Past Events

Eva Horn (University of Vienna) is founding director of the Vienna Anthropocene Network and author of The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age.

In his wry meditation on aging, Thomas Farber memorializes lost friends and takes the measure of our current moment.

The BAMPFA exhibition A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration explores the enduring impressions of the Great Migration as seen through the eyes and work of twelve contemporary artists. In this conversation, the show's co-curators reflect upon the exhibition, from its planning and development to the impact of its ongoing national tour.

Bestselling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik examines the increasing threats to the institutions of liberal democracy that guarantee free political debate.

Shannon Steen explores how discourses of creativity can seduce us into joining a worldview that justifies structural inequalities, environmental degradation, and other aspects of contemporary capitalism that we might otherwise find troubling.

Sonali Deraniyagala lost her entire family, including two sons, in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. She discusses Wave, her bestselling memoir on the experience, which won the PEN Ackerley Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Ocean Vuong, the 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, reads from his latest poetry collection, Time is a Mother, written in the aftershocks of his mother's death.

Ocean Vuong, author of the celebrated novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, is the 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities. He talks with poet Cathy Park Hong.

Erik Davis explores how the concept of the weird helps illuminate the speculative, reality-bending, and dreamlike properties of AI discourse and practice.

Intervening in debates on historical memory, testimony, and the representation of violence, Michael Iarocci shows how Goya's masterpiece extends far beyond conventional understandings of visual testimony.