2022-23 Academic Year

Block 1: Presidential Inauguration 

Block 2: Author Katherine Standefer, Lightning Flowers

Join us for a conversation with Katherine Standefer, author of the 22-23 Common Read "Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life." Standefer’s debut book, "Lightning Flowers," was a finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice/Staff Pick, and shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. She earned her MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Arizona and her BA in English from Colorado College.

Block 3

We will not have a Block 3 First Mondays presentation. Please use that hour for yourself or in community with friends. We look forward to getting back together for First Mondays to start Block 4.

Block 4: Kathryn Lofton, Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies and Professor of History and Divinity at Yale University

Kathryn Lofton, a Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar, presents “The Pulpit of Performative Reason: Transphobia as Religious Practice.” Being queer is never safe. This talk thinks about where that lack of safety begins, focusing on the relationship between trans politics and a specific movement, freethought. Lofton's presentation will focus on understanding trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), and their ability to declare what gender is and is not, which requires a foray into the history of religions to perceive why this is such a tenacious prejudicial rite of modernity, and why violence is so often its outcome.

Blocks 5-8 will be added soon.