All upcoming Lectures

The stamp of prolific chef, author, and TV personality Bobby Flay can be felt in restaurants across the country, as well as at the dinner table in many families’ homes. Join him, in conversation with Washington Post’s Joe Yonan, as he discusses his newest cookbook, Bobby Flay: Chapter One, shares insights into his personal and professional experiences and offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the culinary world that shaped him.

Be careful when you step into your garden: It’s full of killers. You may be familiar with carnivorous plants such as the Venus flytrap, sundew, or pitcher plant, but a surprising number of plants could be classified as carnivorous—including your geraniums and potentillas. Steve Nicholls, a wildlife filmmaker, offers a wide look into these garden-world wonders.

Begun in 1337, the ground floor of Orsanmichele church in Florence, Italy, was originally a loggia-style market. When it was transformed, the inside was decorated with paintings of saints and the outside with statues by artists such as Donatello, Ghiberti, and Verrocchio. Today, the upper floor of Orsanmichele is a museum where all but one of the original sculptures are on display. Renaissance art expert Rocky Ruggiero highlights this museum and its treasures. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Have you ever wondered why scores of British words and phrases—such as one-off, kerfuffle, easy peasy, and cheeky—have been enthusiastically taken up in the United States? Drawing from his new book, Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English, writer Ben Yagoda takes a deep dive into the most popular British terms in the United States today as he explores why Americans have embraced British insults and curses, sports terms, and words about food and drinks.

Are we alone in the universe and are there Earth-like planets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way? In 2009, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope to answer these questions. Jason Steffen, a former member of the science team on the mission, traces Kepler from the take-off of the rocket that sent it into space to the revelations of the data that flowed back to a supercomputer at NASA—evidence of strange new worlds unlike anything found in our own solar system.

Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are three influential philosophers whose ideas have significantly shaped political theory and the understanding of the social contract. In a fall series, join Georgetown professor Joseph Hartman as he explores these thinkers who offered distinct perspectives on the nature of human beings, the origins of political authority, and the formation of societies. This session focuses on John Locke.

Our understanding of dinosaur behavior has long been hampered by the inevitable lack of evidence from animals that went extinct more than 65 million years ago. But with the discovery of new specimens and the development of cutting-edge techniques, paleontologists are making huge advances in reconstructing how dinosaurs acted. Paleontologist David Hone provides a look at the fundamentals of dinosaur biology and evolution and describes feeding, communication, and social behavior.

After teenagers responded with wild enthusiasm to hearing “Rock Around the Clock” in Blackboard Jungle in 1955, Hollywood began to recognize the power of the teen audience. A flood of films featuring musicians performing rock and R&B hits and plots about rebellious high schoolers, daredevil hot-rodders, and antics-prone college students followed. Media historian Brian Rose looks at rock movies’ first decade and how Hollywood benefited from the power of the music and its target audience.

Food and drink appear in myriad contexts over four centuries of European painting. In the Renaissance, feasting transcended mere sustenance, serving as a significant form of communication and expression. Art historian Elaine Ruffolo delves into images of lavish banquets to explore their menus, ingredients, preparation, dining practices, and table settings, as well as the intricate depiction of food in the period’s art. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Bletchley Park was Britain’s nexus of top-secret work during World War II, where under the cloak of secrecy, agents worked furiously around the clock to decode Germany’s secret messages, notably those encrypted with the Enigma machine. Alan Turing, Joan Clarke, and Dilly Knox were among the recruits. Sir Dermot Turing, Turing's nephew and author of The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park, shares the story of this unusual group of people whose mission was to save the world from destruction.