College of Arts and Humanities

Pathways Initiative Kicks Off with Speaker Series

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The newly-founded Pathways in the Humanities and Social Sciences initiative at Clemson University is kicking off its first Spring semester with a lineup of six uniquely accomplished speakers. The Pathways in the Humanities and Social Sciences Lecture Series will feature talks on the themes of “Crisis” and “Slavery and Memory”.

The Pathways initiative was created to highlight and enhance the role of the humanities and social sciences at Clemson and led to the establishment of a new minor.  

According to Pathways faculty director David Coombs, the hope of the speaker series is to “help students and faculty from across the university to discover what important and enduring works of thought and culture — or transformative texts, as we call them — have to offer.”

“One example is our speaker Percival Everett’s novel, James. It takes Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a jumping-off point to re-envision questions about the nature of justice, exploitation, and belonging in American society. It’s an important cultural work that draws critical and comic energy from responding to an earlier important cultural work.”

The series offers an opportunity for all audiences, those in and beyond Pathways courses, to practically consider the importance of texts and their cultural impact.

The Pathways speaker series is made possible by the support of the Humanities Hub and the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation.

All events will be in Watt 106 from 5-6:15 p.m, unless otherwise noted.

Nomi Claire Lazar is an expert in the politics of crises and states of emergency. A Professor of Politics in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, she is the author of Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time (2019) and States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (2009).

  • Thursday, March 13th – Literature After Climate Collapse with Nathan Hensley

Nathan Hensley is an expert on the novel and the environmental humanities. He is an Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University and the author of two books: Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse (2025) and Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016).

  • Wednesday, March 26th; 5-6:30 p.m; G66 Daniel Hall Expansion – William and Ellen Craft’s Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom with Ilyon Woo

Ilyon Woo is an expert in the craft of non-fiction writing and the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times (2010). Her biography of William and Ellen Craft, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

  • Thursday, April 3rd; 8 p.m; Strom Thurmond Auditorium – An Evening with Percival Everett

Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of more than twenty novels, including Erasure (2001), which was adapted into the 2023 film, American Fiction. For his most recent novel, James, Everett received the 2024 National Book Award. He grew up in Columbia, South Carolina.

  • Wednesday, April 16th – Women and Power in the Mughal Empire with Ruby Lal

Ruby Lal is an expert on the history of the Mughal Empire and professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Royal Vagabond:The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (2025), Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India (2013), and  Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (2005).

  • Thursday, April 24th – How Authoritarian Regimes Collapse with Evgenia Albats

Evgenia Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author, and radio host. Since 2007 she has been political editor, and then editor-in-chief and CEO, of The New Times, a Russian-language, independent political weekly originally based in Moscow. In 2004, Albats started hosting “Absolute Albats,” a talk-show on Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow). She is currently a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.


About Pathways in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Pathways operates on a twofold system, offering an associated minor to Clemson students and interdisciplinary groups for Clemson faculty to explore common areas of interest. The minor is available to all students and most courses also count towards general education requirements. These courses help students develop critical life and professional skills like creative problem-solving and persuasive reasoning.

Students can learn more about the Pathways minor by clicking here. Questions related to the initiative, and how to participate as a faculty member, can be sent to David Coombs at dcoombs@clemson.edu.

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