Big Thought Series

All programs of the Gregory J. Grappone Humanities Institute are free and open to the public and may be attended in person or via Zoom.

For further reading and resources related to this series visit The Geisel Library Companion Guide.

Schedule of Events

Tuesday, October 8, 7:00 p.m. in the Melucci Auditorium
Bean Foundation Supported Lecture:
Traces of the Past: Henry David Thoreau and the Mysterious Case of Perez Blood
Dr. John Kaag

John Kaag is Professor of Philosophy at UMASS Lowell and the award-winning author of several books, including American Philosophy: A Love Story, Hiking with Nietzsche, and American Bloods. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Outside Magazine, and elsewhere. His keynote lecture is about Perez Blood, the recluse astronomer and friend of Henry David Thoreau. Dr. Kaag explains the Blood family’s pivotal influence on American history, from the distant past of the Revolutionary War to the twentieth century.

Wednesday, November 13, 3:30 p.m. in the Grappone Humanities Institute
LECTURE:
The Shadow of the Crusades in Post-9/11 America
Professor Alexandra Locking, History Department

Allie Locking is a member of the History Department whose work focuses on the eleventh and twelfth centuries in medieval Europe. Her research focuses on how religious beliefs and medieval ideas of gender influenced the way people thought about power and rulership in a Christian society. Her current book project focuses on how religious reform challenged and changed the roles of elite laywomen in medieval society. She is also exploring how the early crusading movement grew out of and affected concepts about gender and race in the medieval European worldview.

Wednesday, November 13, 4:30 p.m. in the Grappone Humanities Institute
Panel
Understanding the Modern World through the Medieval Past
A panel of Saint Anselm College Students Moderated by Professor Georgia Henley, English Department

Georgia Henley is a member of the English Department who specializes in the languages and literatures of medieval Britain. She employs digital humanities and book-historical methods to uncover the literary networks that connected England to its earliest colonies. She is the author and co-author of numerous scholarly publications, and a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. Her current book project, Reimagining the Past in the Anglo-Welsh Borderlands (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), examines how Anglo-Welsh families reimagined the Welsh past in order to influence the political landscape of the Welsh borderlands.

Tuesday, February 18, 4:30 p.m. in the Grappone Humanities Institute
Lecture
Cultivating Wellness in Arcadia: How the Renaissance Shaped Modern Ideas of Health and Nature
Professor Katherine Bentz, Fine Arts Department

Kate Bentz is Professor of Art History at Saint Anselm College and the Academic Director of Saint Anselm’s study abroad program in Tuscania, Italy. Her research focuses on urbanism and landscape history in sixteenth-century Italy, and she has published her work in scholarly journals such as Sixteenth-Century Journal and The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and has received fellowships and grants from institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collections, Villa I Tatti-The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and The Getty Research Institute.

Tuesday, March 11, 7:00 p.m. in the Melucci Auditorium
Lecture
Toward a Poetics of Self-Governance: Crises, Poets, and Publics
Dr Vincent Colapietro '73

Vincent Colapietro is a 1973 graduate of Saint Anselm College and a Liberal Arts Research Professor Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University in the Departments of Philosophy and African American Studies. Through the Center for the Humanities at the University of Rhode Island, he has a teaching appointment in the departments of English, Writing & Rhetoric, and Philosophy.

In the course of his career he has authored several books and over two hundred articles. In 2004 he was honored by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy with the Herbert W. Schneider Award for lifetime achievement.

Thursday, April 3, 7:00 p.m. in the Grappone Humanities Institute
Poetry Reading
Jennifer Mulitello

Jennifer Militello is the current Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She is the author of the hybrid collection Identifying the Pathogen, named a finalist for the 2024 FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize (forthcoming, 2025), The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021) and the memoir Knock Wood, winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize (Dzanc Books, 2019), as well as four previous books of poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous national journals in the U.S. and abroad. She has taught at Brown University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, the Rhode Island School of Design, and is currently a faculty member in the MFA program at New England College.