CHARLOT LUCIEN is a Haitian storyteller, poet, visual artist, lecturer, and the founder of the Boston-based Haitian Artists Assembly of Massachusetts. He uses his art and writing to promote Haitian culture and advocate for many civil rights, public health, and humanitarian issues through his involvement with various cultural and civic organizations. Lucien has been a long-term public health manager for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and is a lecturer on Haiti-US historical connections with the OLLI Institute at the University of Massachusetts. He frequently participates as a guest speaker on Haiti’s culture and history in various academic and cultural venues in the US. He holds membership with various civic/humanitarian organizations, including the think-tank Groupe of Reflection and Action for a New Haiti (GRAHN-USA), the West African Research Association (WARA), Société des poètes francophones, the Haitian Americans United Inc (HAU), The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Haiti Projects. He is the recipient of several awards acknowledging his cultural contributions from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the City of Boston, the Haitian Roundtable 1804 Haitian Americans Changemakers List, and various cultural and academic institutions. JOSEPH BOCCHICCHIO is an activist and community organizer having facilitated Poverty, Creative Writing and Theater of the Oppressed Workshops for the indigent and working poor. Bocchicchio worked for 24 years in Community Mental Health in Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, and did grass roots organizing for opiate addiction treatment and suicide prevention for the Last Letter Project in Akron, Ohio. He now works part time for Revolutionary Spaces, where he researches and does presentations on various historical topics. His poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in Ovunque Siamo, Cut-Throat, Up-street, Jawbone, Entropy, Panning for Poems, Enclave, and The Daily Clout. LYNN SMITH is a volunteer Board Member for the Friends of Linden Place, which oversees the operations of an 1810 Federal style mansion in Bristol, RI that was built from the profits of the DeWolf Family slave trading business. Smith is an interpreter there and helped Linden Place with re-evaluation and re-interpretation of its history, with input from leading scholars from the African American and Indigenous communities. She is currently mapping the neighborhood founded by the 1850 free black population of Bristol, called Goree. Most of her professional career was spent in commercial banking, first in Boston and then in New Haven. While living in Brockton, MA she helped found a number of neighborhood associations designed to increase citizen engagement, one of which was the Frederick Douglass Neighborhood Association.
Old South Meeting House
Ambassador Jorge Heine
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
JACQUELINE BEATTY is Assistant Professor of History at York College of Pennsylvania where she teaches courses on early American, women's, and public history. Her book, In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America, was published with NYU Press in April, 2023. Her previously published work includes "Privileged in the Patriarchy: How Charleston Wives Negotiated Financial Freedom in the Early Republic" (South Carolina Historical Magazine, July 2018), "Complicated Allegiances: Women, Politics, and Property in Post- Occupation Charleston" in Holly Mayer, ed., and Women Waging War in the American Revolution. She received a BA from Boston College in 2010, an MA from Villanova University in 2012, and a Ph.D. from George Mason University in 2016. DANIEL CARPENTER is the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and Chair of the Department of Government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Professor Carpenter's research on petitioning appears in his book Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790-1870, which was awarded the J. David Greenstone Prize of the American Political Science Association, the Seymour Martin Lipset Prize of the American Political Science Association and the James P. Hanlan Book Award of the New England Historical Association. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1989 with distinction in Honors Government and received his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in 1996. He taught previously at Princeton University (1995-1998) and the University of Michigan (1998-2002).
Old State House
Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. Featuring: Felicia Ellsworth, Mark Perry, and Edwina Clark
Old South Meeting House
Sruthi Gurudev
New England Aquarium
For Wanjiku "Wawa" Gatheru, caring about the environment started early. While farming with her mom and grandmother as a child, the conversations would often turn to saving the earth. The first-generation American of Kenyan descent became even more invested when taking an environmental science class in high school, when she learned that social justice and climate issues were deeply intertwined. Everything suddenly became personal. “It was in this call I learned that the environment had everything to do with me,” she says.
Boston Public Library - Abbey Room
Old South Meeting House
Gary Marcus, author of Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence we can trust and Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU. Also Jane Rosenzweig, Director of the Harvard Writing Center, a past staff editor at The Atlantic and fiction writer at The New Yorker.
Virtual
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Boston College - Gasson 100
Bill McKibben
New England Aquarium
For the latest information regarding each event please contact the presenting organization.