The Shapiro Center at Wesleyan

Sarah Stillman, Tuesday, February 24th at 5:00 pm

Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and a Professor in the Practice at Yale University, where she runs the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab. She won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, for her coverage of the injustices resulting from the felony-murder doctrine. Her work has exposed profiteering within a range of U.S. industries and government practices—from debtors' prisons and civil asset forfeiture, to the exploitation of disaster-recovery workers amid the climate crisis. She's documented the human toll of mass deportations across multiple presidential administrations, including, most recently, shedding new light on the Trump Administration's secretive policy of deporting people to third countries to which they have no prior ties. Stillman’s work can be found in the best-selling anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, as well as in multiple Best American Magazine Writing anthologies. She is a MacArthur Fellow.

Agnes Callard, Monday, March 30th at 5 pm

Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. She received her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from Berkeley. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics. Callard has published in the Boston Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and has written a column on public philosophy for The Point. She hosts the podcast “Minds Almost Meeting” with the economist Robin Hanson. Her most recent book is Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, published by W.W. Norton in 2025.

Anna Silman, Tuesday, April 14th at 5 pm

Anna Silman is a writer and editor based in New York. She was previously the features correspondent at Business Insider and a writer at New York Magazine’s “The Cut.” Silman was also the recipient of the 2023 Ferriss–UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism fellowship and has written for The Guardian, Conde Nast Traveler, Inc., British Vogue, Wired and Elle.

Ben Lerner, Tuesday, May 5th at 5 pm

Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of three internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka School. He has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), Mean Free Path and No Art as well as the essay The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.

Chana Joffe-Walt, Tuesday, September 30th at 5:00 pm

Chana Joffe-Walt is a reporter and producer at This American Life. Before joining the show, Chana reported on schools, health care, and global economics for NPR, where she helped create NPR Planet Money. At This American Life, she has won multiple Peabody Awards for her work on a range of subjects, from episodes about the stories of children in Gaza to American education and school segregation.

Sheila Heti, Tuesday, October 28th at 5:00 pm

Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be? She was named one of The New Vanguard by The New York Times, a list of fifteen writers who are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century. She served as Interviews Editor at The Believer magazine from 2010 - 2014 and has conducted many long-form print interviews with writers and artists, including Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, Dave Hickey, Daveed Diggs, and John Currin. In 2025, she was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow.

Dr. Orna Guralnik, Tuesday, November 4th at 5:00 pm

Dr. Orna Guralnik is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. She is on the faculty at the NYU PostDoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and at NIP (National Institute for the Psychotherapies), where she teaches courses on the trans-generational transmission of trauma, socio-politics and psychoanalysis, and on dissociation. Currently, she lectures and publishes on the topics of couples treatment and culture, dissociation and depersonalization, and psychoanalysis. She has completed the filming of several seasons of Showtime's documentary series Couples Therapy.