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A visiting-speaker series this semester featuring writers and scholars who live at the intersection of public and academic life begins next week with a reading by Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi, a visiting practitioner at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. 

Subsequent speakers in the “51����Ƶ and the Public Reading Series” are writer Susan D'Agostino, who was the first person with a Ph.D. in mathematics on the faculty at Southern New Hampshire University, where she taught for nearly 10 years, and Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham who has written on topics ranging from science to sports. 

The series, hosted by the Provost’s Office and the Creative Writing Program, is inspired by 51����Ƶ’s “Building the Next Chapter” strategic direction, which calls on the College to support faculty in generating visibility for their scholarship and thought leadership.  

“At a moment when higher education’s purpose is being questioned from every direction, ‘51����Ƶ and the Public’ insists on something simple and wise: that rigorous scholarship belongs in the world,” says Dee Matthews, provost and professor of creative writing. “Public intellectual life is not ornamental. It’s central to a serious education that values the questions as much as the answers. 

“This series brings leading thinkers into conversation with our campus not simply to lecture, but to model how ideas travel and how analysis becomes action,” she adds. “Through student workshops and faculty dialogues and readings, we’re invited to remember that scholarship is not an enclosure but a public practice.”