Our University brings Bucknell to the world and the world to Bucknell, including speakers from all disciplines who help make this connection.

Departments across the University's curriculum regularly host outstanding speakers, including various colloquia in the humanities, society and technology, and social science, as well as other disciplines, that bring nationally and internationally renowned guests to campus to talk with students and the campus community about issues affecting our world.

Bucknell Forum

This national speakers series began in fall 2007 to focus on major issues facing America and the world. Guests have already included beloved newsman Tim Russert, renowned investor Jim Cramer, distinguished presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Nobel Laureate F. W. de Klerk, environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and award-winning author Niall Ferguson.

Through the voices of renowned agents of change, the current Bucknell Forum series, Revolution Redefined, will explore social change and how it has - or has not - evolved over time, as well as how individuals can grow to become global citizens who make meaningful, lasting impacts on society in a variety of ways.

Janet Weis Fellow in Contemporary Letters

The Janet Weis Fellow in Contemporary Letters is an award given biannually to honor and recognize an individual who represents the very highest level of achievement in the craft of writing within the realms of fiction, non-fiction, or biography. The award was established in 2002.

Recent recipients have been historian Robert A. Caro, playwright Edward Albee, novelist John Edgar Wideman, biographer David McCullough, and poet Derek Walcott.

The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act: 50 Years After

The Bucknell Institute for Public Policy and the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender mark the 50th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act by remembering those who sacrificed for their passage, by taking stock of what has and has not been achieved, and by challenging those forces that would resurrect the policies and practices of racial hierarchies in new forms.

Post-Obama Paradigms: Problems and Potentialities

The aim of the Griot Institute for Africana Studies spring 2015 series is to extend the conversation and narrative about the myriad significances, meanings, and cultural transformations(?) available to America now that it has elected its first African American President. Particularly, we are interested in deliberating the symbolic, ideological, iconographic impacts on Americans' conceptions of themselves as a people. For instance, in what ways has the United States been changed as a result of electing Obama: in terms of race relations, political progress, a newly emboldened conservatism, and other aspects of life in America in the twenty-first century.