Posts by: zakbos

Gleanings from Bostonia

The following round-up of items of interest from BU’sBostonia magazine comes to us from alumna Cat Dossett (Core ’16, CAS ’18), an illustrator and writer living in the Boston area. For your interest and edification, here are their recommendations: The News section tells us that BU mechanical engineers are usingkirigamito create robotic grabby hands. What’s […]

A note of thanks after the Core Banquet

An email came in this morning, from an alumnus in the Core class of 1994, commenting on last night’s Core Banquet: Im writing just to say I thought the Core banquet last night was fantastic, despite it having to be again a virtual event. Royal Wood was wonderful, the video was a riot, and the […]

The Core Toast

In observance of this evening’s Core Banquet, we share the traditional toast, with which this annual event has been opened for thirty years.Each group of lines is read aloud by our convener, and thenrepeated by all in unison: To students and their teachers; to teachers and their students; and therefore to the great-souled dead, distant, […]

Texts and video from our Spring community reading

On the evening of April 14, 2021, an audience of classmates, alumni, lecturers, and friends of the Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum came together to hear faculty and staff share favorite texts which speak somehow to our present moment of isolation, separation and anxiety, as Auden did in his poem “Age of Anxiety.” Here is […]

Alter on writing The Art of Biblical Narrative

Robert Alterisa scholar and translator whose rendition of the Pentateuch into English we read in the first-year Core humanists as The Five Books of Moses. Earlier this year, in January, Alter was invited to deliver a lecture to students in Brigham Young University’s program in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. In his talk, he discusses The […]

“I think we deserve a happy ending”

Kathryn Donlan (CAS ’18) is a writer and aspiring archivist (an an alumna of CC 111!). She likes talking about literature from the perspective of social history and historical context, and in keeping with this outlook she recently shared her thoughts on Twitter on the news of a new cinematic adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. […]

Akkadian Dogs

Our first-year students are beginning with the beginning in this first week of the Fall 2020 semester, by reading the oldest book we have written copies of — the Epic of Gilgamesh. In keeping with the Mesopotamian moment, let us share these marvelous little clay dog figurines from the 7th century BCE. We spotted this […]

Kendi on antiracism

You may have read at BU Today that Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar of racism, has been recruited to join the BU faculty and to launch a BU Center for Antiracist Research. Last week, Dr. Kendi was interviewed by TED’s current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers and speaker development curator Cloe Shasha. In their conversation, […]

The poems of the 2020 Core Poetry Reading

On the evening of April 15th, four and a half dozen classmates, alumni, lecturers, and friends, all members of the extended community we call the BU Core, came together on Zoom for our traditional spring poetry reading, an event Core has organized for nearly two decades. Despite a hitch at the start (we were Zoom […]

An update on Summer Study in Athens

Following the University/s announcement that all in-person summer abroad programs have been canceled, the organizers of the Summer Study in Athens asked that we share this announcement of their reconfigured plans for the summer 2020 program: We know you are all wondering about this year’sSummer Study in Athens. As you may know, Boston University has […]