Past Faculty Lunch Talks
The Office of Peace and Justice hosts one faculty lunch talk per month, highlighting faculty research and fostering dialogue around peace and justice issues on campus.
See below for our past lunch talk offerings, and consider joining us at our upcoming events!
2025-2026
Minority Identities in Nigeria: Contesting and Claiming Citizenship in the Twentieth Century
Presented by Dr. Oghenetoja Okoh, Associate Professor of History.
The talk will focus on Dr. Oghenetoja Okoh recent publication: Minority Identities in Nigeria: Contest and Claiming Citizenship in the 20th Century, and it will discuss how minorities are historically produced by the state in service of resource extraction.

Teaching After Tragedy: How Rwanda Educates for Peace
Presented by Claver Irakoze
In the aftermath of genocide and post genocide society, how do you teach children about the past without passing on hatred or fear, or at least minimizing such realities? This talk will explore Rwanda’s peace education programs, school curricula, and youth engagement models that help foster critical thinking, empathy, and civic responsibility. Through the lens of my work with Aegis Trust and Solid Minds, I will reflect on how education can prevent cycles of violence, and what the world can learn from Rwanda’s ongoing efforts to raise a generation that remembers differently, one that chooses peace over revenge. This topic aligns well with university students and educators interested in conflict prevention and restorative approaches to justice and trauma.

The IBSA Irony: (Un)Realized Social Justice for Brazillian Trafficking Victims
Presented by Dr. Tania Rosas-Moreno, Communication and Media, Professor.
Human trafficking is the world’s second largest criminal enterprise, since the human body can be sold repeatedly. A world trafficking hot spot is Brazil, Latin America’s leading and among the world’s top ten economy/economies. Join us to learn how (news) media can be powerful allies and heroes in advocating for folks’ rights to and for one of their greatest possessions: their bodies.

Enduring Colonialism and Cultural Injustice
Presented by Dr. Thomas Ward, Professor Emeritus of Spanish.
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega: Literary Genealogies of an Indigenous Intellectual in Nineteenth-Century
Peru
After the Spanish defeated Peru's ruling Inka class, the novel was banned, and Peru's
first native-born writer Inka Garcilaso de la Vega was also suppressed. Colonial subjects
were not allowed to explore who they were, a cultural injustice. After Independence,
writers began to perceive that they were no longer Spaniards, and they were now free
to read Garcilaso's Inkan chronicles. Dr. Ward will depart from his new book published
with University of Nebraska Press to bring these anticolonial writers from Peru into
focus.

Bridge-Building, Neurodiversity, Acceptance, Solidarity, and Peacebuilding & The Future of Academic Freedom
Bridge-Building, Neurodiversity, Acceptance, Solidarity, and Peacebuilding presented by Sarah Flores and The Future of Academic Freedom presented by Sawyer Little.

We're All Stories
Presented by Mary Beth Akre, Visual and Performing Arts, Professor.
The "We're All Stories" presentation will exhibit the stories collected from members
and allies of the LGBTQ+ community and the ten trans memorial portraits completed
in honor of ten trans lives lost to violence.

Autograph Books as Holocaust Objects
During the Holocaust, Jews brought personal objects with them as they were deported to camps and ghettos; among these, Jewish girls brought "autograph books", small albums of blank pages intended for the collection of poems and drawings by friends and acquaintances. This research analyzes several of these books to ask how they functioned inside spaces of persecution and what they meant to their owners.

2024-2025
"The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization"
Sam Klug, Assistant Teaching Professor of History
Monday, April 14 @ 12 pm in CT*M113

"Justice for Her: The Struggle for Justice Among Female Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina"
Olivia Paré
Tuesday, March 25 @ 12:15 in CT*M114

"Live Free or Die: Resistance Against Colonialism and Slavery in the French Caribbean"
Jade Horwitz and Yamil Hernandez Santos
Tuesday, February 18 @ 12:15 in CT*M113

"Slavery and Its Legacies at Loyola: Curricular Interventions"
Dr. David Carey Jr.
October 30, 2024 at 11 a.m.
AWSC 4th floor program room

"Endogenous Colonial Borders: Precolonial States and Geography in the Partition of Africa”
Dr. Joan Ricart-Huguet
October 7, 2024 at 11 a.m.
CT*M113 (conference room behind Starbucks)

“Protecting Human Rights in an International System that is Increasingly Multipolar: Challenges (Both Old and New)"
Dr. James Snow
September 16, 2024 at 11 a.m.
CT*M113 (conference room behind Starbucks)

2023-2024
"The Relevance of Rabindranath Tagore’s Philosophy of Peace in Today’s World"
Dr. Sudeshna Basu
Thu, Apr 18, 2024 from 12-12:50 pm
“Rethinking Nigeria’s Nationalist Narrative: The Role of Ethnic Minorities in Shaping Post-Colonial Nigerian Politics"
Dr. Oghenetoja Okoh
Wed, Feb 21, 2024 from 11-11:50 am

"Legacies of Slavery at Loyola: Historical Evidence from the Postbellum Period"
Dr. David Carey Jr.
Wed, Jan 31, 2024 from 11-11:50 am

"Church and Modern Anti-Semitism"
Dr. James Snow
Wed, Dec 6, 2023 from 12-12:50 pm

"Slavery and Its Legacies at Loyola”
Dr. David Carey, Jr.
Wed, Nov 15, 2023 from 12-12:50 pm

"Genocide and Identity: Destruction and Reconstruction of Selfhood in Me, the Last Tutsi”
Dr. Heidi Shaker
Wed, Oct 18, 2023 from 12-12:50 pm

2022-2023
Compassionate Accountability and Collective Responsibility"
Dr. Kaye Wise Whitehead
Co-hosted with Karson Institute for Race, Peace, and Social Justice
Mon, Apr 17, 2023 from 12-12:50 pm

"Democratic Partisanship"
Dr. Fuat Gursozlu
Wed, Mar 22, 2023 from 12-12:50 pm

"The Age of Cain: Western Extractive Colonialism, the Christian Imagination, and the Anthropocene"
Dr. Daniel Castillo
Thursday, Mar 2, 2023 from 12:15-1:15 pm

Contact Us
Heidi ShakerAssociate Professor of French
Director, Office of Peace and Justice
Maryland Hall 351-I
hsbrown@loyola.edu
