ºìÐÓÖ±²¥app Announces February 2025 Public Lectures
![From left: André Aciman, April Herndon, William J. Barber and Phil Klay visit Dickinson in February to deliver public lectures.](/images/clarke_forum_feb_2025_graphic_copy.jpg")
From left: André Aciman, April Herndon, William J. Barber and Phil Klay. Each will visit Dickinson in February to deliver public lectures.
Speakers probe social justice, literature, citizenship, more
The spring semester is roaring out of the gate at the , which presents four public events in February. The schedule includes two keynote addresses (Black History Month, Love Your Body Week) and two events led by New York Times-bestselling authors. It includes calls to action in pursuit of social justice, a glimpse into life as a memoirist and outsider, meditations on peace and wartime, and an exploration of the experience of time through the lenses of fatness and disability.
Monday, Feb. 10: Citizenship in an Age of Perpetual Conflict
Phil Klay, Marine Corps Veteran & Author
From Africa to the Middle East to Ukraine, America is enmeshed in military conflicts around the world, with troops directly in harm’s way in some places and through our support of other countries’ efforts. How should we think about our role as a citizen of a country deeply involved in warfare, and how might literature help us better understand the stakes of the killing done in our name? Phil Klay, an author and U.S Marine veteran, will discuss. A book signing will follow the presentation; several of Klay’s books are available for purchase at Dickinson’s bookstore prior to the presentation. .
Wednesday, Feb. 12, 7 p.m.
Love Your Body Week Keynote: Out of Time: Fatness, Disability, and Fat Crip Time
April Herndon, Winona State University
This is the keynote address for Dickinson’s 2025 Love Your Body Week series. Author and scholar April Herndon explores the ways we may push fat and/or disabled persons to pursue imagined futures through “treatments” and “cures” that can rob them of joy in the present. Alternately, the concept of “fat crip time” acknowledges that fatness and disability can mean that a person experiences time differently and can help us live in the present, know fat and disabled bodies as potential sites of joy, and offer a framework for justice and liberation.
TBD*
Black History Month Keynote: We Are Called to Be a Movement
Rev. William J. Barber II, Yale Divinity School
*This event has been postponed. Please visit for the latest news on upcoming Clarke Forum events.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II will offer a faith-informed analysis of our nation’s social issues. He is a New York Times bestselling author and a leading scholar and speaker in public policy and public theology. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award,” 12 honorary degrees, a Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award and the Puffin Award, Barber has delivered keynote addresses at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the 59th Inaugural Prayer Service, the Vatican and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In 2018, he addressed the 5th Uni Global Union World Congress. He is regularly featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, MSNBC, CNN and NNPA.
Barber is president and senior lecturer of , co-chair of the and founding director of the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, where he also teaches. Barber is additionally a bishop with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, executive board member of the Christian Church Disciples of Christ and a Kettering Foundation senior Fellow. Barber’s books include We Are Called to Be a Movement, Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing, The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and The Rise of a New Justice Movement, and Forward Together: A Moral Message For The Nation. His most recent work, White Poverty: How Exposing Myths ºìÐÓÖ±²¥app Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, was released in June 2024. .
Monday, March 24, 7 p.m.
On Being From Elsewhere
André Aciman, Author of Call Me by Your Name
André Aciman is a memoirist, essayist, novelist and scholar of comparative literature. His works include the New York Times bestselling Call Me by Your Name, adapted into an acclaimed 2017 film of the same title; Find Me; Out of Egypt and My Roman Year. Born in Egypt he has lived as a foreigner in Italy, France and is now an American citizen. He will speak about his life as a foreigner and memoirist and about the ways that memoir can borrow the conventions of fiction without inventing facts. “One can be elsewhere in space, but one can also be elsewhere in time,” he writes. .
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Published January 29, 2025