English
Past Events
Poet Gold leads an evening of spoken word, music, and conversation, followed by a book signing.
Dinaw Mengestu is the author of four novels: Someone Like Us; All Our Names; How To Read the Air; and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, all New York Times Notable Books.
Free and open to the public.
This talk examines how Black artists transform AI from a tool of command and control into a medium for intergenerational dialogue and alternative worlding.
This event is free and open to the public.
Renowned British war correspondent and journalism professor Julius Strauss presents his 47-minute documentary film Return to Kosovo and responds to questions about his work. This event is open to the public.
Join us for the Pride and Prejudice Film Festival in celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. The first screening is on Friday, November 7, 2025 from 7–9 p.m. See the full schedule. This event is free and open to the public.
Acclaimed writer Lydia Millet will deliver the 2025 William Gifford Lecture on November 5, 2025. The event is free and open to the public.
Explores how storytelling rooted in personal experience, Zambian proverbs, and mother tongues can heal colonial harms and preserve culture, featuring Mubanga Kalimamukwento, an award-winning Zambian author, magazine founder, and University of Minnesota Feminist Studies PhD student.
Free and open to the public.
This year marks the 650th anniversary of Giovanni Boccaccio’s passing. We explore his legacy in a interdisciplinary panel of Vassar faculty, followed by a keynote speech by Grace Delmolino (University of California, Davis) titled: “Boccaccio and Consent.” No reservation required
Campus community only, please
Tita Chico ’91, University of Maryland Professor of English, will discuss the literary history of 18th-century technology.
Monica Youn is an acclaimed poet and professor, a former constitutional lawyer, and a prominent literary leader.
No reservation required. Open to the public.
Professor Patricia Zakreski, Associate Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter, specializes in women’s work, art, and authorship in the nineteenth century. She has published widely on these topics, including several co-edited volumes, and is currently completing a monograph on authorship and the decorative arts.
This event is open to the public.
The film imagines an actress preparing to play Césaire, and encountering and re-examining her own ideas about creativity, love, Black identity, and politics as a result.
Historian of sexuality Jen Manion (Amherst College) gives an oral history of 18th- and 19th-century “female husbands,” the elusive, rebellious and enchanting characters who transed gender, lived as men, and married women.
Campus community only, please.
Lecture by Swarthmore College Professor Rachel Buurma followed by a reception with student posters and refreshments.
This event is open to the public.
The acclaimed author’s reading will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. Free and open to the public, no reservation required.
Whitehead has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Open to the public, no reservations required.
Hutchinson, the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University, is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other awrads. Free and open to the public.
A lecture by Seth Whidden, Professor of French Literature and Fellow of The Queen’s College of the University of Oxford.
Campus community only, please.
A talk by Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and chief policy architect of the Green New Deal—a policy framework that puts justice at the center of climate action.
Author Catherine Tan, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vassar College, will be sharing her book, Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge. Reception to follow.