Formally known as the Emily Carroll ’99 Carleton English Guest Lecture, this college event is funded by the King Family Charitable Lead Trust in honor of the positive experiences of Emily Carleton ’99 at Bates College, and also her graduation from the institution. This fund will, at the discretion of the English department, support guest lecturers on campus for the benefit of Bates students and faculty.

For more information on this year’s lecture, click here.

Dr. D. Vance Smith is a scholar whose work focuses on African and decolonial literature and theory, the history of anthropology, ecocriticism, and medieval philosophy and literature, and their intersections. His 2020 book Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England (University of Chicago Press, 2002) is the third book in a series examining the medieval limit experience—the philosophy and literature of beginnings, middles, and ends. The first, The Book of the Incipit, concerns beginnings, and the second, Arts of Possession, examines the concept of dwelling in medieval romance and economic theory and practice. His most recent book, Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in November. Atlas’s Bones is an intellectual history about 1) the classical and medieval production of knowledges in Africa, and 2) the imposition of medieval structures of knowledge and governance on African colonies.