Past Events

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.

Academy Award winner Barry Jenkins introduces and discusses his 2021 miniseries, The Underground Railroad, which shows at BAMPFA over three days. The series won a Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy.

Behrooz Ghorbani, Cathy Park Hong, and Hoyt Long discuss how artificial intelligence has impacted literary translation. How might AI increase the creative potential of translation? How do writers feel about machine translations of their works?

In The Entanglement, Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.