Convocation, one of the central events of Welcome Week, is an academic rite of passage into Gallatin’s community of learners. Incoming undergraduates assemble together for the first time to begin the intellectual conversation they will continue during their years of undergraduate study. The event addresses the nature of the undergraduate experience at Gallatin and provides new students with advice about the opportunities and challenges that await them during their first year.
After a welcome from Dean Susanne L. Wofford, students enjoy a presentation, followed by a faculty panel discussion of a selected seminal text or texts. A luncheon hosted by Gallatin faculty members follows the formal program, allowing entering students an opportunity to engage in an in-depth discussion of the shared summer readings led by members of the Gallatin faculty and to meet their peers.
BA Convocation 2021
Reading: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer; Faculty panelists: Eugenia Kisin, Mitch Joachim, and Marie Cruz Soto
BA Convocation 2020
Readings: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson; Loïc Wacquant’s “Class, Race and Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America”; Rachel Kushner’s “Is Prison Necessary?: Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind”; and several short creative writing pieces about incarceration from students Jonathan Salgado, Levonne Williams and Miles Lewis, participants in NYU's Prison Education Program;
BA Convocation 2019
Readings: Educated by Tara Westover; On Keeping A Notebook by Joan Didion; A Letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe by Frederick Douglass; A Lofty Study by Getrude Mossell; Death by Civilization by Mary Pember; Faculty panelists: Ali Mirsepassi, Sara Murphy, Vasuki Nesiah
BA Convocation 2018
Readings: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Lauren Berlant’s “The Queen of America Goes to Washington: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill” Selections from the pioneering and influential 1981 anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings from Radical Women of Color: Valerio’s “It’s In My Blood, My Face—My Mother’s Voice, the Way I Sweat”; Merle Woo’s “Letter to Ma”; and the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement”
BA Convocation 2017
Exploration of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Hippocrates’s Airs, Waters, Places, selections from Leanne Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love, and Zoe Todd’s “Relationships.” Faculty panelists: Peder Anker, Kim DaCosta, Eugenia Kisin
BA Convocation 2016
Exploration of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me and Plato's The Apology of Socrates
Theatrical readings and faculty panel with Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Meleko Mokgosi, and Laura Slatkin
BA Convocation 2015
Exploration of Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North.
Theatrical reading and faculty panel with Sinan Antoon, Patrick McCreery, and Vasuki Nesiah
BA Convocation 2014
An investigation of the work of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” Presentations: Fiasco Theater; Kwami Coleman and Michael Dinwiddie
BA Convocation 2013
An analysis and examination of politics and race in Ellison’s Invisible Man
BA Convocation 2012
An exploration of the themes that link Sophocles’s Antigone to the events of the Arab Spring and the murder of Trayvon Martin
BA Convocation 2011
An interdisciplinary panel of professors will present analyses of Christopher Collard's translation of Aeschylus's Oresteia
BA Convocation 2010
An interdisciplinary discussion covering Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Genesis, Princeton Readings in Political Thought, and Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities
BA Convocation 2009
An introduction to Stoppard’s Arcadia, Gleick’s Chaos, Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe, and the poetry of Keats