Humanities Speaker Series

Reimagining the American West

Caleb Gayle
TUE, AUG 26, 7:00 PM

Co-sponsored with the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities

What if the American West wasn’t just a frontier of cowboy myths and Manifest Destiny—but also a battleground for Black freedom, ambition, and erasure? In this talk, Caleb Gayle, author of Black Moses, uncovers the hidden histories of Black pioneers who dared to dream of self-governance and belonging on the open plains. From post-Reconstruction migration to present-day struggles for representation, Gayle reimagines the West not as a place of rugged individualism, but as a site of collective Black aspiration and resistance.

Caleb Gayle is an award-winning journalist, author and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New York Times and more, and has been recognized by the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, the Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellowship, the New America Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In addition to writing, Gayle serves as an Associate Professor at Northeastern University, and his work has been recognized in the 2019 Best American Essays as a Notable Essay.  

An Evening with John Green

John Green
TUE, SEPT 2, 7:00 PM
Lied Center of Kansas (available to view on Crowdcast until Oct. 2)

Co-sponsored with KU Libraries and the Office of Academic Success, as well as with generous financial support from the Self Graduate Fellows Program, the Office of Academic Affairs, the KU English Department, the Lawrence Public Library, and KU's Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum.

John Green is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, and Turtles All the Way Down. He is also the coauthor, with David Levithan, of Will Grayson, Will Grayson. He was the 2006 recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award, a 2009 Edgar Award winner, and has twice been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Green’s books have been published in more than 55 languages and over 24 million copies are in print.

The Anthropocene Reviewed explores a wide range of familiar topics in a series of essays, while employing a five-star rating system, thereby “reviewing” what it means to be human in the modern era. The topics covered in the essays, while varied and sometimes humorous, provide an opportunity to explore the interconnectivity of life and encourage readers to think critically, and oftentimes question, the world around them.

AI and the Humanities

Ruha Benjamin
TUE SEP 30, 7:00 PM
Liberty Hall

An enthralling storyteller, brilliant scholar, and fierce advocate for all things just, Dr. Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University where she studies the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, and health and justice. As the founding director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab, she brings together students, educators, activists, and artists to rethink and retool data for justice. Dr. Benjamin is the award-winning author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, People’s Science: Bodies & Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, and she recently released her fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto. In 2024, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. At the center of all Dr. Benjamin’s work is the invitation to “imagine and craft the worlds we cannot live without, just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within.”

Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, and she recently released her fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto. Ruha is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and in 2024 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship. 

Conversation with Ruha: 10:00 AM Wednesday, Oct. 1 at the Hall Center Conference Hall

Rediscovering the Arkansas River

Hannes Zacharias 
WED, NOV 19, 7:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall

The Arkansas River pierces the heart of America, stretching 1,469 miles from the Tennessee Pass in Colorado to the Mississippi River at the eastern edge of Arkansas. As the nation’s sixth-longest river (45th longest in the world), it is both the economic engine and burden to millions of people and scores of cities bordering its banks. From raging rapids to diversion dams for irrigation ditches, to dry streambeds, and finally barge traffic, this presentation will examine the impact this wild, elusive, and embattled river has had on cities, towns and adjacent farmland, starting with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 through to the present day.

Hannes Zacharias is the Robert A. Kipp Professor of Practice at the KU School of Public Affairs and Administration. With more than 40 years of public service experience, he has worked in federal, state, and local government, including nearly a decade as County Manager for Johnson County. Zacharias started his position as a Professor of Practice in 2019, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses and mentoring students desiring to be public administrators. 

Conversation with Hannes: 10:00 AM Thursday, Nov. 20 at the Hall Center Conference Hall

The Making of the Present / La Fabrique du présent 

Felwine Sarr 
THU FEB 26, 7:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall

Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese academic, writer, economist, musician, and the Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Duke University. His lectures and research focus on postcolonial theory, economic policies, development, economy, econometrics, epistemology and the history of religious ideas. He was awarded the Grand Prix of Literary Associations in 2016 for his essay Afrotopia, which argues for a conceptual decolonization of knowledge and a reappropriation of the metaphors of their own future by Africans. In 2021, Sarr was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2021.

Sarr’s talk will focus on African futures, drawing from his forthcoming work, The Fabrication of the Present/La Fabrication du présent. 

Conversation with Felwine: 10:00 AM Friday, Feb. 27 at the Hall Center Conference Hall

An Evening with Luis Alberto Urrea 

Luis Alberto Urrea
THU MAR 26, 7:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall

Luis Alberto Urrea is a prolific and award-winning writer, a master storyteller who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph. In all his work, Luis encourages empathy and compassion for our shared humanity.

The author of 17 books, he has published extensively in various genres and has received many prestigious awards. The Devil’s Highway, his non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His highly acclaimed historical novels, The Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America together tell the epic story of Teresita Urrea, a great aunt who was a healer and Mexican folk hero. Urrea is also the author of Into the Beautiful North, The House of Broken Angels, and his latest, Good Night, Irene. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, it powerfully demonstrates Urrea’s gifts as a storyteller.

Throughout his career, Urrea has established himself as a passionate and prolific voice urging readers to break down borders instead of putting up walls.

Conversation with Luis: 10:00 AM Friday, March 27 at the Hall Center Conference Hall