January 2025 Lectures
LOCATION
January lectures will be held online via Zoom Webinar on Tuesdays and Thursdays. View each description below to see the date and time of the lecture.
RESERVATIONS
No registration is required to attend online lectures. The Zoom link will be sent to all those subscribed to the OLLI newsletter the morning of the lecture. If you do not receive the OLLI newsletter and would like to attend, please join the email list here.
LECTURES
Christopher Leinberger, Reimagining Cities
January 21
10:30-11:30 AM
Online via Zoom
Christopher Leinberger is co-founding partner and managing director of Places Platform, a proptech start-up developing a big data analytical platform of 100% of US real estate; and founding partner of Arcadia Land Company, a New Urbanism/transit-oriented development firm dedicated to land stewardship and walkable communities, focused on the Philadelphia area.
Leinberger established the real estate and urban analysis research programs at George Washington University School of Business and is now an Emeritus Professor. He received the 2020 Land Economics Society Distinguished Educator Award. He also established the graduate real estate program at the University of Michigan.
For 21 years, he was Managing Director and co‐owner of RCLCo (formerly Robert Charles Lesser Co.), the largest independent real estate advisory firm in the country. He was also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Leinberger was named one of the Top 100 Urbanists of all time by Planetizen urban planning website. The author of two books and a contributor to 16 others, he has written for The Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, American Conservative, Nation, and Washington Monthly.
Erwin Chemerinsky, No Democracy Lasts Forever
January 23
10:30-11:30 AM
Online via Zoom
Erwin Chemerinsky is an American legal scholar known for his studies of U.S. constitutional law and federal civil procedure. Since 2017, Chemerinsky has been the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. Previously, he was the inaugural dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law from 2008 to 2017.
Chemerinsky was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. The National Jurist magazine named him the most influential person in legal education in the United States in 2017. In 2021 Chemerinsky was named President-elect of the Association of American Law Schools.
His latest book is No Democracy Lasts Forever.
Giovanni Russonello, Jazz in DC
January 28
10:30-11:30 AM
Online via Zoom
Giovanni Russonello is a writer, editor, educator and organizer working at the intersection of music, politics and U.S. history. Gio is presently writing a book about Gil Scott-Heron and Washington, D.C., in the 1970s and ’80s, under contract to Metropolitan/Macmillan. A 2024 DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities fellow, he also edits capitalbop.com, an award-winning web magazine covering the D.C. jazz scene, which he co-founded in 2010. The only person to have served as both a politics columnist and a music critic for the New York Times, he has also contributed reporting, reviews and essays to the Atlantic, the Washington Post, NPR Music, JazzTimes, Politico and others. He currently hosts a radio show on WPFW 89.3 FM, spotlighting contemporary jazz and other forms of creative music being made in DC.
Richard Bell, The Reverse Underground Railroad: Slavery and Kidnapping in Pre-Civil War America
January 30
10:00-11:00 AM
Online via Zoom
Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland and author of the book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award and the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. He serves as a Trustee of the Maryland Center for History and Culture and as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
OLLI does not endorse any of the viewpoints expressed by the speakers in its series.
We thank the Lecture Committee and all those who suggested and contacted speakers: Ellen Babby, Joe Belden (Chair), Tamara Belden, Helen Blank, David Coffman, Edward Cohen, Martha Cutts, Dave Hensler, Jeanne Kent, Lynn Lewis, Mark Nadel, Irvin Nathan, and Diane Renfroe.