Professor Rachel Jacoff of Wellesley College reads, in Italian, from “Purgatorio XXX,” which she considers the “structural and emotional center” of Dantes work. She provides commentary and leads a discussion in English.

This program is part of an ongoing public reading of the Divine Comedy organized by the Boston College Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Center for Italian Culture in Newton, Massachusetts.

Alexander Gates is a professor and chair of the Department of Geology at Rutgers University. He discusses his fieldwork investigating recently-developed faults and other signs of post-glacial activity in the upper Hudson highlands of New York.

Nydia Gonzalez, chief diversity officer at Yale University, presents a lecture on diversity in the university setting at a meeting of the New England Higher Education Recruitment Consortium, which took place at Boston College.

Berliner is a vocal critic of the increased role of standardized testing in American schools. His most recent book, Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2007).

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks says she developed a lust for books as a child growing up in Australia. In this Lowell Humanities Series lecture, she discusses her latest novel, People of the Book (Viking, 2008).

Are women more submissive than men? Is it more likely that blacks will commit crimes than members of other races? Sally Haslanger, a professor of philosophy at MIT,

English professor James Smith study of the controversial workhouses where socially marginalized and so-called fallen women and girls were confined throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Activist Bill McKibben, author of one of the first books about climate change written for a general audience, The End of Nature (Anchor, 1989), talks about the challenges presented by global warming and the radical environmental message of the Gospels.

Since its founding, America has been compared to Rome, says Cullen Murphy.

In 1827 the term medieval was first coined to refer to the time period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance.