Dear colleagues, students, and friends, Join us for a lecture and discussion with internationally renowned scholar, educator, and author Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, a leading voice on decolonial futures, global justice, and the profound transformations required in times of social and ecological breakdown. 4th Global Humanities Master Class Title: Hospicing and Outgrowing Modernity: Tuesday, March 17, 12:00 - 1:30 pm Location: The Nexus at Hayden Library, 14S-130, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is the former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism and Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating complexity, complicity and collapse (August 2025), and one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective. Her latest work, Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That is Not Really About AI, explores AI as a mirror and metaphor for human systems and invites readers to rethink relationality amidst planetary crises. Co-sponsored by MIT Global Humanities Initiative, MITHIC, MIT Systems Awareness Lab, Indigenous Spirit at MIT, MIT Radius, MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and the Presencing Institute. Learn more and register: https://bit.ly/4rSX7RR Looking forward to seeing you at our […]

"Gender, Empire and Al" is a symposium and design workshop to both reflect on critical questions and design generative paths forward to addressing them. The day will start with a keynote by award-winning journalist and MIT alumna, Karen Hao, on her book "Empire of Al". Select MIT faculty will facilitate discussion groups to unpack problems outlined in Hao’s talk and possible solutions. Over lunch, we will hear from our second keynote speaker, Paola Ricaurte, who leads the Latin American Feminist Al Research Network and was named as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in Al in 2025. In the afternoon, we will hold hands-on design workshops to tackle specific issues like reproductive justice, Al and propaganda, and biases in medical imaging. We believe that together we can solve complex issues and generate more just and feminist visions for Al and society. For more information, to register, and questions regarding accessibility, contact wgs@mit.edu.. This event is free and open to the public with priority to the MIT community. Registration is required. Learn more here...   Keynote Speakers Karen Hao was formerly a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering American and Chinese tech companies, and a senior editor for […]

Presented by Daniel Smail Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of History Harvard University Date: Monday, March 30 Location: Building 14,  Room 14E-304 (map)* *Directions: From the Lewis Music Library stairs, take the third floor of Building 14, through the CMS/W doors. Alternatively, take the elevator to the 3rd floor, navigate to the opposite end of the 3rd floor hallway, and enter through the CMS/W doors. Abstract: Everywhere in late medieval Mediterranean Europe, it was possible, at least in theory, to purchase and hold an enslaved individual. The traffic in slaves began a noteworthy period of growth in the thirteenth century. In the second half of the fourteenth, the rise of the Black Sea trade led to a significant acceleration. Yet the practice of slavery was never uniform across the region. In some cities, as much as 15 percent of the population may have been enslaved. Elsewhere, the presence of enslaved individuals is scarcely detectable. The significant variation in the degree to which slavery implanted itself in the cities and towns of Mediterranean Europe is a historical phenomenon in search of explanation. Through a survey of practices of slavery in Marseille, a city located in the borderlands of the practice, this lecture seeks to frame […]

Doors open at 5:30pm. Followed by book signing. Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor, and in 2025 he was named the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025) and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025); The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), for which he won the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014); The Ginkgo Light (2009); Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998); and Archipelago (1995). He also authored Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2026), The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024), and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Sze received the 2025 Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. Professor emeritus at the Institute of American […]

Screening of She Runs the World (2025), directed by Perri Peltz and Matthew O'Neill. Introduction by Executive Producer, David Fialkow. Conversation to follow with Sandy Alexandre (Literature), Marzyeh Ghassemi (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), and Angelica Castro-Salazar ('26 Mechanical Engineering) She Runs the World is the powerful story of Olympic champion Allyson Felix as she challenges her sponsor Nike after being financially penalized during her pregnancy. The documentary highlights the need for maternal rights in professional sports. The screening will be followed by a panel moderated by Sandy Alexandre (Associate Professor, Literature Section) In conversation with: • Marzyeh Ghassemi (Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science) • Angelica Castro-Salazar (Mechanical Engineering and student-athlete) Cinema at the Nexus is an institute-wide film series showcasing films/documentaries that grapple with pressing issues of our day aiming to make some sense of what we are experiencing today. Supported by the SHASS Dean’s grant, sponsored by the MIT Libraries and the Literature Section. Pizza and light refreshments will be served. Registration is encouraged but not required. More info here...

Tracy K. Smith is a Professor of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. She is the author of the memoirs To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Knopf, 2023) and Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015), as well as five poetry collections, including Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011) which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. For her writing, Smith has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States. Her latest book is Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (Norton, 2025). The Green-Taylor Lectures is a speaker series celebrating the intersections of Black Studies, Architecture and Design. Over the course of the year, the series will feature voices from across these fields in an effort to illuminate both the unique history of African American architects here at MIT—the Institute's first Black graduate, Robert R. Taylor, as well as two of the first Black women to attend MIT, Marie Turner and Gloria Green, all studied architecture during their time on campus—and contemporary work in the field that honors the role of worldmaking in the Black expressive tradition.