elegance, style, finish, and a convincing continuity.” An annual tribute, free, with a reception afterwards.
Mon Oct 26 · 2:30pm
Denise Léon speaks on gender and Jewish identity in the work of Angélica Gorodischer, the Argentine writer whose Kalpa Imperial was translated into English by Ursula K. Le Guin. The presentation is given in Spanish rather than English, which the university states plainly in its listing.
Tue Oct 27 · 12:15pm
An interdisciplinary panel on A.J. Murphy's Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business, with Murphy joined by an anthropologist, a classicist and a political scientist — Elizabeth Ferry, Michael McGlin and Ayumi Teraoka — each taking the military-industrial question from their own field.
Wed Nov 4 · 6pm
A post-election discussion of Israel’s October 27 vote, the first since the October 7, 2023 attacks, covering US-Israel relations, the war in Gaza and Haredi service in the IDF. Shai Feldman, Raymond Frankel Chair in Israeli Politics and Society at the Crown Center, and Dahlia Scheindlin, a Haaretz English senior analyst who has advised on nine Israeli national campaigns, are the panelists; Shayna Weiss of the Schusterman Center moderates.
Thu Nov 5 · 12:15pm
Three Brandeis faculty present community-engaged work: Jonathan Anjaria on fermentation in Himalayan yak dairying, Shoniqua Roach on building a Black femme makerspace, and Gowri Vijayakumar on a film about labour, gender and street life in Bangalore. The panel doubles as an argument about what public humanities scholarship actually is.
Fri Nov 6 · 8:30am
A daylong conference from Brandeis’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies bringing scholars and former policymakers together to ask what regional order might follow the October 7, 2023 attacks and the wars since. Its questions include what security and economic architecture could support cooperation, and whether a lasting order can be built “without resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at its core.” Registration is required; it is also streamed online.
Mon Nov 9 · 2:30pm
Members of the Transformation Prison Project describe how the organisation began and how it uses restorative justice with people currently and formerly incarcerated, and with the communities they return to. Rosalind Kabhrel of Brandeis Legal Studies hosts. The session is a demonstration of the practice as much as a talk about it.
Sun Nov 15 · 3pm
The Brandeis University Chorus, a mixed choir open to the whole Brandeis community, joins the Chamber Singers, directed by Robert Duff, for an afternoon of choral music presented by the Music Department. Admission is free; walk-ins are welcome, an RSVP on Eventbrite reserves a seat, and the concert is also livestreamed on the department's webpage.
Mon Nov 16 · 4pm
Lawrence Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College, asks what makes a state a criminal state, the subject of his recent book The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice. His earlier books include The Right Wrong Man, on the trial of John Demjanjuk. The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry presents.
Fri Nov 20 · 12:45pm
J. Jarpa Dawuni, a political scientist at Howard University, discusses her new book African Women in Law: Comparative Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2026), which takes up the issues African women face in the legal profession in national, regional and international courts. Dawuni founded the Institute for African Women in Law and co-edited Gender and the Judiciary in Africa. The Mandel Center for the Humanities hosts.
Sun Nov 22 · 3pm
The Brandeis-Wellesley Orchestra, which brings together student musicians from Brandeis University and Wellesley College, gives its fall concert under Professor Neal Hampton. The afternoon runs about 90 minutes, and an RSVP through Eventbrite is optional but preferred.
