Welcome! Burns Library hosts an array of academic, historical, and cultural events during the academic year, with the aim of showcasing our library's vibrant collections, celebrating achievements of the Boston College community members, and presenting local and international scholarship.
We hope you will join us for one of our many upcoming lectures and events, about which more details may be found below and on the BC Events Calendar. To view recordings of our previous lectures and events, visit our Youtube channel. To join our mailing list, click here.
For information regarding parking and visiting the library, see our Planning a Visit page.
Questions regarding upcoming events should be directed to Caroline Pace, Burns Library Administrative Assistant, at 617-552-3282, or caroline.pace@bc.edu.
4:30pm lecture recital, 6:00pm reception
Burns Library
A lecture-recital featuring Emerita Professor Jane Bernstein (Tufts), Prof Daniele Filippi (Turin, Italy), and specialist Dutch ensemble Cappella Pratensis.
In the 500th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, one of the most renowned of the composers of sacred music in the High Renaissance, the Burns Library celebrates its acquisition of a rare copy of Palestrina's Masses printed in Rome in 1570 and a book of motets printed in 1575. Experts on Palestrina and music printing in Rome will introduce the rare Palestrina volumes and singers from the visiting Dutch ensemble Cappella Pratensis will perform a selection of works reading from the original sixteenth-century notation. A reception at 6:00 pm offers the opportunity to meet Profs Bernstein, Filippi, and the singers of the visiting ensemble.
Burns Library will host a complimentary reception beginning at 6:00pm, following the lecture recital.
Sponsored by the Dean of MCAS, Institute for the Liberal Arts, Boston College Libraries, Music Department, Department for Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies.
Free and open to the public. Please use this link to RSVP.
Cappella Pratensis For almost forty years, the Gramophone Award-winning ensemble Cappella Pratensis has been renowned for its innovative approach to the performance of Renaissance polyphonic music, being one of only a handful of professional ensembles in the world who perform directly from historical notation, as opposed to transcriptions in the form of a modern choral score. In recent years, the ensemble has dived further into the musical traditions surrounding this repertoire by exploring historical methods of improvisation and pedagogies, as well as working within the contexts of liturgical reconstruction. The result is an inherently immersive approach, in which the performers draw on a truly embodied relationship with past musical cultures in order to provide convincing and engaging performances.
Jane Bernstein Jane Bernstein's research interests center on Renaissance music, women's studies, and nineteenth-century Italian opera. In 2005, her book Women's Voices across Musical Worlds was named a finalist for the Pauline Alderman Award from International Alliance for Women in Music. Her other major publications include Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice (2002), the thirty-volume series The Sixteenth-Century Chanson, Philip Van Wilder: Collected Works, and French Chansons of the Sixteenth Century. She is currently working on a book about music print culture in Renaissance Rome.
Bernstein has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Gladys Delmas Foundation for Venetian Studies. In 2005, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She served as President of the American Musicological Society in 2008-10 and was conferred Honorary Member of the Society in 2014.
Daniele Filippi Born in Milan (Italy) in 1975, Daniele V. Filippi studied Musicology in Cremona and in Heidelberg. His scholarly interests include early modern music and spirituality, historical soundscapes, and intertextuality. He has published on Gaffurio, Palestrina, Victoria, Marenzio, de Monte, and G.F. Anerio.
In 2012-2014 he was a visiting fellow at the Jesuit Institute of Boston College, where he developed the project ‘The Soundscape of Early Modern Catholicism’ (see http://www.selvarmonica.com/). In 2014-2020 he was a researcher at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (Basle, Switzerland), where he worked at research projects on fifteenth-century motet cycles and the Gaffurius Codices.
From 2022 to 2025 he has been a researcher at the University of Turin; from March 2025 he is an Associate Professor in Musicology and Music History at the same institution.
5:00pm reception, 6:00pm lecture
Burns Library
Eve Watson (PhD, MICP) is involved in psychoanalytic practice, training, education, and research in Dublin, Ireland. She is a co-director of a busy Dublin city centre clinic, and is a psychoanalytic practitioner and clinical supervisor. She has published dozens of essays on psychoanalysis, sexuality, film, culture, and literature. She lectures on various programs in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and health and oversees a variety of research projects at graduate and undergraduate levels. Her co-edited books are Freud's Principal Case Studies Revisited: Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalysts Reconsider the Legacy (2025, Routledge), Critical Essays on the Drive: Lacanian Theory and Practice (2024, Routledge), Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (2017, Punctum), and in 2026 a forthcoming collection on James Joyce's writing and her own authored book on psychoanalysis and film. She is the academic director of the Freud Lacan Institute (FLi), and was the Editor of Lacunae, the International Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis from 2016-2024. She is a member of the Editorial Boards of Lacunae, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and the European Journal of Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy. In 2022, she was the Erik Erikson Scholar-in-Residence at the Austen Riggs Centre in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She is the Burns Scholar in Irish Studies at Boston College in the Fall of 2025.
For further background on Professor Watson and her Burns Visiting Scholar residency, please visit the Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies web page.
Burns Library will host a complimentary reception beginning at 5:00pm, with Prof. Watson's lecture to follow at 6:00pm. All are welcome.
Jill Lepore is Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), an overview of American history in relation to the values we consider fundamental to this country. She studies the history of evidence, and her work examines inconsistencies in the historical record. Her essays have b
een collected in the book The Deadline, which explores personal and political life in contemporary America. She has won the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay.
Professor Lepore’s most recent book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (2025) discusses successful and unsuccessful amendments to the constitution and argues that the Framers did not intend for the Constitution to remain stagnant, “like a butterfly under glass,” but rather that it should be continuously amended and modified. The Clough Center is delighted to welcome Professor Lepore for the Clough Distinguished Lecture. Please join us for a thought-provoking lecture, and the final event of our fall semester.
A complimentary reception will begin at 5:00pm, with Prof. Watson's lecture to follow at 6:00pm. All are welcome.
