Each year, the Gould Center offers a series of sponsored lectures.

GOLO MANN LECTURER

The Golo Mann Lectureship is made possible through the generosity of CMC alumnus Eugene Wolver '51 and recognizes Golo Mann, noted German historian, essayist, and writer and former professor of history at the College. He was the author of several books, including German History of the 19th and 20th Century, Wallenstein, and Vom Geist Amerikas (translated in English as The American Mind).

RICARDO J. QUINONES DISTINGUISHED LECTURER

This lectureship was established in honor of Ricardo J. Quinones, the founding director of the Gould Center and Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus.

LERNER LECTURE on hinge Moments in History

The Lerner Lecture is made possible through the generosity of CMC alumnus Perry Lerner '65 P'89 GP'19 GP'20. Formerly named Lerner Lecture in the 1960s in our Time.

Golo Mann Lectureship Series

The Golo Mann Lectureship is made possible through the generosity of CMC alumnus Eugene Wolver '51 and recognizes Golo Mann, noted German historian, essayist, and writer and former professor of history at the College. He was the author of several books, including German History of the 19th and 20th Century, Wallenstein, and Vom Geist Amerikas (translated in English as The American Mind).

Ricardo J. Quinones Distinguished Lectureship Series

This lectureship was established in honor the Ricardo Quinones, the founding director of the Gould Center and Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus.

LERNER LECTURE on hinge moments in History

The Lerner Lecture is made possible through the generosity of CMC alumnus Perry Lerner '65 P'89 GP'19 GP'20.


2019 - 2020 Gould Sponsored visiting speakers

Allyson Hobbs is the director of African and African American Studies at Stanford and an associate professor of history at Stanford University where she teaches American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth-century American history and culture. She has won numerous teaching awards, including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. She was honored by the Silicon Valley branch of the NAACP with a Freedom Fighter Award. She served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2017. 

Hobbs’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. It won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history, among other accolades.

Hobbs will explore themes from her upcoming book on the history of Black women's testimonials in the wake of the the #MeToo movement on January 28th, 2020. Her talk is co-sponsored by the Gould Center.


Alex Kotlowitz tells stories from the heart of America, deeply intimate tales of struggle and perseverance. He is the author of four books, including his most recents, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago. His other books include the national bestseller There Are No Children Here which the New York Public Library selected as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. It received the Helen B. Bernstein Award and was adapted as a television movie produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey.

While Alex’s home is print, he has also worked in film and radio. His documentary, The Interrupters, a collaboration with Steve James, premiered at Sundance in January 2011 and aired as a two-hour special on PBS’s FRONTLINE. In 2016, Alex worked with inmates at Illinois’ Stateville prison on essays about their cells. The stories which ran on The New Yorker’s website and on The New Yorker’s Radio Hour became the basis for the podcast Written Inside.

Kotlowitz will be discussing his recent books about some of Chicago’s most turbulent neighborhoods, providing a collection of intimate profiles of people and communities touched by gun violence, on March 4th, 2020. His talk is co-sponsored by the Gould Center.


Tara Westover spent her childhood and teen years preparing for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches, stewing herbs during the summer for her mother—a midwife and healer— and in the winter, salvaging in her father’s junkyard.

Self-motivated and driven, she then taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. Without a primary education—without even a birth certificate or exact birth date—she was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. After that first encounter with education—which was both uplifting and devastating—she pursued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 2008 and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an M.Phil. from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a Ph.D. in history in 2014.

Educated was long listed for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and had spent 32 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. Former President Barack Obama named Educated as one of the books on his summer reading list of 2018.

Westover is speaking about her book Educated at the Athenaeum on September 16th, 2019. Her talk is co-sponsored by the Gould Center, the Center for Writing and Public Discourse, and the President’s Leadership fund.


Michele M. Moody-Adams is Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University, where she has also served as dean of Columbia College and vice president for undergraduate education. She holds degrees from Wellesley College, the University of Oxford (where she was a Marshall Scholar), and Harvard University, where she earned her Ph.D. under the direction of John Rawls. She has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and she is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. She is the author of Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy and is currently at work on a book entitled Renewing Democracy. She has also published numerous articles on moral psychology, justice, gender and race, academic freedom, and democratic disagreement.

Moody-Adams is speaking at the Athenaeum on the topic of “How Imagination Creates Space for Social Progress” on September 26th, 2019. Her talk is one of two keynote addresses for the Imagination and Social Justice Conference organized and sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.


Kiese Laymon is a southern writer, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University before graduating from Oberlin College. He earned an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University. Laymon is currently the Ottilie Schillig Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi. He served as the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Nonfiction at the University of Iowa in Fall 2017.  

Laymon is the author of the novel, Long Division and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and Heavy: An American Memoir. Heavy, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal, the LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose and Audible’s Audiobook of the Year, was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by The Undefeated, New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Library Journal, The Washington Post, Southern Living, Entertainment Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times Critics.

Laymon has written essays, stories and reviews for numerous publications including Esquire, McSweeneys, New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, ESPN the Magazine, Granta, Colorlines, NPR, LitHub, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, PEN Journal, Fader, Oxford American, Vanity Fair, The Best American Series, Ebony, Travel and Leisure, Paris Review, Guernica and more. 

Laymon is speaking about his book Heavy at the Athenaeum on November 4th, 2019.