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Authors and panelists representing the School of Liberal Arts — as faculty, alumni, and partners — participated in today's most important conversations.

This page is being updated as videos become available.
The complete 2026 Bookfest schedule can be found on the Bookfest website.

George Saunders — author of Liberation Day, Tenth of December, and the Booker Prize–winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo — will visit Tulane on Thursday, April 9, as this year’s featured writer in the Carole Barnette Boudreaux ’65 Great Writers Series.

The acclaimed fiction writer has been in the spotlight recently with the release of his new novel, Vigil, written in the satirical, otherworldly style that makes him one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature. As news circulates about a forthcoming film adaptation of Lincoln in the Bardo starring Tom Hanks as Abraham Lincoln, Saunders has been making the rounds discussing Vigil in interviews and on podcasts, including appearances on The Late Show Book Club and The New York Times’ The Interview.

A recipient of both the Booker Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, Saunders is known for fiction that blends dark humor and surreal imagination with deeper reflections on the human condition. His latest novel unfolds at the bedside of a powerful oil executive facing the end of his life. As a series of visitors — both earthly and supernatural — force the dying man to reckon with the consequences of his actions, the novel explores themes of accountability, forgiveness, and the long shadow of environmental harm.

Saunders — whom the National Book Foundation once dubbed “the ultimate teacher of kindness and craft” — teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University, and publishes a popular Substack newsletter called Story Club, an ongoing exploration of how stories work and why they matter. His thoughtful reflections on writing, often delivered in a soft, conversational speaking style, have made him a favorite guest at literary festivals and universities.

His visit is part of the Carole Barnette Boudreaux ’65 Great Writers Series, which brings leading contemporary authors to Tulane to share their work with students and the broader community — work that often engages with some of the most pressing social and cultural issues of our times. Saunders’ talk will center around his new novel, whose themes of power, accountability, and climate responsibility will resonate with students and readers considering ethical challenges of the present moment.

The event will take place in Kendall Cram at the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life, followed by a book signing. 
Register for the April 9 Event.

 

A new bookstore has opened in the heart of the French Quarter, on the corner of Toulouse and Chartres streets — an appropriate location for one of only three French-language bookstores in the United States. The bookstore and gallery space are home to Nous — or the New Orleans Foundation for Francophone Cultures — a nonprofit created and directed by former Tulane Global Humanities Center Fellow Scott Tilton and his partner, Rudy Bazenet.

“We like to joke that we are bringing French back to the French Quarter,” says Tilton, who grew up in New Orleans and is of French-Creole descent. He met Bazenet — who hails from Clermont-Ferrand, France — while they were working in Paris. There, they launched an initiative to have Louisiana join the International Organization of la Francophonie, a global body that connects French-speaking countries and regions.

The pair moved back to New Orleans in 2021; their first project stateside was supported by a Monroe Fellowship from Tulane’s Global Humanities Center. The fellowship funded Voices of Renewal, a video project documenting the revitalization of Creole heritage in communities facing environmental crisis along Louisiana’s rapidly eroding coastlines.

Those early efforts laid the groundwork for Nous, whose mission is to revitalize Louisiana’s heritage cultures, including Cajun/French, Creole, and Indigenous communities.

“From the beginning, we knew that having a physical location where people could come and learn about these cultures was important,” says Tilton. The Toulouse Street location is also a gallery, office space, and studio for producing print and audio projects.

For the bookstore, they aimed for a mix of international and Louisiana-focused French material: shelves hold around 300 French classics alongside art and history books, exhibition catalogs from the Louvre and museums in Quebec and Switzerland, as well as fiction written by Louisiana authors in French — most dating back to the 19th century — along with more contemporary works.

“As recently as 1970, there were about a million French speakers in Louisiana,” says Tilton, which would have represented about 1 in 3 people. “Today, there has been a near 90 percent drop, with only about 150,000.”

Louisiana Creole — distinct from French dialects, in that it blends French with West African and Indigenous linguistic traditions — is a critically endangered language, with fewer than 10,000 active speakers. Tilton’s own connection to Louisiana’s Francophone heritage began at home. His Grand-mère and great uncle were part of the state’s French-speaking traditions, but it wasn’t until after Hurricane Katrina, when Tilton was a teenager, that his father began teaching him French more intentionally. Around the same time, Tilton’s family moved to the French Quarter, where neighbors who spoke Creole welcomed the opportunity to teach him that language as well.

The experience left a lasting impression.

“In Louisiana, teaching French and Creole was actually banned for a while — from 1921 to 1974. Even in my family, while they’re proud of being French-speaking, there were spaces where they didn’t want to use it publicly. That came from a sense of shame around speaking the language, and I became very aware of that growing up.”

In addition to French and Creole traditions, Nous collaborates with Indigenous language initiatives, including the Houma Language Project. A recent effort launched a grant program supporting work in Sabine Parish on the revitalization of the Mobilian language.

Since 2021, Nous has grown rapidly. The foundation has received multiple major grants, including two active grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and a recent grant from the Mellon Foundation. They’ve also had several Tulane interns over the years, both through the French department and service-learning initiatives, who help with events, programs, and community outreach.

A major current project focuses on building a digital archive for materials related to Louisiana’s heritage cultures that are at risk of being lost. The pair is working with scholar Kim Vaz-Deville, whose research includes searching funerary archives for materials that reference heritage cultures.

“People have literally been giving us hundreds and hundreds of documents,” Tilton says of their initial outreach. Seeing this need helped kick-start the project, which is now funded by a Mellon grant.

Their NEH grants are connected to Celebrate America, commemorating the country at 250.

“We wanted to flip the narrative on Louisiana always being on the periphery of the show — so we’ve organized this season to be about Louisiana’s America. The idea is to show how we influenced the country in return,” explains Tilton.

The first exhibition launches with a sold-out symposium, organized in partnership with The Historic New Orleans Collection, titled "One Single Place: Louisiana and the Shaping of the Early American Republic," held March 20–21 at the Nous space. The event features School of Liberal Arts professor Walter Isaacson as the keynote speaker.

Opening April 8, the exhibition, "Becoming Louisiana: Borders in Motion (1688–1812)," traces the shifting geography of the region through historical maps, telling the story of how Louisiana emerged as a territory. Their second NEH grant will support a later exhibition on the reception and interpretation of the American Revolution in Louisiana’s French-speaking communities. “We wanted to focus on the perception of the Declaration of Independence, but in light of other revolutions that were going on — the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolution — and how Louisiana was being influenced from all of these different directions,” Bazenet explains.

Bazenet is lead curator for both exhibitions. He was also recently accepted to Tulane’s PhD Program in French Studies, where he plans to work with School of Liberal Arts Associate Professor Chelsea Steiber, director of Graduate Studies and a scholar of Haitian 19th-century literature. At Tulane, Bazenet aims to hone the archival skills essential for his role in the expanding space and foundation.

“We do a lot of curation — exhibitions, publications, films — and that requires increasing amounts of research,” says Bazenet, whose focus will be on the French and Haitian Revolutions in Louisiana.

Working with Stieber, he will continue developing the research methods necessary for archival work while applying them directly to the foundation’s public-facing projects in their French Quarter location — a place where scholarship and community engagement meet. “Come visit us anytime,” says Tilton.
 

Tulane Mock Trial has had an extraordinary year, and it has been such a pleasure to watch this group continue to grow. Over the course of the 2025 to 2026 season, our students traveled across the South, competed against very strong programs, earned individual honors, and represented Tulane and the School of Liberal Arts with confidence, discipline, and real professionalism.

What stands out most to me is not simply the awards or the tournament results, though those are certainly impressive. It is the level of commitment, preparation, and teamwork that these students have brought to every stage of the season. Mock trial demands critical thinking, persuasive speaking, adaptability, and trust in one another, and this year Tulane’s students rose to that challenge again and again.

The season began in October with invitationals at the University of Georgia, Emory, and Ole Miss, where Tulane’s teams quickly showed that they were ready to compete at a high level. That momentum only grew stronger in November, with impressive performances at Tobacco Road, Vanderbilt, Texas Showdown, and Georgia State’s Downtown Derby. One of the biggest highlights of the fall came when Tulane’s B team captured first place at Downtown Derby, a major accomplishment that reflected both individual talent and the depth of the program as a whole. Throughout the season, students earned outstanding attorney and outstanding witness awards at multiple tournaments, which speaks to how much talent and dedication this organization has developed across its teams.

That success carried into January, when Tulane returned from winter break with the same focus and energy that defined the fall semester. At the Crimson Classic in Alabama and Dillard’s Big Easy Invitational here in New Orleans, Tulane students once again delivered strong performances and brought home more individual honors. Taken together, this has been more than just a successful season. It has been a season that reflects the steady rise of a program that is becoming stronger, deeper, and more confident with each passing year. As a professor, that is especially rewarding to see, because it reflects the kind of growth that comes only from hard work, consistency, and students who genuinely care about what they are building together.

One of the students, Yilan Tang, captured that growth beautifully: “Over the past four years, I’ve had the privilege of watching Tulane Mock Trial grow into a truly competitive program. This year, our dedicated students and volunteer coaches helped us send four teams to regionals and advance two to the Opening Round Championship Series. As a graduating senior, I’m proud to have been part of that growth and am excited to watch the program continue to reach new heights from afar.”

I think that reflection says a great deal about what makes this program so special. Yes, the competitive success matters, but so does the sense of shared investment that students bring to it. This is clearly a group that has been building something meaningful over time, and this year that work has paid off in a visible way.

What makes Tulane Mock Trial so impressive to me is that it represents the very best of what a liberal arts education can do. These students are learning how to analyze difficult fact patterns, build arguments, speak with clarity and confidence, and perform under pressure. They are also learning how to collaborate, respond quickly, and support one another in demanding environments. Those are skills that matter far beyond competition. They matter in law, in public service, in advocacy, and in leadership. This year’s success says a great deal not only about the strength of the team, but also about the seriousness, ambition, and talent of the students who make it possible.

And the most exciting part is that the story is not over yet. As Ethan Lenkin said, “It’s been an incredible year with Mock Trial. For the first time in program history, two of our teams advanced past Regionals. Now we’re preparing to compete at the Opening Round Championship Series in Memphis from March 20 to 22, with the goal of becoming the first Tulane teams to qualify for Nationals.”

This is a remarkable milestone for this program, and one that these students have absolutely earned. All of us at Tulane should be proud of what they have accomplished already, and should cheer them on as they take this next historic step. Roll Wave!

When I arrived at Tulane over 3 years ago, I was excited, like most freshmen, for my new independence, to live in a new part of the country, and of course, to experience Mardi Gras. Little did I know that at Tulane, I would fall in love not only with the city of New Orleans but also with the study of international relations, that I would find amazing mentors, that I would develop meaningful expertise on important world issues through my coursework and thesis research, and that I would even have the amazing opportunity to share my education and insights with the greater New Orleans community.

Last year, as a junior in the School of Liberal Arts, I was invited to speak at a Jewish lawyers’ event and at a local synagogue about the experiences of Jewish students on campus following October 7, 2023. It was incredibly exciting (and to be honest, intimidating), but helped me develop confidence in public speaking. My most exciting speaking opportunity, however, took place last weekend when I was invited to speak as part of a three-person panel for Limmud New Orleans, a festival of Jewish learning at the Uptown Jewish Community Center (JCC). The event featured a host of Jewish educators, leaders, professors, and religious leaders delivering lectures on different topics related to Jewish current events and related topics. During my panel, I spoke alongside distinguished Tulane University professor Michael Wallace, a retired military intelligence officer, as well as Sam Melamed, an Iranian-American Jew with a strong understanding of the experience of a Persian living in the U.S. We discussed recent events in Iran, what led to them, and what they mean for the Middle East going forward.

This is a topic that I care deeply about, as I am completing my Newcomb Tulane College honors thesis on proxy-warfare, using Iran as a case study. I was invited to speak because of the incredible support I have received from Tulane faculty, and particularly Professor Brian Horowitz, who recommended me to David Singer, the CEO of Limmud, as someone who has been studying Iran-related issues throughout my undergraduate education.

The panel was moderated by Singer and featured an animated conversation in which we addressed the geopolitical relevance of the current conflict, as well as its historical context. I was asked about how Iran’s proxy network and its relative decline have played a role in the lead-up to the current military conflict. I responded by speaking about one key observation I have made in my research. The October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and subsequent Hezbollah attacks, while intended to reshape the Middle East in a way favorable to the “Axis of Resistance" and Iranian interests, actually succeeded in causing the deterioration of Iran’s armed proxy network.

I also talked about how the Hamas and Hezbollah attacks against Israel created a shift in both the Israeli and American approaches toward counterterrorism. Subsequent military operations have left Hamas and Hezbollah crippled and struggling to retaliate on behalf of the Iranian regime as they have in the past. These conditions allowed for the U.S. and Israel to confront Iran directly, undeterred by the regime’s proxy forces.

Not only was I able to share my knowledge about the history and state of Iranian military strategy, but I was also able to learn from the other panel speakers and audience. Professor Wallace’s knowledge and passion for global security and counterterrorism shone through. He provided deep insights into the conflict, as well as estimations of potential outcomes and ramifications for the Middle East. Since my background on global conflicts is purely academic, hearing from a retired military officer was enlightening as to the human costs of war.

In addition to Professor Wallace’s perspective, I was able to better understand the Iranian-American experience through the words of Melamed. He spoke of the surreal nature of a status quo life in the U.S. while many of his countrymen are dying in Iran from crackdowns on protests. He described a feeling of collective urgency and aspiration for democracy among the Iranian diaspora, and likely by many Iranians still in Iran. Melamed paints a story of a people longing for normality, safety, and a democratic future for their children.

My experience at Limmud is just one of many examples of how Tulane has fostered engagement with the New Orleans community. Tulane has supported my internship with the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s office, my desire to learn, and my interest in the Middle East. All of these experiences have not only allowed me to deepen my understanding of world affairs but have enabled me to meet amazing people and given me new perspectives and confidence that I hope to carry forward as I graduate from college and pursue a career in law and policy.