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.
Tuesday, March 25
5:30pm - 7:30pm
Burns Library
In collaboration with the Romance Language and Literatures department, Burns Library will host programming and book display for the celebration of "Dante Day" ('Dantedì'), an annual commemoration of Italy's most celebrated poet and writer, Dante Alighieri. March 25 was chosen as it is recognized by scholars as the day the poet started his journey in the afterlife in the Divine Comedy.
5:30pm: Lecture: "The Poet's Blessing and Dante's Divine Comedy", Laurie Shepard, Professor Emerita, Boston College
6:00pm: Book display
6:30pm: Lecture: "No Child's Play? Childhood in Dante's Divine Comedy", Professor Erminia Ardissino, Università di Torino-Harvard Divinity School
Light refreshments will be served throughout the evening.
For more information, please contact program organizer Maria Sole Costanzo (Romance Languages) at costanmh@bc.edu or 671-552-2064.
5pm reception, 6pm talk
Burns Library
LAUNCH OF THE NEW DIGITAL ANNOTATED EDITION.
Please join us for an exploration and celebration of the work of the English Department Early Modern Reading Group in collaboration with the John J. Burns Library an the BC Digital Scholarship Group.
Light refreshments will be served.
Fulton Hall, Burns Library
On Sat
urday, March 29, 2025, Boston College will host the conference “Jane Jacobs and Climate Readiness in Boston” on campus to focus on the work of Jane Jacobs, who is most well known for her monumental book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, though she also wrote 9 others books of impressive ambition. She is also known for her activism, especially in stopping plans for expressways that would have gone through the center of Washington Square and that would have cut across southern Manhattan. The conference considers what Jacobs’s work offers to the City of Boston as it plans to accommodate the ongoing challenges posed by climate change. The conference will be comprised of panels on urban planning, urban forestry initiatives, and community-based learning. The reason the conference is being hosted at BC is because the Burns Library houses the Jane Jacobs Papers as well as several related collectionsLinks to an external site., which makes us a magnet for any scholar interested in Jacobs’s work.
This event is free and open to the public. Please register to attend.
5:00pm reception, 6:00pm lecture
Burns Library
‘The spring bed will rock when we get out’, republican prisoners during the Irish Civil War told each other, an erotic imaginary of their longed-for reunions with their wives. The Irish Revolution of 1916-23 brought seismic political change to Ireland, but also wrought a transformation in personal relationships, creating new affective bonds and breaking others. Love in a time of revolution was not just a matter of deep affection, economic rationale or social place-finding, it was also a political declaration. Through revolutionary organisations, men and women met, courted, and married, sharing political as well as romantic passions. Yet the Revolution was also a moment of rupture in personal relationships, as imprisonment or death separated husbands from wives, sons and daughters from parents, and brothers from sisters, and severing friendships. In this lecture, Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid will explore the various forms of love which existed during the Irish Revolution - romantic, platonic, familial - and ask what a closer reading of affection and intimacy in these turbulent years might reveal about Irish revolutionary dynamics.
Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid is Professor in Ir
ish History and Faculty Director of Education for Arts and Humanities at the University of Sheffield, where she has taught since 2013. She works primarily on Irish history, in particular the Irish Revolution, and more broadly the history of political violence and terrorism since the nineteenth century. Her current research engages the cultural history of the Irish Revolution, focusing particularly on the history of emotions. Her publications include two monographs: Terrorist Histories: Individuals and Political Violence since the 19th Century (Routledge, 2016) and Seán MacBride: A Republican Life, 1904-1946 (Liverpool University Press, 2011).
For further background on Professor Nic Dháibhéid and her Burns Visiting Scholar residency, please visit the Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies web page.
Burns Library will host a complimentary beer, wine, hors d'oeuvres reception beginning at 5:00pm, with Prof. Nic Dháibhéid’s lecture to follow at 6:00pm. All are welcome.
5:00pm talk, 6:00pm reception
Burns Library
As the repository for Margaret Heckler's archives, Burns Library is pleased to celebrate the publication of A Woman of Firsts: Margaret Heckler, Political Trailblazer with a talk and book signing by author Kimberly Heckler. A Woman of Firsts offers a rare view into the behind-the-scenes world of American politics from the 1960s through the 1980s.
The daughter of Irish immigrants, Margaret O'Shaughnessy Heckler (1931-2018) rose to become a congresswoman, presidential cabinet secretary, and ambassador. She mastered the seemingly unbeatable game of being a woman in a man's world and a Republican in a Democratic state, becoming a champion for others against all odds.
Following her graduation from Boston College Law School in 1956, the sole woman in her class, Heckler became the only newly elected woman to Congress in 1966. She went on to represent Massachusett’s 10th district for eight consecutive terms. Her landmark legislation, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, gave women the right to credit in their own names for the first time. As President Reagan's Health and Human Services Secretary, Heckler was one of the most powerful women in America, responsible for the third-largest budget in the world. She took the lead in addressing the AIDs crisis and commissioned the Heckler Report to address racial inequalities in health care. She was later appointed by Reagan as the first female amnbassador to Ireland, a highly sought-after diplomatic post.
A Woman of Firsts is a tribute to a woman who helped break the glass ceiling and fought to provide equality and justice for millions of Americans.
Kimberly Heckler is a native Washingtonian and the daughter-in-law of Margaret Heckler. She is a member of The
Authors Guild and the Library of Congress Women's History and Gender Studies Group. Her passion for reading and writing has taken her on a ten-year journey of discovery through the publication of debut book by Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot, the trade division of Rowman & Littlefield.
Light refreshments will be served following Kimberly Heckler's talk. Copies of A Woman of Firsts will be available for sale and signing.
Presented by Boston College Libraries with support from the John and Ruth Galvin Fund. This event is free and open to the public. All are welcome.
Contact Caroline Pace (pacecar@bc.edu; 617-552-3282) for more information, including accessibility and parking needs.
Watch Kim Heckler's interview with Kelly Sullivan on Boston 25 News (3/17/25)
1pm readings; 2pm reception
Burns Library
As part of the Boston College annual Arts Festival, Burns Library is pleased to host the annual Creative Writing Concentration Senior Reading. The Creative Writing Concentration is a special track of the English major. Seniors will read briefly from their work with a reception to follow. All are welcome to attend.
5:00pm reception, 6:00pm talk
Burns Library
Burns Library is pleased to host the Boston launch of Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, the most comprehensive critical biography of Poe yet produced, exploring his fascinating life, his extraordinary work, and the vital relationship between the two. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre found in such works as "The Raven", "Annabel Lee", and "The Tell-Tale Heart", this legendary American author, who was born in Boston in 1809, continues to intrigue and enthrall his devoted readers.
Written by one of the world's leading Poe experts, this biography offers a rich and rewarding study for the general reader as well as for the seasoned scholar. Richard Kopley combines a biographical narrative of Poe's enduring challenges—including his difficult foster father, his personal losses, his great struggles with depression and alcoholism, and the poverty that dogged his existence—with close readings of his work that focus not only on plot, character, and theme but also on language, allusion, and structure in a way that enhances our understanding of both. While incorporating past Poe scholarship, this volume also relates unknown stories of Poe culled from privately held letters unavailable to the previous biographers, presenting a range of groundbreaking archival discoveries that illuminate the man and his oeuvre in ways never before possible.
Richard Kopley is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Penn State DuBois, the author and editor of numerous books on Poe and American literature, and recipient of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement & Service Award from the Poe Studies Association.
In collaboration with the Ticknor Society of Boston and the BC English Department, Burns Library will host a complimentary beer, wine, and hors d'oeuvres reception beginning at 5:00pm, with a talk by Professor Kopley to follow at 6:00pm.
Copies of Edgar Allan Poe: A Life will be available for sale and signing. Burns Library will also present a book display featuring rare editions of Poe's works including some from Professor Kopley's personal library. All are welcome.
