Michelle Addington, a leading voice in sustainability and architectural design, challenges traditional net-zero approaches and advocates for systemic change in the built environment. Drawing on her experience at NASA, E.I. DuPont, Yale, and UT Austin, she offers practical strategies for rethinking sustainability at human, regional, and societal scales. Register Here Originally published at architecture.nd.edu.

John Green, author of The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet will be the 2025 Ruskin Lecturer.   The End of the World as We Know It: John Green offers some thoughts on apocalypse, endings, and whether human hope is truly justified. Plus, there will be some jokes, I promise!Originally published at reilly.nd.edu.

Resilience is presented by Elliott Parker, CEO, and Matt Brady, general manager of the Build team, of High Alpha Innovation, a venture builder that co-creates companies directly in partnership with organizations to drive tangible growth and transformation. The Ten Years Hence speaker series explores issues, ideas, and trends likely to affect business and society over the next decade. The theme of the 2025 series is Innovation: The Process of Creation and Renewal. Ten Years Hence is sponsored by the Eugene Clark Distinguished Lecture Series endowment. This is one of seven lectures in the Ten Years Hence Lecture Series. See website for details and other lecture dates. Free and open to students, faculty, staff and public. The original date was February 21. It will now be held February 7.

Resilience is presented by Elliott Parker, CEO, and Matt Brady, general manager of the Build team, of High Alpha Innovation, a venture builder that co-creates companies directly in partnership with organizations to drive tangible growth and transformation. The Ten Years Hence speaker series explores issues, ideas, and trends likely to affect business and society over the next decade. The theme of the 2025 series is Innovation: The Process of Creation and Renewal. Ten Years Hence is sponsored by the Eugene Clark Distinguished Lecture Series endowment. This is one of seven lectures in the Ten Years Hence Lecture Series. See website for details and other lecture dates. Free and open to students, faculty, staff and public. The original date was February 21. It will now be held February 7.

The Dignity of Human Life in the Digital Age is presented by Paolo Carozza, professor of law, Notre Dame Law School as part of the Dean’s Speakers Series. Paolo Carozza joined the Notre Dame Law School faculty in 1996. His expertise is in the areas of comparative constitutional law, human rights, law and development, and international law. From 2012-22 he served as the director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, an interdisciplinary, university-wide institute focusing primarily on the themes of democracy and human development, where he was also the principal investigator of the Notre Dame Constitutionalism and Rule of Law Lab (CAROLL). Professor Carozza is also a Faculty Fellow of the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, the Institute for Educational Initiatives, the Pulte Institute for Global Development, and the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Initiative. Carozza currently serves as a member of the Oversight Board, an independent expert body created by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to render binding decisions and policy recommendations regarding difficult content moderation questions on Meta’s platforms.  

As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute’s spring 2025 speaker series, Anelise Hanson Shrout will deliver a talk on her new book, Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy (NYU Press, 2024). Book sales will follow the talk. Book DescriptionFamine brought ruin to the Irish countryside in the 19th century. In response, people around the world and from myriad social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds became involved in Irish famine relief. They included enslaved Black people in Virginia, poor tenant farmers in rural New York, and members of the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, as well as plantation owners in the US south, abolitionists in Pennsylvania, and, politicians in England and Ireland. Most of these people had no personal connection to Ireland. For many, the famine was their first time participating in distant philanthropy.Aiding Ireland  investigates the Irish famine as a foundational moment for normalizing international giving. Anelise Hanson Shrout argues that these diverse men and women found famine relief to be politically useful. Shrout takes readers from Ireland to Britain, across the Atlantic to the United States, and across the Mississippi to Indian Territory, uncovering what was to be gained for each group by participating in global famine relief. Aiding Ireland demonstrates that international philanthropy and aid are never simple, and are always intertwined with politics both at home and abroad. Speaker Biography Anelise Hanson Shrout is assistant professor in the Program in Digital and Computational Studies at Bates College, where she is also affiliated with the Department of History and the Program in American Studies. Her work explores the intertwined relationships between history, computation, algorithmic thinking and data. Her research focuses on the nineteenth-century origins of international humanitarianism, and particularly the ways in which philanthropic donations were used as proxies for arguments about governance in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. She is also working on a digital archiving project that explores the lives of immigrants who were medically incarcerated in New York in the nineteenth century. This project uses computational methods to understand the forces working on those immigrants, as well as the communities they were able to form within institutions. Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.