Upcoming Lectures & Talks
6 upcoming lectures and talks from Mahindra Humanities Center (Harvard), with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All lectures in Greater Boston →
Tue Oct 6 · 6:00pm
Douglas Stuart, whose debut Shuggie Bain, about a boy growing up with an alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow, won the 2020 Booker Prize, is in conversation in Harvard's Writers Speak series. His second novel, Young Mungo, followed in 2022, and his third, John of John, in May 2026. Born in Glasgow, Stuart worked for two decades as a fashion designer in New York before turning to fiction.
Tue Oct 13
Classicists David Elmer, Emily Greenwood and Jie Li, moderated by Robin Kelsey, take apart Christopher Nolan's blockbuster reworking of Homer — how his IMAX Odyssey adapts the ancient epic, what its cinematic choices do to the story, and what the film's reception says about us now.
Mon Oct 19 · 6:00pm
The Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue talks with Alejandra Vela Martínez in Harvard's Writers Speak series. His Sudden Death, built around a tennis match between Caravaggio and the poet Quevedo, won Spain's Premio Herralde in 2013; Now I Surrender followed the last years of the Apache wars, and You Dreamed of Empires (2024) stages Cortés's arrival at Moctezuma's court in 1519.
Mon Nov 9 · 6:00pm
A panel in the Mahindra Center's Sports & Us series looks back on the 2026 World Cup and what the world's most popular sport means for cities and nations. Speakers are Garnette Cadogan, MIT's Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in Urbanism; Bruno Carvalho, a Harvard professor and author of The Invention of the Future; and Duncan White, a deputy editor at The Athletic. New Yorker staff writer Louisa Thomas moderates.
Tue Dec 1
Historian Kyle Harper — who integrates the natural sciences into the study of the human past, from Roman plagues to climate — speaks on humans as agents of ecological change and what our role as 'the last animal' means for the future. An Environment Forum lecture at the Mahindra Center.
Thu Mar 25 · 6:00pm
Dan Shaughnessy, the Boston Globe sports columnist who received the 2026 Red Smith Award for sportswriting, talks with Louis Menand about the craft of writing and the sporting cultures of nation and region. Shaughnessy's thirteen books include The Curse of the Bambino and Francona. Menand, a Harvard English professor and New Yorker staff writer, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history for The Metaphysical Club.
