IAS Events

Kevin Young, Poet and Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, will present the IU IAS Fall 2022 Branigin Lecture in celebration of the Institute’s 40th anniversary. This event is presented by the IU Institute for Advanced Study, with the gracious support of the College Arts + Humanities Institute and the Department of English. It is open to the public, and attendance is free. For questions regarding this event, please contact the Institute at ias@indiana.edu. Kevin Young is the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and poetry editor of The New Yorker, where he hosts the poetry podcast. He was previously the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown (Knopf, 2018), as featured on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995- 2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; and Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. His collection Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His newest book of poetry, Stones, was one of Library Journal’s Top Ten poetry titles of 2021, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His new children’s book is Emile and the Field (RHCB/Make Me a World, March 15, 2022 illustrated by Chioma Ebinama. Young’s second nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was named a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” selection, and a “Best Book of 2017” by NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian, Vogue, the Atlantic, Nylon, BuzzFeed, and Electric Literature. Young’s previous nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012), won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.Young is the editor of nine other collections, including The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965- 2010 (BOA Editions, 2012) and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012). He is the editor of the anthology African American Poetry 1770–2020: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America October 2020). He is series editor and wrote the introduction and forward for Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition.He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. In March 2021 he was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in May he was elected as a Fellow of the Society of American Historians.

Dr. Randy Schekman, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and Nobel Laureate, will present the IU IAS Spring 2023 Branigin Lecture in celebration of the Institute's 40th anniversary. This event is presented by the IU Institute for Advanced Study and the Branigin Lecture Fund, through the generosity of IU Alumna Gene Lois Portteus Branigin. It is open to the public and attendance is free. For questions regarding this event, please contact the Institute at ias@indiana.edu. Dr. Randy Schekman is a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He studied the enzymology of DNA replication as a graduate student with Arthur Kornberg at Stanford University. His current interest in cellular membranes developed during a postdoctoral period with S. J. Singer at the UC Diego. Among his awards are the Gairdner International Award, the Albert Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with James Rothman and Thomas Südhof. He served as the Editor of the Annual Reviews of Cell and Developmental Biology and as Editor-in-Chief of the Proceedings of the NAS and eLife. Beginning in 2018, Schekman has served as the Scientific Director of “Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s Disease” a major philanthropic effort organized along with The Michael J. Fox Foundation to identify molecular and cellular mechanisms in the initiation and progression of Parkinson’s Disease (https://parkinsonsroadmap.org).Schekman’s laboratory investigates the mechanism of vesicular traffic in the secretory pathway in eukaryotic cells. Currently the lab investigates the mechanism of biogenesis of extracellular vesicles including how small RNAs are sorted for secretion in exosomes and the means by which these vesicles are internalized and function in target cells.