Audio recording of a lecture given by Daryl Haggard on September 19, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “It’s been a fantastic decade for black hole studies, particularly for Sagittarius A (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Multiple Galactic Center research groups, the Event Horizon Telescope, and LIGO/Virgo continue to bring rapid-fire new observations to sharpen our understanding of these exotic objects, research highlighted by the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the 2017 and 2020 Nobel Prizes in Physics. In this talk, I will discuss the new Event Horizon Telescope image of Sgr A*. I’ll describe its unique variability and put it in the context of other time domain phenomena in the Galactic Center, traced out over more than 20 years of observations of M87*, the supergiant elliptical galaxy with several trillion stars in the constellation Virgo. I will also briefly explore how we can continue to push the frontiers of black hole research with existing and next-generation observatories.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tutor Emeritus John Cornell on September 12, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "Dante’s Comedy is widely assumed to champion the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. Surely the test case for this conventional view is the episode in Paradiso where Dante imagines meeting up with the great defender of the faith. There, to our surprise, Thomas offers an extravagant tribute to the wisdom of Solomon, wisdom that he says has never been surpassed. Really? Not even by Christ? Thomas had better explain his accidental heresy. Does his apologetic performance succeed? Or is it part of the comedy of the Comedy?"

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tutor Emeritus Phil LeCuyer on September 5, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "In this lecture arrays are contrasted to sequences as paradigms of thought. Sequences are based on causation. What are arrays based on? Several examples of arrays will be considered, including the human face. When viewed and understood as an array, what can a face tell us about being human?"

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean Sarah Davis on August 29, 2025 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "St. John’s students often have the experience of coming to beautiful realizations and insights that seem to push past the ordinary—to touch that which is most important about life, about being human, about the world. But so too do we know what it feels like to plummet back to the ground, to confusion and questioning. The lives of two principal and beloved characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Pierre and Andrei, are marked by this kind of movement, being drawn in, or up, or beyond, only to find themselves seemingly back at the beginning, lost again. This lecture explores the pattern in these characters—a kind of blooming and wilting and re-blooming—and suggests that, rather than revealing an absurdity in the truth-seeking character of human beings, these rises and falls point to our most potent possibility."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Philip Ording on May 2, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “There is no shortage of evidence that professional mathematicians describe their work in aesthetic terms, but the terms they use, at least publicly, are limited. The oft-repeated ‘beauty’ and ‘elegance’ may be important components of mathematical taste, but they fail to convey its range or subtlety or how it relates to literary and aesthetic experiences beyond mathematics. This talk will highlight the material differences in logic, diction, imagery, and even typesetting that give tone and flavor to mathematics.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Kit Slover on April 25, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In the final act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet the northern prince stumbles upon the grave of Ophelia, leaps in, and declares himself to the funeral goers: ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ (V.1, 279). By calling himself the Dane, Hamlet seems to identify himself as the rightful king of Denmark—as though the grave, in particular, is his sovereign territory. The grave itself was dug by a sexton who took up his profession ‘on the very day that young Hamlet was born’ (V.1, 152), which also happens to be the day ‘our last king Hamlet overcame Fortinbras’ (V.1, 148), seizing the Norwegian lands of the latter. This acquisition is familiar to us from the beginning of the play because the ghost of the former king has appeared ‘in the very armor he had on/When he the ambitious Norway combated’ (I.1, 71-71). And the appearance of this ghost has set off a chain of events resulting in the death of the women into whose grave Hamlet leaps. In this lecture, I will attempt to understand this strange scene. Why is it here, in a grave with such uncanny ties to his own birth, the ghost of his father, and the ultimate fate of Denmark that Hamlet asserts his sovereign rights? Hamlet cries, ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane,’ but what, in short, does he mean by the word this?”

Audio recording of a lecture given by David Hayes and Jeremy Schwartz on April 18, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has providedthis description of the event: “The ‘Love Test’ in King Lear is widely understood to be the central puzzle in one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.  As part of a political succession plan, it seems unnecessary.  As part of aloving relationship between parents and children, it seems grotesque.  It doesn’t even seem to be a real test, sincethe result is supposed to be pre-ordained.  While it is clear that the disastrous results of the test set the wholetragedy in motion, neither we nor the characters within the play seem to grasp the ‘why’ of the test itself.  In thistalk, we will argue that the ‘Love Test’ is best understood by reflecting on the vexed question of the ends of the parent-child love relationship.  Surprisingly, Shakespeare challenges the view that the filial pious child solves this vexed question, opening the possibility that parent-child love is tragic.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tutor Emeritus Howard Fisher on April 9, 2025 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “Galileo’s mathematical treatment of ‘speed’ perennially draws questions about both the validity and presuppositions of his argument. But perhaps we can make more sense of Galilean speed when we find in it traces of Homeric speed: the speed of ‘speedy Achilles.’ We may also find some Homeric grounding for an algebraic form of discourse exemplified by the Taylor Series—a form that moves uneasily between favoring being and favoring fact.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Jacqueline Stone on April 4, 2025 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Premodern Japanese believed that one's dying thoughts could determine one's postmortem fate. Even a sinful person, by dying with a mind calmly focused on the Buddha, could be reborn in a 'pure land,' where one's enlightenment would be assured. Conversely, a stray distracted thought at that final juncture could send even a devout practitioner tumbling down into the hells or other miserable rebirth realms. The ideal of mindful death generated both hope and anxiety and created a demand for ritual specialists to serve as religious guides at the deathbed, contributing to Buddhist preeminence in matters of death management."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Steven Berg on March 7, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra begins with Zarathustra descending from the heights of his overflowing wisdom to effect, in the wake of what he calls the “death of God,” the transformation of the historical destiny of mankind through the dissemination of his teaching of the “overman.” The overman, he proclaims, must now become the “meaning of the earth,” the supreme aim of the human will, and the ultimate object of all human thought and striving. The book ends, however, with Zarathustra, in the aftermath of the collapse of all his efforts to transmit this teaching, renouncing his doctrines of the overman and the will to power, and turning away from human beings and a concern with the historical progress of mankind, in order to retreat once again to his mountain solitude. This turn away from the will and history coincides with a turn toward the quest for truth of the soul and mind in their relations to eternity. The following question must arise for anyone attempting to understand the argument of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: What has happened to Zarathustra during the course of the drama of the book such as to cause this radical transformation of his thought. This lecture will make an attempt to begin to address this question.”