Past Speakers

Dorceta Taylor presented on "Untold Stories of American Conservation: Privilege and Social Inequality." A professor at the Yale School of Environment and prominent environmental justice scholar, Taylor has received awards from the National Audubon Society, National Science Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution.

Pamela Karimi presented on "Art and Spatial Politics." She is an architect and an architectural historian. Her primary field of specialization is art, architecture and visual culture of the modern Middle East.

Nadia Brown presented on "The The Politics of Black Women's Appearance." Dr. Brown is a professor of Government, chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and affiliate in the African American Studies program at Georgetown University. This lecture explored how the politics of appearance shape Black women’s political ambitions, opportunities and access to political office in the United States. 

Janet Mancini Billson presented on "The Global Refugee Crisis: Can a Broken System be Fixed?" Dr. Billson is a Killam Visiting Professor at Bridgewater State University and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Rhode Island College. She is also the author of several books on identity, marginality, refugee resettlement and integration, and social change.

Khary Polk presented on "For Race or Country? Double Consciousness and the Life of Col. Charles Young." Dr. Polk is an associate professor of Black Studies and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. This lecture explored the theme of double consciousness in the life and work of Charles Young, the third African American officer to graduate from West Point, and the first to reach the rank of colonel.

The 2021 Chet Raymo Literary Series welcomed author Ross Gay. He is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new poem, Be Holding, was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of 2020.

Karam Dana presented on "Between Orientalism and Racialization: The Ongoing Exclusion of Arabs and Muslims in the US." Dr. Dana is the Alyson McGregor Distinguished Professor of Excellence and Transformative Research and Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He is also the founding Director of the “American Muslim Research Institute.”