Lawson Lecture

Kevin Wilson, BA’00, the author of Now is Not the Time to Panic, this year’s Campus Reading, shared his experiences as a Vanderbilt student in the mid-1990s with more than 1,000 current first-year students on Sept. 10. Read More

This year’s Lawson Lecture featured Dolly Chugh, author of "The Person You Mean to Be," the 2020 Commons Reading for first-year and transfer students, and Dean of The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons Melissa Gesalfi in a fireside chat via webinar. Read More

Resilience—the ability to adjust to change, recover from setbacks or overcome life’s challenges—is a key theme being explored by first-year students on The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons during 2017-18. Read More

Watch video of the 10th Annual Lawson Lecture featuring Perry Wallace, Godfrey Dillard, and Andrew Maraniss. Read More

A tradition among first-year students to read and discuss a common text has inspired a campuswide initiative called “Human Identities: Global, Local, Personal,” designed to raise nuanced dialogue about gender and sexuality across the Vanderbilt community. Read More