“Conversation with the Dean” lecture series featuring Professor Adia Benton

Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences’s “Conversation with the Dean” is a faculty speaker series designed to deliver insights into the cutting-edge research and teaching from faculty experts around the College. The series is offered live to Weinberg College leadership society donors with a real-time Q&A. Learn more about the leadership giving society here. The series is available to all Weinberg College alumni in the days following the event.

Adia Benton, professor in the Department of Anthropology, and Dean Adrian Randolph share reflections on COVID-19, the United States’ reaction to the virus, and other nations’ reactions to it. They also discuss how COVID-19 compares to the nature of the Ebola and HIV outbreaks, two viruses that Professor Benton has previously studied.

Watch the conversation below:

Adia Benton is an associate professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. She is the author of the award-winning book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone, and is currently writing a book about the West African Ebola outbreak. During spring quarter, she taught a Weinberg College Freshman Seminar titled Modern Plagues where she and her students investigate how the complex interactions among social, political, environmental, and economic factors influence the history of infectious disease and the efforts to address them. Read more about Professor Benton’s research and books here.

Adrian Randolph is dean of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Henry Wade Rogers Professor of the Humanities. Dean Randolph’s research focuses on the art and architecture of the medieval Renaissance Italy. He joined Northwestern in 2015 from Dartmouth College. There, he served as the associate dean of the faculty for the Arts and Humanities, chair of the Department of Art History, and director of the college’s Leslie Center for the Humanities.