Events

These are events sponsored wholly or in part by the Center for the Humanities for 2024-2025

• September 
• October 
• November 
• December 
• January 
• February 
• March 
• April 
• May 

SEPTEMBER

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2024

Odds Bodkin Performance
"The Iliad: Book 1"

Storyteller and musician Odds Bodkin returns to Loyola! Using a variety of intensely real characters with ongoing music, he brings to life the most famous argument in ancient history: Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior at Troy, against Agamemnon, the Lord Marshall, commander of all the armies. Achilles already despises Agamemnon for his greed and brutish ways, but when, during a confrontation over a captured Trojan girl, the Marshall threatens to send her home, only to replace her in his tent with a girl Achilles loves, the hate between them boils over. The rift threatens to sunder the Greek army and waste ten years of siege at Troy’s gates. With Apollo’s plague arrows wiping out their army, somebody has to give in. Meanwhile the Gods of Olympus, who started all this, are watching their favorite mortals fight.

Odds Bodkin has been called “one of the great voices in American storytelling” by Wired and “a consummate storyteller” by The New York Times. Loyola audiences have given Odds standing ovations for this performance in the past. Come see why. Experience Homer’s great story in a clear, accessible way.

McGuire West
Andrew White Student Center
7:00 PM

If you require additional accommodations, please contact Disability and Accessibility Services at das@loyola.edu.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26

The Witness of Óscar Romero: Martyrdom as a Call to Social Transformation
Public Lecture by Dr. O. Ernesto Valiente

Dr. Valiente is Associate Professor of Theology, Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, author of Liberation through Reconciliation: Jon Sobrino’s Christological Spirituality.

McGuire Hall
Andrew White Student Center
6:00 PM

OCTOBER

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1

Center for the Humanties 40th Anniversary Celebration

Join us under the tent in the Quad to celebrate the nine departments  in the Humanities and the programs of the Center for the Humanities. 
Displays, Performances, and refreshments! 

2:00 - 4:00 PM
Quad and the new Humanities Cafe

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4

CFH Annual Celebration of Teaching, Learning, and Research in the Humanities

Student Presentations from the CFH Summer Student Research Fellows:
Elizabeth Thompson
Evy Ryan
Jason Rowe
Gitanjali Oommen
Daniel Gaughan
Trevor Sponaugle
Catarina Broccolino
France Jimenez

Summer Study Fellows:
Liam Holden

and Student Summer Humanities Internships:
Tess Felter
Sophia Randle
Caroline Kunz

Fourth Floor Program Room
Andrew White Student Center
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8

WRITERS AT WORK SERIES

Karin-Lin Greenberg

Karin Lin-Greenberg's first story collection, Faulty Predictions, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press. Her second story collection, Vanished, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction and was published by the University of Nebraska Press. Her debut novel, You Are Here, was published by Counterpoint Press and was an Indie Next pick for May 2023 and a People Magazine book of the week. Her stories have appeared in literary journals including New England Review, The Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and she is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in upstate New York and is an associate professor in the English Department at Siena College. She also teaches in Carlow University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program.

Fourth Floor Program Room
Andrew White Student Center
6:30 PM

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11

Center for the Humanities Student Grants Info Session

Join us to learn what grants are available for Loyola students from the CFH! 

We will discuss Student-led Seminars, Summer Research Fellowships, stipends for Summer Study programs, stipends for otherwise unpaid Internships, and our pilot program Digital Humanities Summer Fellows. After the presentation by CFH Student grant coordinator, Dr. Brett Butler and past student recipients, there will be time for pizza and conversation.

Center for Intercultural Engagement (CIE)
Student Center East 317
4:15 PM

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15 - FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2024

The Sterlings
exhibition by Julio Gallery Artist-in-Residence, Bria Sterling-Wilson

The Julio Fine Arts Gallery will be welcoming Baltimore artist Bria Sterling-Wilson to our community in 2024- 2025 as Artist-in-Residence. There will be an exhibition at the Julio Fine Arts Gallery, an Artist Talk and Reception, and three workshops. Sterling-Wilson is a photographer and collage artist, whose work focuses on the manipulation of her family’s photographic archive, weaving it together with found imagery, magazines, newspapers, and fabrics to both forge connections to family, culture, and history, while also challenging prevailing and dominant narratives about black families and culture. The exhibit at the gallery will run through Friday, November 22. 

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16

“A Poetics of Nostalgia: Exile and Memory in Francisco Clavijero”
Public Talk by Dr. Luis Ramos

In his talk, Dr. Luis Ramos of New York University will examine how the exiled Jesuit historian Francisco Clavijero drew from his nostalgic memories of colonial Mexico to craft a novel patriotic vocabulary that anticipated its formal emancipation from Spain. His forthcoming book is Between Reason and Revolution: Mexican Jesuits on New World History, Universal Rights and Spanish American Independence (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment: Summer 2025).

Knott Hall B01
3:00 PM

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16

MODERN MASTERS READING SERIES

Jackie Calmes

Jackie Calmes is an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times in Washington, D.C. Before joining The Times in 2017 as White House editor, she worked at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, covering the White House, Congress and national politics. In 2004, she received the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. She was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She is the author of Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court.

McManus Theater
6:00 PM

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17

“Race, Relief, and Rebellion: Navigating Natural Disasters and Slavery in the French Atlantic, 1656-1791”
lecture by Phoebe Labat, Loyola Class of 2019

Phoebe Labat, a PhD Candidate in History at Brown University, will discuss how enslaved Black people in the French Atlantic World, particularly in Martinique and Guadeloupe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, responded to hurricanes and earthquakes. She will propose that enslaved people and enslavers instrumentalized natural disasters to renegotiate local conditions of slavery. Environmental disasters were universal ordeals, but experiences of death, famine, and violence splintered along lines of race and caste.

Fourth Floor Program Room
Andrew White Student Center
4:30 PM

MONDAY, OCTOBER 21

“Nature and Humanity in German Romanticism: A History and Art Workshop” 
co-sponsored by the German Studies Minor, the Department of History, and the Art History Program

Learn about the work of Caspar David Friedrich, one of the most famous landscape painters in Western art, and how his work explores relationships between humanity and Nature as characterized by the ideals of German Romanticism. Participants will then try their hand at sketching landscape as an exercise in considering their own relationships to Nature. Drawing materials and refreshments will be provided.
 
The event is open to 15 registrants and free of charge. Register on The Bridge.

Loyola Notre Dame Library Patio
Rain Location: Library Board Room (Room 3028)
4:30 - 6:30 PM

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30

Faculty CFH Grant Information Session

The Center for the Humanities is hosting a Faculty Grants Info Session. Come learn about the dozen-plus grant opportunities that the Center for the Humanities has for faculty, as well as for students, along with tips for successful proposals. This info session is open to all tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track faculty. Some time will be dedicated to reviewing the process for applying for small, medium, and large general grants. Non-humanities faculty who are thinking of, planning, or working on a project involving the humanities are also encouraged to attend.
Please RSVP to Bess Garrett, esgarrett@loyola.edu.

College Center Conference Room 107
2:00 - 3:00 PM

NOVEMBER

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4

“Chlordecone Pollution in Martinique and Guadeloupe: Postcolonial Activism”
Talk by Dr. Heidi Shaker
3:00 PM
Language Learning Center
Maryland Hall 443

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4

Artist Workshops with Loyola's 2024 - 2025 artist-in-residence, Bria Sterling-Wilson. 

Join Bria for an artist workshop at 6:00 PM on:
Monday, November 4
Tuesday, November 12
Tuesday, November 19

Spots are limited. Reserve yours on The Bridge.

Artist Talk and Reception: Thursday, November 7
Black Box Theatre followed by a reception in the Julio Fine Arts Gallery
6:00 - 8:00 PM
All are welcome!

NATIONAL 2024 FRENCH WEEK  -  The Maghreb and Lebanon: French-Arabic Crossovers

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 TO WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2024

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8
North African Food Tasting with Lebanese Dabke band and Dancing
Fourth Floor Program Room
3:00 PM

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10
Interfaith Trip to Coptic Orthodox Church and Islamic Society of Baltimore
Meeting Point at Loyola Notre Dame Library
12:30 - 4:00 PM
Registration required on the Bridge: https://cglink.me/2hL/r2145511

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11
Henna Tattoos with Arabyola
Language Learning Center
Maryland Hall 443
2:30 PM

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12
Film Screening: Fatima
Loyola Notre Dame Library Auditorium
6:00 PM

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13
Keynote Talk: "Cracking the Codes of Farida Benlyazid's Cinema"
Talk by Florence Martin, PhD
Dr. Martin is the Dean John Blackford Van Meter Professor of French Transnational Studies at Goucher College.
Knott Hall B01
5:00 PM

Check loyola.edu/frenchweek for times and other details. You may also contact the Department of Modern Languages.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12

“Why Museums Matter”
Talk by Dr. Daniel Weiss
Knott Hall B01
5:00 PM

Dr. Daniel Weiss, Homewood Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and President Emeritus of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will give a public lecture on why art museums matter today.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13

Humanities Symposium Fall Faculty Teaching Seminar - The Great Derangement
Interdisciplinary resource presentations
College Center Conference Room 105
12:00 – 1:00 PM

Faculty members are invited to attend this year's Humanities Symposium Fall Teaching seminar. This seminar will provide information about the Humanities Student-Faculty Colloquia, which will take place on March 12 and 13. It will also offer suggestions and resources for teaching this year's text, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh, this year's Symposium keynote speaker.

Faculty from three different departments will share ideas about how to incorporate this text into your spring courses. This fall's seminar will feature:  
Terre Ryan (Writing) 
Suzanne Keilson (Engineering) 
Mark Sentesy Wagner (Philosophy) 

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to Bess Garrett, esgarrett@loyola.edu by November 1.

DECEMBER

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7

Center for the Humanities Student Grants Info Session 

 Join us to learn what grants are available for Loyola students from the CFH!    We will discuss Student-led Seminars, Summer Research Fellowships, stipends for Summer Study programs, and stipends for otherwise unpaid Internships. After the presentation by CFH Student grant coordinator, Dr. Brett Butler and past student recipients, there will be time for pizza and conversation.

Writing Department Lounge
Maryland Hall 038
4:15 PM

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 10

Jerome S. Cardin Memorial Lecture

Dara Horn, award-winning author and journalist

Dara Horn is the author of six books, including the novels In the Image (Norton 2002), The World to Come (Norton 2006), All Other Nights (Norton 2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (Norton 2013), and Eternal Life (Norton 2018), and the essay collection People Love Dead Jews (Norton 2021). One of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists, she is the recipient of two National Jewish Book Awards, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, and she was a finalist for the JW Wingate Prize, the Simpson Family Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books, Booklist’s Best 25 Books of the Decade, and San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of the Year, and have been translated into eleven languages. Her nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and The Jewish Review of Books, among many other publications, and she is a regular columnist for Tablet. Horn received her doctorate in Yiddish and Hebrew literature from Harvard University. She has taught courses in these subjects at Sarah Lawrence College and Yeshiva University, and has held the Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies at Harvard.

McGuire Hall
Andrew White Student Center
7:00 PM

For more information about the history of the Jerome S. Cardin Memorial Lecture, including past speakers, please consult the Celebrating the History of Cardin webpage.

If you require additional accommodations, please contact Disability and Accessibility Services at das@loyola.edu.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14

Douglass Day Events

Educate and gather: 
Transcribe-a-thon

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18

WRITERS AT WORK SERIES: Faculty Reading and Q & A

Professors Oghenetoja Okah and Peggy O'Neill

Dr. Oghenetoja Okoh is an Assistant Professor in the History Department here at Loyola University, Maryland. Her current research focuses on the development of minority identity and citizenship in the oil-rich region of the Niger Delta, Nigeria. This research is captured in a forthcoming book, entitled Minority Identities in Nigeria: Contesting and Claiming Citizenship in the Twentieth Century, which is being published by Cambridge University Press. Her areas of expertise include the history of colonialism and decolonization, gender identity, minority politics, and 20th century cultural flows between Africa and the African diaspora. 

Dr. Peggy O’Neill, a professor in the Writing department, is an active scholar and academic writer. She writes primarily about teaching writing and learning to write for other scholars and writing teachers. While she has been the sole author of many publications, she enjoys writing collaboratively and has many co-authored works. Over the last 26 years, she has co-authored three books, edited or co-edited four books, and published over 30 academic journal articles and book chapters. Her most recent book, written with Dr. Sandy Murphy from University of California Davis, is Assessing Writing to Support Learning: Turning Accountability Inside Out (2022). Beyond writing scholarly pieces for publication, she, like most academics, writes a lot of other things such as reports, grant proposals, presentations, blogs, reviews, policy statements, letters, recommendations, and all types of teaching material.

Fourth Floor Program Room
Andrew White Student Center
6:30 PM

MARCH

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12 and THURSDAY, MARCH 13
Student-Faculty Colloquia for the 2025 Humanities Symposium: "Cry of the Earth: Cry of the Poor"

Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement:Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Two days during the official Symposium week are set aside for Loyola student/faculty colloquia. During each scheduled class period, faculty and their classes will meet with faculty and students from other classes. These colloquia have traditionally been led by panels composed of faculty members from different disciplines who lead informal discussion, posing questions to stimulate the participation of students, and to engage the Symposium text across narrow disciplinary boundaries. This year’s text is The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh.

The colloquia will be in-person. Faculty from all disciplines are invited to bring their classes to our student-faculty colloquia March 12 and March 13 to discuss the book as a group. 

McManus Theatre
9:00 - 4:30 PM on both days

THURSDAY, MARCH 13, 2025
LOYOLA'S 2025 HUMANITIES SYMPOSIUM KEYNOTE ADDRESS: 

Amitav Ghosh
Novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh will deliver the 2025 Humanities Symposium keynote address.


In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh explores the climate crisis through multiple disciplinary lenses. In three short chapters: Stories, History, and Politics, which also address art, colonialism, and Laudato Si among other topics, Ghosh interweaves reflections on how we are constrained by our current modes of thinking and how we might find a way forward. 

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the juries of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. The Great Derangement was given the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times.  Amitav Ghosh holds four Lifetime Achievement awards and five honorary doctorates. In 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honors, by the President of India. In 2010 he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood, of a Dan David prize, and 2011 he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal. In 2018 the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor, was conferred on Amitav Ghosh. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. In 2024, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation. Headshot credit: Mathieu Genon.

McGuire Hall
6:30 PM

Keynote Registration

For more information, please consult the Symposium webpage.

If you require additional accommodations, please contact Disability and Accessibility Services at das@loyola.edu.

APRIL

TUESDAY, APRIL 8

WRITERS AT WORK SERIES

Emma Dries

Emma Dries is a writer and editor, and an agent at Triangle House Literary. She has worked on bestselling and award-winning books in editorial at Alfred A.Knopf, Doubleday Books, Ecco, and Flatiron Books. She has a B.A.in History from the University of Chicago and an M.F.A in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. She grew up in Lower Manhattan, above the Fulton Fish Market, and now lives in the Hudson Valley.

Fourth Floor Program Room
6:30 PM

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9

2025 Hanna Geldrich-Leffman Colloquium on Language, Literature, and Society:
"Writing Mother Nature: Global Perspectives on Literature and the Environment"

Speakers:

Dr. Mingwei Song, Professor of Chinese at Wellesley College
Dr. Laura Bianco, Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Ana María Mutis, Associate Professory of Spanish at Trinity University

MAY