Sue Houchins, associate professor of African-American, American cultural and women and gender studies at Bates College, will speak at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 15, at 161 Wood St., as part of “Spiritual Sojourners,” a series sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain at Bates College. The public is invited to attend free of charge. For more information, call the chaplain’s office at 207-786-8272.

Since August Houchins has served as a special assistant to President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, taking a leading role in efforts to increase diversity at Bates and improve the campus climate.

Before coming to Bates in 2003, Houchins held joint appointments in the literature and religion departments at Scripps and Pitzer colleges, and was affiliated with the intercollegiate Department of Black Studies and Women’s Studies of the Claremont Colleges as a faculty associate. She received her undergraduate and her graduate education in medieval English literature at UCLA, where she began a consuming comparative study of women who write of mystical union with a feminine divine.

Houchins continued her graduate work at the Union Institute and Graduate University in Africana, women’s, cultural and queer studies concentrated in literatures and religions. Her publications on this subject include the introduction to the volume of Spiritual Narratives in the Oxford University Press series of 19th-century black women writers.

Her research presentations have included ‘I Found God in Myself/ I Loved Her/I Loved Her Fiercely’: A Study of Suffering in the Archetypal Journey of Alice Walker’s Female Heroes, Sacred Sext: The Incarnational Theology of Bessie Head and Amazonian Dynasties and Spiritual Matriarchs: A Study of the Theology of Affiliation in Toni Morrison and Simone Schwarz-Bart.

Houchins has recently completed a book-length study of Pan African lesbian texts, some of which also explore mystical union. She delivered a portion of this larger work at the English Institute at Harvard.

In 1995, Houchins took time away from academia to enter a Carmelite monastery. In the academic year 2000-01 she was a fellow in the program for women’s studies in religion at the Harvard School of Divinity, where she researched and wrote on the representation of Sapphic women priests in religions of the black Americas.

Recently, Houchins and her Bates colleague Baltasar Fra-Molinero, associate professor of Spanish, completed an annotated translation with a critical and historical introduction of the 18th-century Spanish hagiography of Sor Teresa Chicaba, an African Dominican nun who spent her years after enslavement in a cloistered monastery.

Each speaker has a story to tell, says “Spiritual Sojourners” organizer and  Bates College Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace. The speaker’s personal journeys serve as “starter dough” for conversation, Blaine-Wallace says.

Houchins’ talk, the sixth in the series, will be followed by two additional 90-minute presentations throughout the balance of the academic year. Each talk begins at 4:30 p.m.

Bates College Professor Jane Costlow, a specialist in Russian literature and culture who travels frequently to Russia, will speak at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15, at 161 Wood St., as part of Spiritual Sojourners, a series sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain at Bates College. The public is invited to attend free of charge. For more information, call the chaplain’s office at 207-786-8272.

Costlow was born and grew up on the coast of North Carolina, she says, “which means my first landscape was the ocean, that wonderful full emptiness of sounds and smells and endless horizon.”

The daughter of biologists, Costlow became an Episcopalian and grew interested in Russia. These experiences, she says, “contributed in some complicated way to where I am now.”

“My first ‘memory’ of Russia is of lying in bed at night imagining the plane in the distance was the Russians coming to get us. Must have been 1962, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Costlow recalls. “Years later I spent an academic year in what was still Leningrad. I learned Russian. Demonstrated against nuclear weapons. Worked in a soup kitchen. Wondered if I really wanted to be an academic.”

After coming to Bates, marrying and having children, Costlow and her family settled in Auburn. “From where I live,” she says, “you can see out over the Androscoggin towards Lewiston and Bates. The steeple of Trinity Episcopal Church is just visible, and the amazing skies roll in from Canada. I’m ‘living in the question’ — with deep gratitude for languages and landscapes.”

Each speaker in this series has a story to tell, says its organizer Bates College Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace. The speaker’s personal sojourns serve as “starter dough” for conversation, Blaine-Wallace says.

Costlow’s talk, the fifth in the series, will be followed by three additional 90-minute presentations throughout the balance of the academic year. Each talk begins at 4:30 p.m.

Paul Solman, business and economics correspondent for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer since 1985, will speak at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 11, at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave., as part of “Spiritual Sojourners,” a series sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain at Bates College. The public is invited to attend free of charge. For more information, call the chaplain’s office at 207-786-8272.

The founding editor of the alternative Boston weekly The Real Paper (1972), Solman began his career in business journalism as a Nieman Fellow, studying at the Harvard Business school in 1976. He has been a business reporter for public broadcasting since 1977 and was the co-originator and executive editor of PBS’s business documentary series, Enterprise. His reporting has won Emmys for the last four decades and two Peabody awards, the most recent in 2004 for his reporting on the undercounting of unemployment.

Solman has served on the Harvard Business School faculty, teaching media, finance and business history. He co-authored the well-received Life and Death on the Corporate Battlefield (1983), which appeared in Japanese, German and a pirated Taiwanese edition. He lectures on college campuses, has written for numerous publications including both Forbes and Mother Jones magazines, and was named a member of TV Guide’s “Dream Team” of television reporters.

A one-time cab driver, kindergarten teacher and management consultant, Solman is the presenter for and author of Discovering Economics with Paul Solman, a series of videos released in 2004 by McGraw-Hill to accompany the company’s introductory economics textbooks. He is married with children and grandchildren.

Solman’s talk, the fourth in the series, will be followed by four additional 90-minute presentations throughout the balance of the academic year. Each talk begins at 4:30 p.m.