Commencement Address: Lisa Nakamura ’87

Reed’s 2021 Convocation took place on the front lawn, Tuesday, August 23, at 5 p.m.

Introductory Remarks: Milyon Trulove, Vice President and Dean of Admission & Financial Aid

Introductory Remarks: Safi Zenger ’24, Student Body President

Welcome: Roger M. Perlmutter ’73

Reed physics professor Richard Crandall ’69 presents Vollum Award to Steve Jobs who reminisces on his time as a student.

Convocation - audio

Steve Jobs at Reed College, 1991 Convocation

Jen Bervin, Visiting Writers Series

Jen Bervin is a visual artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice weaves together situated poetics and entangled relationships between text and textiles. Bervin’s conceptual, scientific, and literary investigations of material histories are attuned to the embodied, visual, and tactile aspects of language; these research-driven works frequently result from long-term collaborations with specialists ranging from literary scholars to material scientists.

This work has been exhibited internationally at MOMENTA, Biennale de l’Image, Montreal; the Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery; Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; The Power Plant, Toronto; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MASS MoCA; Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Des Moines Art Center; and Morgan Library and Museum, New York, among others.

Bervin has earned numerous awards, fellowships and grants including The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Research Fellowship (2023–2024), the Banff Centre Fleck Fellowship (2022), SETI Institute Artist in Residence (2016–2019), Foundation for Contemporary Art (2017), The Rauschenberg Residency (2016), Asian Cultural Council (2016), Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artist Program (2016), Bogliasco Foundation (2014), Creative Capital (2013), The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (2012), New York Foundation for the Arts (2007), Camargo Foundation (2006), and MacDowell Colony (2006).

Jen Bervin

February 20, 2020

Dr. Safiya U. Noble is the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the Director of the Center on Race & Digital Justice and Co-Director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech & Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2).  She currently serves as Interim Director of the UCLA DataX Initiative, leading work in critical data studies for the campus. Professor Noble is the author of the best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic harm in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for her ground-breaking work on algorithmic discrimination. 

Dr. Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment, and provides expertise to a number of civil and human rights organizations. She is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where she is a chartering member of the International Panel on the Information Environment. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient.

Her academic research focuses on the internet and its impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, power, and technology. She is regularly sought out for her expertise on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias by national and international press including Rolling Stone, The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Time, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The New York Times, and a host of network news and podcasts. Her popular writing includes critiques on the loss of public goods to Big Tech companies, as featured in Noema magazine.  

Safiya is the co-editor of three edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online and Emotions, Technology & Design, and the forthcoming second volume of The Intersectional Internet. She is a member of several academic journal and advisory boards, and holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno where she was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award for 2018. In 2020, she was awarded the Distinguished Alumna Award from the iSchool Alumni Association, and is also the inaugural Diversity and Inclusion Award winner from the Illinois Alumni Association at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award.

In 2021, she founded a non-profit, the Equity Engine, to accelerate investment in companies, education, and networks driven by women of color.

Safiya Umoja Noble: Algorithms of Oppression

Antropology Roundtable Symposium
October 28, 2020

About Dr. TallBear: https://kimtallbear.com/#about

Dr. Kim TallBear: Science v. the Sacred: a Dead-end Settler Ontology

Kim Williams, Ph.D.: Race, Gender, and Partisanship in the 2016 and 2020 Elections

Anthropology Roundtable Symposium
March 3,2021

Keisha Brown: Racialization and Class Struggle

Commencement Address: Sasha Kramer ’99

February 7, 2008
Reed College Public Policy Lecture Series

Torture and Democracy Lecture - audio

Darius Rejali

Convocation Speaker: Peter Rock, Professor of Creative Writing

Welcome: Audrey Bilger, President

Introductory Remarks: Andee Gude ’26, Student Body President

How did ancient medicine answer the fundamental questions about the sexed body? How far are women different from men, and how should medicine take this into account? In this lecture, Helen King, Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University of the United Kingdom, will introduce the strange world of ancient women's medicine and the remedies for women's diseases, including scent therapy. Further, Dr. King will demonstrate why diagnoses and remedies such as the "wandering womb" and the beetle pessary, which no longer make sense to us, made perfect sense to the ancient Greeks, and she will investigate how men and women interacted in accounting for disease and in proposing cures. Dr. King focuses her research in ancient medical thought and has written on the use of classical models in nursing and midwifery, with particular interest in the classical origins of “hysteria.” Sponsored by the Reed Department of Classics, the Division of Literature & Languages, and the Dean of the Faculty's office.

Helen King,  "Ancient Greek Gynaecology For Beginners  Wine, Women, And Pongs"

Annie Wenstrup (Dena’ina) is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in March 2025. Annie is the recipient of the 10th annual New England Review Emerging Writer’s Award, and is the 2024 Stephen Donadio Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholar. In 2023, she received the Alaska Literary Award and support from The Rasmusson Foundation. Annie’s held a Museum Sovereignty Fellowship with the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center (Alaska office) supported through a Journey to What Matters grant from The CIRI Foundation, and was an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022 and 2023. Her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska with her family.

Annie Wenstrup

Alumni Welcome: Andrei Stephens '08

Welcome: Deborah D. Kamali '85

Introductory Remarks: President Audrey Bilger

Commencement Address: Advait Mahesh Jukar '11

2025 Convocation Mary Ashburn Miller

2025 Convocation Audrey Bilger Welcome

2025 Convocation Admission Milyon Trulove

Morgan Thomas is a writer from the Gulf Coast. Their debut story collection, Manywhere, was published in 2022. Their work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. They were the recipient of Lambda Literary’s Judith Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ+ Writers and have also received support from MacDowell, the Southern Studies Fellowship, and the Shearing Fellowship. Their second book is forthcoming next summer.

Morgan Thomas

Cynthia Cruz is the author of eight collections of poems, two collections of critical essays, and one novella. Two new collections of poems are forthcoming: Sweet Repetition in 2025 from the University of Chicago Press and Twilight with Four Way Books in 2026. Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her recent collection of poems, Hotel Oblivion, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Cruz earned a BA in English literature at Mills College, an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in art writing at the School of Visual Arts, an MA in German language and literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School, where her research focuses on Hegel and madness.

Cynthia Cruz

“Breath and Precarity” addresses a confluence of black music and experimental poetics in the United States that arose during the post-World War II period, a confluence in which the salience and foregrounding of breath and breathing relate to precarious conditions on multiple, concurrent fronts. Ranging from Charles Olson to Eric Garner and Frantz Fanon, it touches on the work of such writers as Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, John Tchicai, Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins and Roscoe Mitchell. Mackey's lecture looks retrospectively at a line of poetic and musical thought and performance that was important to his formative years as a writer, referencing his own work and, in particular, outlining the backdrop to a recent poem in his “Mu” series, “The Overghost Ourkestra’s Next,” with a reading of which it concludes.

Nathaniel Mackey is an American poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic, and editor. He is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and criticism and has received numerous awards for his work, including the National Book Award in poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the 2015 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

Nathaniel Mackey: "Breath and Precarity”

Reed College Dean of Students Bruce Smith visits with Vice President of Admission and Financial Aid Milyon Trulove and Director of Communications Kevin Myers to welcome the Reed College Class of 2022.

Orientation: Welcome to Reed, Class of 2022!

Reed College, located in Portland, Oregon, was founded in 1908 as an independent, coeducational, nonsectarian college of the liberal arts and sciences. Committed to intellectual rigor and academic freedom, rejecting the establishment of intercollegiate sport and fraternal societies, and guided by an egalitarian spirit and meritocratic ideal, Reed has served for over a hundred years as a model of independent leadership in higher education.

Reed College

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