Encounter speakers who challenge and inspire.
Each year the Core Program hosts several distinguished speakers from outside the Occidental community, who represent different fields and perspectives. All Core Program events are held in Thorne Hall 11:45 a.m.鈥12:40 p.m. The lectures are open to the 海角社区 community and admission is free. Attendance is mandatory for first-year students.
Fall 2025
Friday, September 26, 11:45am-12:40pm
Thorne Hall
Vijay Gupta is a violinist, speaker and citizen-artist dedicated to creating spaces of wholeness and belonging through music. Vijay鈥檚 own musical journey embodies his belief that the work of artists and citizens is one: to make a sadhana 鈥 a daily practice 鈥 of the world we envision. Hailed by The New Yorker as a 鈥渧isionary violinist鈥ne of the most radical thinkers in the unradical world of American classical music,鈥 Vijay leads a protean career as a thought leader, performer, collaborator, curator, and communicator.
Vijay is the founder and Artistic Director of Street Symphony, a nationally-recognized pioneer in creating spaces of connection for people in reentry from homelessness, addiction and incarceration. Since 2011 Street Symphony鈥檚 communities of artists have presented thousands of musical workshops, performances and lessons in Los Angeles shelters, clinics, county jails, state hospitals and prisons 鈥 delivering the music of classical, choral, Jazz, Reggae, Mariachi and West African drumming traditions to communities beyond the concert hall.
For more on Vijay, see:
Friday, October 24, 11:45am-12:40pm
Thorne Hall
'07 is a social entrepreneur, sociologist, and bestselling author of When We Walk By. He is the founder, board chair, and former longtime CEO of Miracle Messages, a nonprofit helping people experiencing homelessness rebuild their social support systems and financial security. The organization has reunited over 1,100 unhoused neighbors with their loved ones, and connected hundreds more with volunteer phone buddies.
Adler holds an MPA from UC Berkeley鈥檚 Goldman School of Public Policy, an MPhil in sociology from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in politics from 海角社区, where he was named the 2018 Young Alumnus of the Year.
When We Walk By is Occidental's 2025-26 Community Book Program selection.
Tuesday, September 30, 7:00-8:30pm
Thorne Hall
While attendance is not required for this event, first-year students are encouraged to take advantage of the opportunity to hear this exciting speaker.
Roxane Gay鈥檚 writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney鈥檚, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity and once had a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.
This event is funded through the generous support of Occidental trustee and alumna, Lisa Coscino 鈥85; the Occidental Class of '74; and the Antoinette and Vincent M. Dungan Lectureship Fund.
Fall 2024
Monday, September 30, 11:45am-12:40pm
Thorne Hall
Stephanie Salda帽a is a journalist and religion scholar from San Antonio, Texas, who has spent most of the last twenty years living in the Middle East. Salda帽a studied religion at Harvard Divinity School and is the author of A Country Between and The Bread of Angels, hailed by Geraldine Brooks as "a remarkable, wise, and lovely book." Her work has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, America Magazine, and Plough, and she has been featured on National Public Radio. Salda帽a and her family split their time between Bethlehem and France.
Wednesday, October 16, 11:45am-12:40pm
Thorne Hall
Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller, and her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.
The Vanishing Half is Occidental's 2024-25 Community Book Program selection.
Spring 2025
Friday, February 7, 11:45am-12:40pm
Thorne Hall
Bryant Terry is a chef, food justice activist, and critically acclaimed author fighting for a more just and sustainable food system. Groundbreaking and rich, his work illuminates the intersections that exist today between poverty, structural racism, and food insecurity, in order to pave a new, better path forward. In his new book Black Food, Bryant offers a stunning and deeply heartfelt tribute to Black culinary ingenuity, capturing the broad and divergent voices of the African Diaspora in a way that鈥檚 never been done before.
Fall 2023
Friday, September 15, 11:45am-12:40pm
Thorne Hall
Tania El Khoury is a live artist whose work focuses on audience interactivity and its political potential. She creates installations and performances in which the audience is a witness and an active collaborator. Tania鈥檚 work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 32 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. Tania is Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater & Performance and the Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College in New York. She holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is associated with Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK and is a co-founder of the urban research and live art collective, Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.
The talk is free and open to the public. Dr. El Khoury's installation Cultural Exchange Rate will be on display from September 11-15. Advanced reservations for Cultural Exchange Rate are required and can by made .
Spring 2024
Tuesday, February 6, 11:45am-12:40pm
Online - Register
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
Braiding Sweetgrass is Occidental's 2023-24 Community Book Program selection.
Monday, March 4, 11:45am-12:40pm
Dr. Earyn McGee is an aspiring Natural History TV Show Host. She鈥檚 merged her love for lizards and passion for social justice to create the very popular social media game #FindThatLizard. Every Wednesday at 5pm MST, she posts a photo of a lizard camouflaged in its natural environment and invites participants to find it. The captions that go with each photo often give the players natural history facts about the lizards, while Dr. McGee also uses this as an opportunity to talk about conservation and social issues.
Dr. McGee鈥檚 graduate studies focused on the impact of stream drying on the lizard population. She鈥檚 also exploring ways to get more black women into natural resources careers. Committed to diversity and inclusion, Earyn was graduate student mentor to the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars program. The program aims to increase the diversity within the conservation field.
Earyn earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Howard University. As well as both a Master of Science and PhD in Natural Resources with an emphasis in Wildlife Conservation and Management from the University of Arizona.
Fall 2022
Monday, October 17, 11:45am-12:40pm
Filmmaker Ann Kaneko talks about her road to making Manzanar, Diverted and how she came to the fight for climate justice. How did the convergence of her family's legacy of WWII incarceration, three generations in Tongva lands/Los Angeles and a love for nature bring her to tell this story? What has she learned on this journey and where can the film take us?
Manzanar, Diverted is available to the 海角社区 community for viewing through the Panopto platform. You can access the film by using the link below and logging in using your 海角社区 username and password.
Wednesday, November 9, 11:45am-12:40pm
Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, Occidental's 2022 Community Book Program selection. You House Will Pay is winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She鈥檚 a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology.
Spring 2023
Monday, March 20, 11:45am-12:40pm
Despite the undeniable fact that Indigenous communities are among the most affected by climate devastation, Indigenous ways of knowing are nowhere to be found in mainstream environmental policy or discourse. And while holistic land, water, and forest management practices born from millennia of Indigenous knowledge systems have much to teach all of us, Indigenous ways of knowing has long been ignored, otherized, or perceived as 鈥渟oft鈥濃搕he product of a systematic, centuries-long campaign of racism, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and delegitimization. In this presentation, Dr. Hernandez will present ways in which we can honor Indigenous ways of knowing.
Wednesday, April 19, 11:45am-12:40pm
How do we re-imagine public safety to prioritize social groups that are disproportionately impacted by systemic and interpersonal harm? How do we create communities of care that prevent, interrupt, and intervene in violence? This talk will seek to answer these questions by providing attendees with frameworks, tools, and resources for enacting Transformative Justice. Borne of feminist and queer/trans of color organizing lineages, Transformative Justice is a social movement that seeks to disrupt violence and repair harm without relying on the police. This talk will focus in particular on the small, everyday acts that we can all begin practicing now鈥攊n our intimate relationships, college campuses, and wider social communities.
