President's Lecture Series
The President's Lecture Series (PLS) is a faculty initiative of the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences that is sponsored by the Office of the President. The lecture series is planned, organized, and administered by a committee of faculty volunteers who are guided by the PLS Mission Statement.
Mission Statement
PLS Mission Statement: By welcoming public intellectuals to a dynamic educational environment, The President's Lecture Series strives to provide a forum for critical discourse that is responsive to the interests of the Humber community. In fulfilling this goal, we commit to the values of free speech, diversity, and academic and social engagement.
Explore our archive!
We have a video archive of speakers going back to 2006 available as a resource to faculty, staff and students.
Get Involved!
Come to one of our upcoming talks. Here are the speakers for the Winter 2026 term:
Zahra Nader
What Wasn’t Said: Rethinking Two Decades of Media in Afghanistan
Tues, Jan 27th 12:00 - 1:00 p.m., Q&A + Reception to Follow
North Campus, BCTI (Barrett Centre) 5th Floor
Zahra Nader is a journalist and Editor-in-Chief of Zan Times, a women-led, investigative newsroom that covers human rights violations in Afghanistan with a focus on women and the LGBTQI+ community. It earned a Human Rights Press Award for its reporting on the alarming rise in suicides among young Afghan women. Zahra started her career as a journalist in 2011 in Kabul and joined the New York Times bureau there in 2016. She has authored articles in publications ranging from Time and Foreign Policy to the Guardian and DW. She also spoke at the UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security in 2022 and was the recipient of the Kathy Gannon Legacy Award from the Coalition For Women In Journalism in 2023.
Dr Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey
Pan-Africanism and the Paradox of Progress: Black Self-Determination and the Limits of ‘Democracy’ in Canada and the United States.
Tues, Feb 10th 12:00 - 1:00 p.m., Q&A + Reception to Follow
North Campus, BCTI (Barrett Centre) 5th Floor
Dr Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. He specializes in the history of African peoples in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean Basin. His book, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America, situates fundamental questions of twentieth-century U.S. history - race, immigration, civil rights, revolution, counterinsurgency, imperialism, and neo-colonialism - within a North American and transatlantic diasporic frame. It has won numerous accolades, including the Governor General's History Award for Scholarly Research and the Canadian Historical Association's Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize.
Cory Doctorow
Disenshittification Nation: How Canada Can Fix the Internet, Win Trump's Trade War, and Make a Genuinely Astonishing Amount of Money
Wed, April 8th, time and location TBA
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of dozens of books, most recently the non-fiction, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, and the novels Picks and Shovels and The Bezzle. He is an AD White Professor at Cornell University; an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate; and a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina's School of Library and Information Science. He is also a special advisor to the digital rights organization, Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as the UK Open Rights Group which he co-founded. A recipient of numerous awards, he is a regular contributor to media outlets and maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net.
Suggest a Speaker
The PLS Committee strives to be responsive to the entire college community. To generate as much interest as possible, the committee looks for speakers who will have broad appeal among the great diversity of students who attend the college. We actively seek feedback and suggestions from faculty, staff, and students.
PLS speakers are chosen on the basis of five criteria. PLS speakers must be 1) high profile 2) intellectually accessible 3) thought-provoking 4) Canadian- and/or internationally-focused, and 5) must not be sitting or campaigning elected politicians nor have already appeared at the college within the past three years. Do you know of a suitable speaker? If so, please forward your suggestion(s) to pls@humber.ca. Be sure to let us know what topics the speaker could address, their areas of academic specialization, their publications, and especially send us any links to interviews or talks available online.