The Lecture Fund has committed to organize a new professor lecture series with the Georgetown University Student Association. The first lecture, featuring assistant professor of government Fr. Matthew Carnes, S. J., is scheduled for April 14.
The initiative, which will be named the Professor Spotlight Series, is designed to engage students with a variety of subjects and professors and to help students with registration and pre-registration.
“I think it’s an exciting initiative. Students are surrounded here at Georgetown by a fantastic set of faculty members and often they get a limited view because they only get to take so many classes,” Carnes said. “The opportunity to hear more voices is a terrific one.”
According to Angela Bai (COL ‘17), Intellectual Life Committee member, the first lecture will most likely be held in Healy Hall, where Carnes will speak for about 45 minutes on a topic from his Comparative Political Systems course.
“We wanted to choose someone in high demand. [Fr. Carnes is] popular, everybody knows his name, he’s a very solid speaker and we wanted to make sure that we have a good start,” said Bai.
The Lecture Fund is also currently developing a website for the series. “The website would be entirely dedicated towards this new initiative, and it would just contain the videos that we record from each of these lectures,” said Chris Mulrooney (COL ‘14), chair of Lecture Fund.
The series will only hold one lecture this semester. GUSA and the Lecture Fund hope to have the series more developed by next fall and ideally host at least one lecture a month.
According to GUSA Intellectual Life Chair Shweta Wahal (SFS ’16), as this initiative develops further, GUSA will be responsible for professor outreach and the Lecture Fund will handle promotion, marketing, and logistics for events of the series.
“There is still a lot to be done, but both GUSA and Lecture Fund are working hard to make this idea happen. We’ve received a great deal of encouragement from faculty members including teachers and deans,” wrote Milan Chang (COL ’17), a member of the Lecture Fund working on the Professor Spotlight Series, in an email to the Voice.
