Current Theme

The theme for 2024-2025 is “Border Crossings.” What are the boundaries that give shape and meaning to our lives? Who gets to draw, or imagine, or impose, these boundaries, and who is – or is not– allowed to move across them?

Our reading list will enable us to consider how these questions have been asked and answered across a range of historical periods and social contexts. The borders we explore and cross together will sometimes be geographic in nature, but we will also consider other kinds of borders that give shape to bodies and minds across various kinds of human knowing – poems, memoirs, novels, films, philosophical and political tracts among others. We will encounter a range of wanderers, explorers, travelers, and guides – some who left pathways for others to trace, and others who warned people from following in their steps. The borders and boundaries we map will be both real and imagined – between the known and the unknown, life and death, natural and supernatural, as well as across space and time.