Upcoming Lectures & Talks
11 upcoming lectures and talks from UMass Lowell, 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
Jennifer Papasodoro, a pediatric occupational therapist from Burlington who spent more than seventeen years working in schools, talks about handwriting and cognitive development. She has argued for teaching both printing and cursive, on the grounds that handwriting trains visual-motor, perceptual, motor-planning and attention skills as well as fine motor control. UMass Lowell's English Department hosts.
Wed Nov 4 · 5:00pm
Amir Issaa, a Roman rapper, author and educator, is in conversation under the name of Power to the Words, the rap-writing workshop he founded to take on stereotypes and discrimination in Italian schools. The son of an Egyptian father and an Italian mother, he co-founded the Rome Zoo collective; his memoir Vivo per questo, published in English as This Is What I Live For, won the MLA's Lois Roth Award.
Wed Nov 4 · 5:00pm
Boyd Coolman, professor of theology at Boston College, follows Francis of Assisi from a cloth merchant’s son with a taste for parties, troubadour songs and soldiering to the barefoot penitent who renounced his inheritance and founded the Franciscan order. Coolman is the author of The Theology of Hugh of St. Victor. UMass Lowell’s Medieval & Renaissance Studies program presents the talk.
Thu Nov 12 · 2:00pm
Artists whose work appears in the Environmental Prints exhibition discuss it in a panel organised by UMass Lowell's Department of Art and Design, an afternoon session that runs into the early evening.
Fri Nov 13 – Sun Nov 15
Chekhov's last play, written in 1903: an aristocratic Russian family comes back to the estate it can no longer afford, for one visit before the orchard is sold and cut down. Chekhov called it a comedy and Stanislavski staged it as a tragedy, and the argument has never been settled. The student Off-Broadway Players produce; Tom Coiner directs.
Sat Nov 14 · 4:00pm
UMass Lowell's The Common Voice Community Chorus is joined by choirs from across New England for a festival concert of community singing. The programme builds to a closing performance by the New England Community Choir Festival Chorus, a massed choir of well over 200 voices drawn from around the region and brought together on one stage.
Mon Nov 23 · 7:00pm
The UMass Lowell Percussion Ensemble's fall concert includes the world premiere of Derek Latta's Clown Rag, with Severino Marques as xylophone soloist, and a Suite for Solo Drum Set and Percussion Ensemble featuring Avery Stout on drums. Also on the programme are Morten Lauridsen's O Magnum Mysterium and John Beck's Jazz Variants, a long-standing piece in the percussion ensemble repertoire, among other works. Admission is free.
Tue Nov 24 · 7:00pm
UMass Lowell's percussion ensemble for non-percussionists, made up of musicians whose main instrument lies elsewhere, plays a programme that includes Serenade to a Sand Dune, Buckets Ruckus and Avant-Garde Contingent, along with September, a piece that uses the whole of the concert hall as its performing space. Further works fill out the concert, which is free and open to the public.
Tue Dec 1 · 11:00am
Members of UMass Lowell’s delegation to COP31, the 2026 United Nations climate conference in Antalya, Turkey, report back on what they saw and what they took from it, and discuss how the global climate negotiations might inform action on campus and in local communities. The university’s Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy hosts the panel.
Fri Dec 4 · 8:00am
UMass Lowell’s annual day of talks on advanced materials honours Sukant Tripathy, who founded its Center for Advanced Materials in 1992 and died in 2000. Speakers include Solomon Mensah of WPI on global health innovation, Devon Shipp of Clarkson on polyanhydrides, Amay Bandodkar of NC State on wearable microfluidic diagnostics, Pradeep Dhal on polymer nanogels as synthetic antibodies, and Murugappan Muthukumar of UMass Amherst, with a lunchtime poster session.
Sun Dec 6 · 4:00pm
The UMass Lowell University Orchestra, about 60 players strong, pairs Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony with a concerto grosso by Corelli in which string players from the orchestra step forward as soloists. Tchaikovsky's symphony of 1888 carries a single motto theme from its sombre E minor opening to a major-key finale, with prominent solos for horn, woodwinds and brass along the way. Admission is free.
