Common Reading: The Prophets
2024: Robert Jones Jr.
2023: Alice Wong
2022: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
2021: Jia Tolentino
2020: Mohsin Hamid
Common reading: Exit West
[Because of the Covid pandemic, there was no Starr lecture this year.]
2019: Tommy Orange
2018: Roxane Gay
2017: NK Jemisin
2016: Rob Dunn
2015: Larry Siems
Common Reading: Guantánamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi
edited by Larry Siems
2014: Alison Bechdel
2013: Jennifer Egan
2012: Paul Greenberg
Common Reading: Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food
2011: Robert Pinsky
2010: Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein
Common Reading:
Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind
2009: Billy Collins
Common Reading:
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
2008: Elizabeth Kolbert
Common Reading:
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
2007: Tim O’Brien
2006: Salman Rushdie
Common Reading: Shalimar the Clown
In 2005, the Vassar First Year (through the Campus Life and Diversity Office) collaborated with the Dean of First Year Students and the First Year Reading Seminar to institutionalize the Common Reading in connection with The Starr Lecture, beginning with Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown.
