Educating the Whole Human - A University Libraries Speaker Series
Educating the Whole Human invites students, faculty and community members to explore how these speakers combine expertise and lived experience to ask new questions, create original work and put knowledge into practice—and to consider what those approaches could make possible in their own studies, research, careers, communities and lives.
Hear from scholars whose acclaimed work is shaped by lived experience and expands how knowledge is created and understood.
Bree Fram
Monday, Oct. 12
7:30 p.m.
Muenzinger Auditorium E050
What does it mean to serve a country that questions whether you belong? Bree Fram draws on 23 years of military service, her role in helping establish the U.S. Space Force and her experience navigating changing policies on transgender service to explore leadership, belonging and the meaning of service.
About Bree Fram
Bree Fram is a retired U.S. Space Force colonel, astronautical engineer, author and speaker. During her 23 years in uniform, she deployed to Iraq and Qatar, helped establish the Space Force as a separate military service and became the first openly transgender officer selected for and promoted to colonel in the U.S. military. She came out publicly in 2016, on the day the military first lifted its transgender service ban, and was forced into retirement in 2025 under a renewed ban.
Fram is co-editor of With Honor and Integrity: Transgender Troops in Their Own Words and With Valor and Visibility: The Next Chapter of Transgender Military Service, and co-author of Forging Queer Leaders: How the LGBTQIA+ Community Creates Impact from Adversity. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Military Times. A 2024 Out100 honoree, she speaks nationally and internationally about leadership, service and inclusion.
Michel S. Moushabeck
Monday, Oct. 19
5:30 p.m.
UMC Ballroom
Join Palestinian American writer, publisher and musician Michel S. Moushabeck for an evening exploring the role of intellectuals, artists and publishers at a time when freedom of speech is increasingly under threat.
About Michel S. Moushabeck
Michel S. Moushabeck is a Palestinian American writer, editor, publisher and musician. He is the founder of Interlink Publishing, an independent publishing house established in 1987 with a focus on literature, history, politics, art and culture from around the world.
Moushabeck is the author of several books including Kilimanjaro: A Photographic Journey to the Roof of Africa. Most recently, he guest-edited “A View from Gaza,” the winter 2024 issue of the Massachusetts Review that featured works from 35 Palestinian writers. He contributed a piece to Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora.
He has written and spoken extensively about publishing, literature, Arabic music and Palestinian culture. Through his work as a publisher and artist, he has spent decades bringing international voices and perspectives to American audiences.
Christopher Marmolejo
Monday, Nov. 2
5:30 p.m.
Math 100 Auditorium
Christopher Marmolejo will discuss divination as a choral, sonic medium in which the diviner is in correspondence with image, text, ancestor, element, time, the unseen and the uncertain. Marmolejo will explore decolonial divination, or a “red read,” that emphasizes speculative relations as a way of knowing, a way of understanding our relationship to the world and a methodology in which the diviner becomes a DJ, enacting critical intervention to let the margins talk back.
About Christopher Marmolejo
Christopher Marmolejo is a writer, scholar, educator and diviner whose work explores decolonization, indigeneity, queerness and consciousness through divination. Their teaching and scholarship bring together critical and feminist pedagogy with tarot, astrology and other forms of divinatory practice.
Marmolejo is the author of Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy, which approaches tarot as a form of critical literacy and explores how its symbols and traditions can be reconsidered through decolonial and queer perspectives. Their work as an educator centers on creating spaces for critical inquiry, creative risk and ways of knowing that extend beyond conventional academic boundaries.
Attend the series
Registration is required for each event. Visit the individual event pages for admission, accessibility and security information, including the no-bag policy.
