Past Events

Portrait or a person with dark hair.

A talk by Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and chief policy architect of the Green New Deal—a policy framework that puts justice at the center of climate action.

Portrait headshot, person with dark hair and brown eyes faces the camera
Apr. 26, 2024, 5:00 p.m.

Author Catherine Tan, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vassar College, will be sharing her book, Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge. Reception to follow.

Headshot of Ross Benjamin
Mar. 27, 2024, 5:00 p.m.

Vassar alum Ross Benjamin ’03 will discuss his Guggenheim scholarship-funded work: An essential new translation of Kafka’s complete, uncensored diaries.

A black and white drawing depicting a scene from Shakespear's Othello, in which Othello, holding a pillow, tries to smother his wife, Desdemona, who cowers in bed.

Professor Miles P. Grier (Queens College, CUNY and CUNY Graduate Center) offers a lecture based on his research on the transatlantic performance history of Shakespeare’s Othello, Shakespeare and early modern science, and Black Atlantic responses from Wheatley to Toni Morrison.

Campus community only, please.

A grid made up of 20 squares that all contain the same image of a camel galloping.
Sep. 23, 2023, 2:00–5:00 p.m.

A reception for the Library’s fall exhibition, Elizabeth Bishop’s Postcards, with talks by Head of Special Collections Ronald Patkus and the two co-curators of the exhibit, plus refreshments.

Cover of a book designed to look like grid of spiral notebooks with the title “Letters to a Writer of Color,” Edited by Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro,” and a blurb from Laila Lalami that says, “Electric essays that speak to the experience of writing from the periphery…a guide, a comfort, and a call all at once.”
Apr. 18, 2023, 6:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.

Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro, editors of the new essay collection Letters to a Writer of Color, will talk about race and craft with a multidisciplinary panel of Vassar faculty.

Nicholas Dames standing in front of a bookcase

What is a “chapter” and what work does it perform in prose narrative? In this lecture, Dames (Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities at Columbia University) will present work from his book-in-progress, The Chapter: A History of Segmented Life.