Before you start off your spring/summer plans, take a look at Literature's Fall 2026 21L Subject Offerings! Pre-Registration starts May 1 - June 12th and the final pre-reg deadline is August 27. Registration starts again August 31. Learn more about our subject offerings and their supplemental descriptions on lit.mit.edu or follow the link in our bio!
Happy National Poetry Month*! Even as National Poetry Month draws to a close, we hope this spring continues to bring a little more poetry into your life (or at least inspires a budding 🌱 interest in it) thanks to the free poetry books distributed across town by Prof. Sandy Alexandre of MIT Literature to kind strangers on the train, bus, and readers in the Boston and Cambridge area in Slide 1 & 2. The gifted books on Slide 4 include:
- Slide 3: "Selected Poems" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “The Morning You Saw A Train of Stars Streaming Across the Sky” poems by CooXooEii Black
- “Memory” by Laura Jenson
- “Dreamweed” poems by Yvan Goll, translated by Nan Watkins
- “Intentions of Thunder” by Patricia Smith
- “Portraits and Elegies” by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
- “Haunt Me” by José Enrique Medina
- “We (The People of the United States)” by Literature's Joshua Bennett
- "Postcards from the Interior" by Wyn Cooper
- "Eva~Mary" by Linda McCarriston
- "Indecency" by Justin Phillip Reed
- Slide 5: “blessing the boats” by Lucille Clifton
- Slide 6, this gorgeous copy of “The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri, Illustrated by Gustave Doré!
Tag us if you have read or plan to read any of these amazing books!
*Poetry is every month and every season!
#literature #litatmit #mitshass #shass #mit2026 #NationalPoetryMonth #ApoemAday
Alumna @caralaimd , a medical resident in orthopedics, credits both her mechanical engineering (@mitmeche ) and literature (@litatmit ) studies with helping her "step into other people’s shoes and understand the breadth of life experiences represented in our patients.”
"Medicine is both an art and a science, which is part of what drew me to the field in the first place," Lai says.
Learn more about Lai's post-MIT journey at the link in our bio.
Join us on April 10 for Robert R. Taylor Day, the first annual commemoration honoring Robert Robinson Taylor — MIT’s first Black graduate and the first professionally trained Black architect in the United States.
We are celebrating the day Taylor returned to MIT in 1911 to speak at the Institute’s fiftieth anniversary — a date that closely aligns with the spring submission of his 1892 thesis, "A Soldiers’ Home." Between those moments, he carried out foundational work at Tuskegee University, shaping its campus and advancing a vision of architecture grounded in education and civic purpose.
MIT and Tuskegee continue that connection by bringing students, faculty, and the community together around Taylor’s legacy and its continued relevance.
The program, hosted in collaboration with the MIT Museum (@mitmuseum ), includes a rare opportunity to view Taylor’s original thesis and archival materials, followed by a lunch-and-learn conversation.
With participation from Joshua Bennett (@sirjoshbennett ), Kwesi Daniels (@kwesi_daniels ), Nicholas de Monchaux (@de_monchaux ), Jonathan Duval, Timothy Hyde, Caroline Jones, Carrie Norman (@carrie_norman_ ), and Larry Sass (@larrythesass ).
📍 MIT Museum (Archive Room + Sharp Room)
🗓 April 10, 2026 | 11 AM–2 PM
🎟 Registration required (link in bio)
@mit | @mitsap | @mitarchitecture | @mitshass | @litatmit | @tuskegeeuniversity
Images courtesy of the MIT Museum
When: Wednesday, April 22 @ 5:15 PM
Where: Building 14, 14E-304
Global France Seminar presents,
"The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage by France: Where Are We Now?"
Presented by Felwine Sarr,
Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Professor of Romance Studies
Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University
Abstract: Restitution of African heritage (cultural artifacts) by former colonial powers is an entangled issue. The questions it raises are not limited to those of legitimate ownership of objects. Its implications are political, symbolic, philosophical and relational. It opens up a reflection on history, memory, the colonial past, the genesis and development of Western museums and ethnographic collections.It also allows us to think about the different conceptions of cultural heritage, the different ways of exhibiting objects, as well as their circulation and translocations. Finally, it allows us to think about the larger question of the transmission of cultural heritage and that of the trace. I want to share with you some lessons from this experience related to history, memory, traces, re-appropriation and relationality.
Bio: Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese academic and writer. He is Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies and African & African American Studies at Duke University in North Carolina, after teaching at the Université Gaston Berger in Saint-Louis, Senegal, where he is Professeur Titulaire des Universités and agrégé in economics. His academic work focuses on economics, the ecology of knowledge, contemporary African philosophy, economic policy, epistemology, economic anthropology, and the history of religious ideas.
He has published Dahij (Gallimard 2009), 105 Rue Carnot (Mémoire d'Encrier 2011), Méditations Africaines (Mémoire d'Encrier 2012), Afrotopia (Philippe Rey, 2016), Ishindenshin (Mémoire d'Encrier, 2017), Habiter le Monde (Mémoire d'Encrier, 2017), Ecrire l'Afrique-monde (collective work co-edited with Achille Mbembe, Philippe Rey/Jimsaan, 2017), and more! Link in bio!
When: Thursday, April 9th @ 6:30 PM
Where: Building 7, Long Lounge (7-429)
The Green-Taylor Lectures: A Black Life and Letters Speakers Series presents Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith is a Professor of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. She is the author of the memoirs To "Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul" (Knopf, 2023) and "Ordinary Light" (Knopf, 2015), as well as five poetry collections, including "Life on Mars" (Graywolf Press, 2011) which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. For her writing, Smith has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States. Her latest book is "Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times" (Norton, 2025).
The Green-Taylor Lectures is a speaker series celebrating the intersections of Black Studies, Architecture and Design. Over the course of the year, the series will feature voices from across these fields in an effort to illuminate both the unique history of African American architects here at MIT—the Institute's first Black graduate, Robert R. Taylor, as well as two of the first Black women to attend MIT, Marie Turner and Gloria Green, all studied architecture during their time on campus—and contemporary work in the field that honors the role of worldmaking in the Black expressive tradition. @mitarchitecture
#poetry #poet #tracyksmith #joshuabennett #blackstudies
For MIT senior @marisamontione , a double major in @mit_bcs and @litatmit , the connects between literature and our ability to understand, process, and appreciate them across media are clear.
"Works of literature and film convey so much about one’s identity, experiences, and ideas, and the neuroscience behind an audience’s ability to access an author’s or director’s intentions is truly incredible," she says.
Learn more about Marisa's time at MIT at the link in our bio.
@litatmit professor @sirjoshbennett has a new book, "We (The People of the United States)." The epic poem celebrates unexpected lives forged across the nation. “There’s so much to be said for a country where you and I are possible, and the things we do are possible,” Bennett says.
Learn more at the link in our bio.
What playlist would you pair with a novel? 🎻📖
After a conversation with a literature professor (Sandy Alexandre) and a cognitive neuroscientist (Rebecca Saxe) about the novel IMMACULATE CONCEPTION, our visiting novelist Ling Ling Huang picked up her violin—and with pianist Yoko Greeney—played the scenes she hears in the very story she authored. Thank you @violingsquared
That evening, we saw how #MIT can also mean "Music Is Translation"—how a narrative passage on the page can become music to your ears.
What music plays in your mind when you read?
#ImmaculateConception #LingLingHuang #literature #music
MONDAY, APRIL 6 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Cinema at the Nexus Film Series presents, "She Runs the World"
Hayden Library, Nexus Space 14S-130
Screening of "She Runs the World" (2025), directed by Perri Peltz and Matthew O’Neill. Introduction by Executive Producer, David Fialkow. Conversation to follow with Sandy Alexandre (Literature), Marzyeh Ghassemi (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), and Angelica Castro-Salazar (’26 Mechanical Engineering)
"She Runs the World" is the powerful story of Olympic champion Allyson Felix as she challenges her sponsor Nike after being financially penalized during her pregnancy. The documentary highlights the need for maternal rights in professional sports.
The screening will be followed by a panel moderated by Sandy Alexandre (Associate Professor, Literature Section)
In conversation with:
• Marzyeh Ghassemi (Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science)
• Angelica Castro-Salazar (Mechanical Engineering and student-athlete)
Cinema at the Nexus is an institute-wide film series showcasing films/documentaries that grapple with pressing issues of our day aiming to make some sense of what we are experiencing today.
Supported by the SHASS Dean’s grant, sponsored by the MIT Libraries and the Literature Section.
Pizza and light refreshments will be served. Registration is encouraged but not required.
@bostonglobe 's Kate Tuttle reviews @litatmit professor Joshua Bennett's book of poetry, “We (The People of the United States).” “In some ways, it feels like the kind of thing I’ve been working on forever,” Bennett says. “I wanted to tell the truth about who and what constitutes my vision of America.”
Read the review at the link in our bio.
🖍: @downpourdw
"The literature classroom has become a place where I feel such an immense joy for learning and discovering," says MIT senior Kelly Kim, a double major in Literature (@litatmit ) and Management (@mitsloan ). "Majoring in literature taught me how to think critically and multi-dimensionally, with both a technical and humanistic lens."
Learn more about Kelly, her MIT journey, and what she's doing next at the link in our bio.
