Distinguished Speaker Series

The Pomona College Distinguished Speaker Series seeks to bring to campus exciting, high-profile speakers with unique, informative perspectives. The College hopes that these events will encourage substantive conversations around important national and international issues. During their visit, speakers give a public lecture as well as interact with students, faculty and staff in more informal settings. Pomona College is very grateful to the Broe family for its generous three-year donation to the College for a seed fund to establish this series, which was outlined in Pomona College's 2007 Strategic Plan.

Past Distinguished Lecture Series Guests

• 2011: Van Jones, green jobs advocate & civil rights activist (video), and Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft & co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (video)
• 2010: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice
• 2009: David Plouffe, Campaign Manager for the Obama presidential campaign

2011-12 Speakers

Bill McKibben

Thursday, October 27, 2011
Bridges Auditorium
7:00 pm

The video from this event is available by clicking here.

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign, 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him "the planet's best green journalist" and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was "probably the country's most important environmentalist." Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, he holds honorary degrees from a dozen colleges, including the Universities of Massachusetts and Maine, the State University of New York, and Whittier and Colgate Colleges. In 2011, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

To read his full bio, check out his website here.

Anna Deavere Smith

Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Bridges Auditorium
7:00 pm

Anna Deavere Smith is an actor, a teacher, a playwright and the creator of an acclaimed series of one-woman plays based on her interviews with diverse voices from communities in crisis. She has won numerous awards, among them two Obies, two Tony nominations, a Drama Desk Award, the USA Susan V. Berresford Award from United States Artists, and a MacArthur fellowship. She was runner up for the Pulitzer Prize for her play Fires In the Mirror. She has been said to have created a new form of theater; her work combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. Television and movie credits include Nurse Jackie, The West Wing, The American President, Philadelphia and others.

Smith is the founding director of Anna Deavere Smith Works, a nonprofit that convenes socially-committed artists whose work addresses the world's most pressing problems and brings them into dialogue with scholars, scientists, activists, students and politicians. She is also the founder of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University. Honorary degrees include those from Juilliard, Northwestern and a Radcliffe Medal. She is a professor at New York University.