Bobby Yan Lectureship: School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University

The Bobby Yan Lectureship in Media and Social Change

The School of Liberal Arts Bobby Yan Lectureship in Media and Social Change is part of the Tulane Trailblazers initiative, which celebrates the contributions of people from diverse backgrounds who have made a substantial and lasting impact at Tulane. The lectureship is named after seven-time Emmy Award winner Bobby Yan, a 1995 Tulane graduate who founded Tulane’s Asian American Student Union.

Upcoming Speakers

Check back for the announcement of the next featured speaker in this series.

Past Speakers

Felicia Henderson, Bobby Yan Lecture at Tulane University School of Liberal Arts

Felicia D. Henderson

Thursday, February 15, 2024 6:30 pm
Lake Residence Hall Theater

Writer, Producer, Director, Scholar and Activist. Creator of the Emmy nominated Showtime series Soul Food.

Daniel Alarcón

Tuesday, November 15, 2022, 5:30 pm
Freeman Auditorium
See the Event page
Read more about the event in Tulane News

Radio Ambulante and El Hilo — both of which are collaborative and transnational enterprises integrating stories from 20+ countries, resulting in more than 8M annual downloads. These interactive audiovisual platforms have become a widely used educational tool for journalism and Spanish classes.

Vann R. Newkirk II

Wednesday, February 16, 2022, 6:00 pm
Kendall Cram Lecture Hall (LBC)

Vann R. Newkirk II is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and the host and co-creator of the Peabody Award-winning Floodlines, a narrative podcast about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. For years, Newkirk has covered voting rights, democracy, and environmental justice, with a focus on how race and class shape the country's and the world's fundamental structures. Vann was a 2020 James Beard Award Finalist, a 2020 11^th Hour Fellow at New America, and a 2018 recipient of the American Society of Magazine Editors' ASME Next Award.

Listen to the podcast of this lecture produced by a student in our Digital Media Practices program.

Cecilia Aldarondo

Thursday, February 18, 2021, 6:00 pm
Cecilia Aldarondo is a documentary director-producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora who works at the intersection of poetics and politics. Her feature documentaries Memories of a Penitent Heart (2016) and Landfall (2020) premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and were co-produced by the award-winning PBS series POV. Landfall's many awards include the 2020 DOC NYC Film Festival Viewfinders Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary, as well as a Cinema Eye Spotlight Award nomination. Among Aldarondo's fellowships and honors are the Guggenheim, a two-time MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the 2021 New America Fellowship, and Women at Sundance 2017. In 2019 she was named to DOC NYC's 40 Under 40 list and is one of 2015ʼs 25 New Faces of Independent Film. She teaches at Williams College.

View lecture: https://youtu.be/DbBO60pDweM
Stream Aldarondo's films for free by clicking on them below (Tulane login required):
Memories of a Penitent Heart (2016)
Landfall (2020)

Christine Vachon

Wednesday, November 6, 2019, 6:00 pm
Christine Vachon came to Tulane as the inaugural speaker in the School of Liberal Arts’ Bobby Yan Lectureship in Media and Social Change. Vachon is an Independent Spirit Award winner and co-founder of the independent film & television production company Killer Films, whose production credits include award-winning titles including Boys Don’t Cry, Still Alice, I’m Not There, and Far from Heaven. Vachon is strongly associated with the “new queer cinema” movement of the 1990s, having produced many films with LGBT themes after observing a lack of representation of this community onscreen. Christine Vachon is currently the artistic director of the MFA program at Stony Brook University.