ACE Fest Keynote Address
Date: Wednesday, April 15
Time: 10:15-11:15 a.m.
Location: Lehman Auditorium
More info:

Dr. Deborah Lawrence, chief scientist and director of forest and land at Calyx Global, will open the 2026 Academic and Creative Excellence (ACE) Festival as keynote speaker at 10:15 a.m. on Wednesday, April 15, in Lehman Auditorium.

At Calyx Global, a Colorado-based carbon credit ratings agency, Lawrence ensures the scientific integrity of its greenhouse gas ratings. She spent 25 years as an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia, where she conducted global forest and climate research.

She also served as a science advisor to the U.S. Department of State and established SilvaCarbon, a U.S. federal program for forest carbon measurement and monitoring, according to a staff listing on . 

Lawrence holds a BA in anthropology from Harvard University and a PhD in botany from Duke University. 

Her keynote address will reflect on “our connections to nature and how they have changed over the course of my life,” Lawrence said, “informing my scholarship, my work, and my daily life.”

Jennifer Ulrich, chair of the Intellectual Life Committee, said Lawrence’s teaching experience, research, and international background were key factors in selecting her as keynote speaker. 

She said Lawrence readily embraced both the university’s annual theme of environmental sustainability and its Common Read, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, as she developed her address.

“I am grateful for her willingness to speak with us and look forward to her keynote address,” Ulrich said.

91����Ƶ ACE Festival

91����Ƶ’s Academic and Creative Excellence Festival provides an opportunity for students to learn from their peers and to showcase their own research, creative projects, and papers. It’s also an opportunity to continue conversations sparked by 91����Ƶ’s Common Read for the year.

In addition to poster and oral presentations held throughout the day on Thursday, April 15, ACE Fest events include a music department student recital at noon in Lehman Auditorium, an art exhibition opening for senior capstone projects at 4:45 p.m. in the Margaret Martin Gehman Gallery, and a wind ensemble concert at 7 p.m. in Lehman Auditorium.

The 17th 91����Ƶ Authors’ Reception and Award Presentation will be held from 3:45-5 p.m. in Old Common Grounds (University Commons 177) on Thursday. The annual event, hosted by the Office of the Provost, recognizes and celebrates winners of the university’s Excellence in Teaching Awards and recipients of student writing awards, as well as 91����Ƶ faculty, staff, and students who have published scholarly work since Jan. 1, 2025. The awards presentation part of the program will begin at 4:30 p.m.

An 91����Ƶ Career Fair, hosted by the Alumni Engagement Office, will be held from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. on Thursday at the Hall of Nations. It will provide an opportunity for students to interact directly with employers, connect with alumni professionals, explore career options, and potentially secure internships or employment. 

The ACE Festival is hosted by the Provost’s Office and made possible by the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the Center for Interfaith Engagement, and the Daniel B. Suter Endowment, which supports 91����Ƶ’s commitment to fostering curiosity, discovery, and scientific learning. 

For more information about the festival and a schedule of events, visit .

New York Times-bestselling author Douglas Abrams, who has worked with many of the most inspiring people on the planet — from Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama to Stephen Hawking and Jane Goodall — is the keynote speaker for 91����Ƶ’s Academic & Creative Excellence (ACE) Festival.

Abrams will deliver a virtual address titled “Two Truths and Three Lies 91����Ƶ Hope and Humanity” from 10:10 to 11 a.m. on Wednesday, April 17, in Lehman Auditorium. His address explores the importance of hope in our lives and how to cultivate it personally and collectively when we need it most. It invites audiences to see hope not as a passive or weak response, but as an act of resistance that challenges the status quo. Following his address, Abrams will remain available for a talkback session until 11:30 a.m.

The talk will draw on his work writing The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times (2021) with Goodall (91����Ƶ’s Common Read selection for 2023-2024) as well as his collaborations with leading spiritual teachers, activists and scientists. Together with the Dalai Lama and Tutu, Abrams co-wrote The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World (2016), which inspired the documentary .

Abrams lives in Santa Cruz, California. He is the founder of Idea Architects, a literary agency and media development company that helps visionaries create a wiser, healthier and more just world.

He worked with Tutu as his co-writer and editor for more than a decade. He was a senior editor at HarperCollins Publishers and served for nine years as the religion editor at the University of California Press.

91����Ƶ the ACE Festival

The ACE Festival invites keynote speakers to engage the community in conversations around values important to us at 91����Ƶ. The speaker is typically selected with the themes of the year’s Common Read in mind. We invite engagement and response from diverse perspectives, and encourage continued conversation around these themes.

This event is co-sponsored by 91����Ƶ Convocation and the Language and Literature Program. It will be livestreamed on Facebook Live from the .

“Race,” said Kishbaugh, a chemistry professor who heads the Intellectual Life Committee. “Cross-cultural understanding. Racism. These topics appeared multiple times and in different suggested books in the months before we made the selection.”

In selecting the year’s Common Read – one book that the university community is encouraged to read, discuss and delve into throughout the coming months, Kishbaugh says: “We always try to choose a book that connects with 91����Ƶ’s distinct mission and these are topics that link directly to peacebuilding, to cross-cultural engagement and serving and leading in a global context.”

Searching for Zion: the Quest for Home in the African Diaspora (Grove Press, 2013) by Emily Raboteau became this year’s Common Read selection after professor David Evans and then reached out to her.

“Once she said she could come to campus, it was an easy decision,” Kishbaugh said. “That creates a real sense of immediacy that is so valuable for our students.”

Raboteau will be on campus Oct. 21 to speak at 10 a.m. chapel in Lehman Auditorium, as well as in a 4 p.m. colloquium at Main Stage Theater in the University Commons. Both events are free and open to the public.

Around the world

The book chronicles Raboteau’s 10 years of travel in Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South, as she encounters and engages with voices as diverse as Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals, Ethiopian Jews and Katrina transplants from her own family.

Raboteau’s search for Zion leads her right back to where she started, the United States of America, where, Evans asks in his review, “one wonders if the search for Zion is a search for a promised land or a search for self?”

The book was named a best book of 2013 by The Huffington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle. Raboteau is a current finalist for the , grand prize winner of the New York Book Festival, and winner of a 2014 American Book Award. Her fiction and essays have been widely published and anthologized. Raboteau resides in New York City and teaches creative writing in Harlem at City College, once known as “the poor man’s Harvard.”

‘Read’ strategy varies

91����Ƶ’s strategy related to the Common Read has been different each of its three years, Kishbaugh said. The inaugural book selection for 2013-14 was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. was Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which Kishbaugh said was especially thought-provoking for faculty members thinking about how to teach this new generation of computer-savvy consumers.

This year, all students in Transitions courses – that is, students who are new to the 91����Ƶ community – are reading “Searching for Zion” and exploring themes of selfhood, race, citizenship and displacement: “how you and your cultural background fit in” or don’t fit in within various contexts and encounters with people who are similar and different, says professor , director of the 91����Ƶ Core curriculum.

“A common read is based on the premise that learning together through our joint comprehension of and engagement with the text invites conversation and valuable cultural connections,” says English professor . “Meeting the author of the book helps make the text come alive – in community.”

Students, faculty and staff are welcome at events throughout the school year, including faculty presentations and responses, that provide opportunities to learn from and discuss the book.

I’m big on reading books (no TV at home when growing up) and consider myself decently informed about the university that I’ll be getting a degree from in December, but I had never heard of the Common Read until I was asked to write an 91����Ƶ news blog about it. Along with the assignment came the 2014-15 Common Read book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

The book proved to be fascinating and sobering – ironically, it  explains why people of my 18-22 age group and younger would be highly unlikely to actually read all 228 pages of The Shallows. Not unless it was assigned, tested, and graded for credit, or otherwise read under some form of duress.

The idea behind the Common Read – as gathered from national collegiate news accounts and interviews at 91����Ƶ – is a good one. “Campus common reading programs rest on a simple idea: that reading the same book brings people closer together as a community by creating common ground for discussion,” at the in 2006.

Breaking out of our narrow circles

Put another way, 91����Ƶ hopes an interesting book, read by all, can help us to break out of departmental or athletic or musical social circles and meet others. In 2012-13, 309 colleges and universities had common reading programs, with 190 book titles selected, usually centering on themes of social justice, sustainability, diversity, and economic justice, according to .

Here at 91����Ƶ, for two years in a row, a Common Read book has been selected by our Intellectual Life Committee, consisting of six faculty members from different departments, a couple of student leaders, the campus pastor, a librarian, the provost and the provost’s assistant.

The inaugural book selection for 2013-14 was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. (I somehow missed this announcement, perhaps because I was on a cross-cultural that fall and at the in the spring.) 91����Ƶ provided all incoming first-year students a free copy of this book, but members of the Intellectual Life Committee interviewed for this article seemed unsure how many students actually read the book.

Several events related to the book were held throughout the year, including Tuesday lunch discussions and sessions, but by all accounts these were not well attended by students.

Students reading books for pleasure?

This may be par for today’s course. A by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 74% to 80% of college freshmen and seniors read 0–4 books on their own during the school year.

“We were trying to get people to talk to each other,” said professor , who is on the Intellectual Life Committee. “We wanted to encourage people to connect with the mission outside of their classes.”

Ashley Thorne, one of the Common Read researchers at the National Association of Scholars, : “Across the campuses, they aren’t doing the same courses, they’re not reading the same books. So colleges want to give them something common intellectually…. This is a chance to do that.”

Ironically, this year’s Common Read book may offer insights for the poor student participation in the program. In The Shallows, Carr argues that the Internet is rewiring our brains to be efficient in filtering through the vast stores of information available at click of a mouse. But being efficient at filtering information quickly is inhibiting our ability to engage in “deep reading.”

It’s not that people aren’t reading, Carr explains, it is that they are not reading books anymore. People read blogs, online social networks, use newspaper “apps” that give highlights or headlines, and visit Wikipedia for research papers. The nature of information cultivation is changing.

Seven events planned for 2014-15

With the advent of the Internet age, and perhaps demise of the reading one, university scholarship will change dramatically. “This year’s book is far more about what the nature of the university is going to be,” Kishbaugh told me, while last year’s was more about cross-cultural understanding.

Perhaps as the nature of university scholarship shifts, so will the nature of the Common Read until it is a Common Blog or a Common Video Series. If so, I will be among the dinosaur-types who will long for a return to a book, where you can immerse yourself in a well-developed stream of thought and ponder its implications, as I have with The Shallows.

Seven events are planned at 91����Ƶ for 2014-15 on the themes raised by The Shallows, beginning with a “faculty response” over lunch on Oct. 28 featuring Jerry Holsopple, Walt Surratt, and Dee Weikle in the West Dining Room. The other events and more information about the program can be found .