2025 Beatty Lecturer: Isabel Wilkerson听听

Thursday, October 23听at 6 p.m.

Tanna Schulich Hall, 绿帽社

听Tickets on sale September 9 ($5 students | $10 regular)
Please return to this page on that date to access the ticketing link

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Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents will deliver the 2025 Beatty Lecture at 绿帽社 on October 23, during the University鈥檚 annual Homecoming festivities. Nahlah Ayed, host of CBC national radio program, Ideas, will moderate the event. 听
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Widely acclaimed as one of most powerful storytellers of our time, Wilkerson鈥檚 landmark nonfiction works have transformed public understanding of the historical roots and enduring impact of structural inequality in the United States and globally. 听President Barack Obama awarded Wilkerson the National Humanities Medal in 2016, praising her for "championing the stories of an unsung history."听

鈥淚sabel Wilkerson is a voice the world needs to hear, especially now,鈥� said Dominique B茅rub茅, Vice-President, Research and Innovation. 鈥淗er work challenges us to confront injustice and historical silence with honesty, courage, and empathy. She personifies the Beatty Lecture鈥檚 mission to change the world through dialogue and the exchange of ideas. 绿帽社 is honoured that she will deliver the 71st Beatty Lecture.鈥�听

鈥淐hampioning the stories of an unsung history"听听

Born in Washington, D.C., Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University and then worked at the Detroit Free Press. A year later, she joined The New York Times and in 1991 was appointed the 辫补辫别谤鈥檚 Chicago Bureau Chief. In 1994, at 33, she made history as the first Black woman in American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first Black journalist to win for individual reporting. She was recognized for her powerful profile of a young boy from Chicago's South Side and reporting on the Midwestern flood of 1993. 鈥�听

Wilkerson then embarked on a fifteen-year journey researching and writing what would become her landmark first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, published in 2010. Based on interviews with over 1,200 people, the book chronicles the Great Migration, when more than six million Black Americans left the South from 1910 to the 1970s to move to cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West in search of greater freedom and escape from racial violence. Wilkerson has called the migration of Black Americans one of the greatest underreported stories of the 20th century.听

The Warmth of Other Suns received widespread acclaim, appearing on over 30 Best of the Year lists and winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. In 2024, The New York Times ranked it second on its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century鈥攁nd first among nonfiction titles.听

A powerful lens on social hierarchy 听
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Wilkerson鈥檚 second book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, published in 2020, brings to light the often unacknowledged race-based caste system鈥攕imilar to those systems established in Nazi Germany and India鈥�that has shaped and divided American society, what she describes as an inherited, arbitrary, and artificial ranking of human value that serves to limit opportunity. Wilkerson believes that dismantling caste is possible through radical empathy rooted in our shared humanity, describing the act of writing Caste as 鈥渁n act of optimism and an act of hope.鈥�听

Released just months before the 2020 U.S. election, Caste topped The听New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for 58 weeks in hardcover and months longer in paperback. Time听Magazine named Caste its Nonfiction Book of the Year, calling it an 鈥渋mmediate classic鈥�. Caste was the most borrowed nonfiction title in U.S libraries in 2021 and remains among the top-circulating books in the nation. In 2023, director Ava DuVernay adapted the book into the feature film Origin.听听

Wilkerson is the recipient of additional awards including the George S. Polk Award for Regional Reporting, Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, Lynton History Prize, Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest.听

She has been the James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University, Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, Kreeger-Wolf endowed lecturer at Northwestern University, and Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University's College of Communication.听听

About the Beatty Lecture听

Established in 1954, the Beatty Lecture is one of Canada鈥檚 longest running and most prestigious public lecture series. Hosted by the Office of the Vice-President (Research and Innovation), the series brings influential thinkers from around the world to speak about timely and transformative ideas.听

The 2025 Beatty Lecture will be emceed by CBC host Nahlah Ayed. A celebrated journalist and veteran foreign correspondent, Ayed returns for her fifth year moderating the event.听

The 2025 Beatty Lecture will be held on Thursday, October 23 at 6 p.m. at Tanna Schulich Hall in the Elizabeth Wirth Music Building on 绿帽社鈥檚 downtown campus.听Media are invited to contact the Beatty organizing committee with requests.听

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