Provost's Lecture Series

Provost's Lecture Series

A partnership of the Office of the Provost and the OSU Foundation to bring renowned thinkers, writers, scientists, artists and leaders to OSU to engage, challenge and inspire.

Featuring Diana B. Henriques: Award-winning Financial Journalist and Author

Why Financial History Matters: From Coolidge to Cryptocurrency

Date: Thursday, March 14, 2024

Lecture Recording

Lecture Recording will be available until April 1, 2024. 

The Provost's Lecture featuring Diana B. Henriques is the first lecture in the 2023-24 series. Henriques is an award-winning financial journalist and author. Her lecture titled "Why Financial History Matters: From Coolidge to Cryptocurrency" is a look at the road America has traveled since the "wild west" markets of the Jazz Age; from the reforms of the 1930s to the newest court cases confronting Wall Street's watchdogs, the talk is based on the author's newest book, "Taming the Street: The Old Guard, the New Deal and FDR's Fight to Regulate American Capitalism."  Following the lecture, Diana Henriques will engage in a moderated Q&A with Tim Carroll, Dean of the College of Business.

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Diana B. Henriques is an award-winning journalist and author unearthing Wall Street's scandals and breaking news. In her formidable role at the New York Times, Diana investigates investment and securities regulation, white-collar crime, corporate governance, market volatility and more, setting her work apart for more than 30 years as detective, historian and modern-day narrator. 

Diana's reach expanded across multimedia with her unmatched investigation into financier Bernie Madoff, perpetrator of history's biggest Ponzi scheme. Starting with her New York Times bestseller The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust, the book became the basis for the HBO film by the same name and the docuseries Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. Detailing Madoff's rise and fall during his decades-long $65 billion investment scam, the Netflix series jumped to top ten most watched TV shows upon release in January 2023.

In September 2023 Diana will release her highly-anticipated book, Taming the Street: The Old Guard, the New Deal, and the Fight for the Soul of the American Market. Diana digs into the unregulated Wall Street of the 1920's and 1930's, the Crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression, leading to President Franklin D Roosevelt's fight to curb industry excess exacerbated by concentrated wealth. A follow-up to her book A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History, Diana presents parallels between financial drama one century ago and those affecting politics today.

Her legacy includes multiple Pulitzer Prize nominations as well as top awards for business and finance journalism. An authority in historical precedents and investment behavior, Diana is regarded as the go-to expert on the effects of September 11, 2001 on the financial community, the 2008 bank crisis and resulting Great Recession, and more recent headlines centered on US wealth markets including cryptocurrency.

Renowned for intelligent investigation and piercing insight, Diana distinguished her career as a trailblazer, breaking the glass ceiling when few women gained roles on Wall Street. She engages audiences with her singular perspective, putting lessons from complex financial history into everyday simplicity. Passionate for rectifying wrongs and holding lawbreakers accountable, Diana shares the mistakes of the past as cautionary tales for today's economy in hopes of preventing future calamity.  


Featuring Michael Pollan: Bestselling Author and Sustainable Food Advocate

A Conversation with Michael Pollan

Date: Tuesday, April 2, 2024
Time: 7 - 8:30 p.m. 
Location: Austin Auditorium, LaSells Stewart Center

Register Here

The Provost's Lecture featuring Michael Pollan is the second lecture in the 2023-24 series. Pollan is a bestselling author and sustainable food advocate. Join us for a special Provost's Lecture event in which Michael Pollan will engage in an in-depth conversation with Oregon State's own Emily Ho, University Distinguished Professor of Nutrition in the College of Health and Director of the Linus Pauling Institute. Following their discussion, Dr. Ho will moderate a Q&A with the audience. 

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For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. 

Pollan is the author of nine books, seven of which have been New York Times bestsellers; four of them, including his latest This is Your Mind on Plants, were immediate New York Times bestsellers. Previous books include How to Change Your Mind (2019), Cooked (2013), Food Rules (2009), In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008) and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), which was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award for best food writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

His most recent book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants and the taboos we place on them, was a New York Times bestseller and one of the Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2021. 

A four-hour Netflix miniseries based on Cooked premiered in February 2016. PBS presented a two-hour special documentary based on The Botany of Desire in 2009 and a two-hour documentary based on In Defense of Food was broadcast nationally in 2015 and was nominated for an Emmy. Pollan appeared in the 2008 Oscar-nominated documentary Food Inc., which was partly based on The Omnivore's Dilemma, and is currently working on a sequel to Food Inc.. 

A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine since 1987, Pollan's writing has received numerous awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003; the John Burroughs prize; the QPB Nwe Vision Award; the 2014 James Beard Foundation Leadership Award; the 2015 Washington University Humanities Medal; and the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace in 2010. In 2009, Pollan was named one of the top 10 "New Thought Leaders" by Newsweek magazine and in 2010 was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. 

Pollan has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gastronomic Science and in 2015 was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. He retired as the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism, and co-founder of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. In 2017, he was appointed Professor of Practice of Non-fiction at Harvard and the university's first Lewis Chan Lecturer in the Arts. 

Michael Pollan holds degrees from Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University. 


Both lectures will be streamed on live.oregonstate.edu.

Closed captioning will be available for each entire lecture.

For accommodations please contact [email protected]

Upcoming Speakers

 

Atwood web

Margaret Atwood
November 19, 2024

Celine Cousteau-web

CeĢline Cousteau
March 10, 2025

 

 

Previous Speakers

Image of W. Kamau Bell, Provost's Lecture Speaker, OSU 2019

W. Kamau Bell
January 31, 2019

image of Michael Beeschlos, OSU Provost's Lecturer 2015

Michael Beschloss
November 10, 2015

image of Richard Besser, OSU Provost's Lecturer 2015

Richard Besser
April 13, 2015

image of Robin Chase, Provost's Lecturer 2017

Robin Chase
March 8, 2017

David Eagleman
October 27, 2021

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
November 9, 2020

Mae C. Jemison
February 4, 2021

Mary Karr
April 13, 2022

Ibram X. Kendi
April 14, 2021

Image of Maya LIn, Provost's Lectuer 2018

Maya Lin
April 26, 2018

image of Ruth Reichl, OSU Provost Lecturer, 2016

Ruth Reichl
February 17, 2016

Laurie Santos
April 4, 2023

cheryl strayed

Cheryl Strayed
January 15, 2015

Sam Quinones 
November 14, 2022