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“This room holds many ghosts,” Tony Award-winning playwright Richard Nelson ’72 said as he began his talk in the Chapel on Tuesday, March 11. “Ghosts in every corner.” Nelson delivered the Tolles lecture titled “The Peculiarity of Theater.”

While things, or objects, are physically tangible, they can also be an abstract gateway to looking at the world from a fresh perspective and liberating the mind from selfishness. Dr. Ian Bogost, award-winning author of Alien Phenomenology, delivered a lecture to the Hamilton community about the pressing importance of discovering substantive meaning in everyday objects to enrich our daily lives.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to read Art Spiegelman’s Maus just once. The Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel tells the story of first- and second-generation Holocaust survivors, challenging the notion—if any such notion existed—that the effects of war and genocide are finite in a gripping autobiographical/biographical narrative. As such, Maus fits Spiegelman’s definition of the graphic novel genre: “a long comic book that needs a bookmark and wants to be reread.”

Naomi Wallace, playwright and author of Slaughter City, spoke at Hamilton on February 15 as part of the Tolles Lecture Series. As a guest of the theater department, Wallace discussed the ethical obligations of theater performers. At times personal and other times political, Wallace informed and challenged the more than 100 guests in the Chapel. Her speech focused on the concept of “hospitality” in theater along with issues of race and class.

A writer from age 16, Margaret Atwood has created a successful career, garnered many awards in both poetry and prose, and has received international acclaim. Throughout her career she has shown loyalty to her fellow writers and to the causes she champions.