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Harker Speaker Series

Launched in 2008 to bring leaders and visionaries from a wide variety of fields to share their expertise or unique experiences with Harker.

Harker Speaker Series

For more information, contact communications@harker.org.

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Watch All of Our Past Event Videos in our HSS Event Playlist

2024-25 Speaker Series

Earlier This Season

In Conversation with Clarence B. Jones

part of our annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebrations

Fri., Jan. 24, 2025 | 7 p.m. | Rothschild Performing Arts Center | 500 Saratoga Ave., San Jose

Clarence B. Jones served as legal counsel, strategic advisor, and draft speechwriter to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from 1960 until King’s assassination in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968. Vanity Fair called him the man who kept King’s secrets; Jones was privy to King’s decision-making processes and political struggles. He is credited with writing the first seven paragraphs of the iconic I Have A Dream speech. He currently serves as the chairman of the Spill the Honey Foundation, an organization dedicated to Black-Jewish relations. He also founded the Dr. Clarence B. Jones Institute for Social Advocacy and serves as the founding director emeritus of the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco.


Mapping Our Way Home: A Conversation with Connie Zheng

Wed., Dec. 4 | 6-7 p.m. | Rothschild Performing Arts Center | 500 Saratoga Ave., San Jose

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer and experimental filmmaker based out of the East Bay. She works with maps, seeds, food, environmental histories, speculative fiction, field recordings and hand-drawn animation. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including at the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, Mass.), the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Sa Sa Art Projects (Phnom Penh), Framer Framed (Amsterdam) and Salt Beyoğlu (Istanbul). She has received fellowships and awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation, among other organizations, and was a 2023 YBCA 100 awardee. Zheng’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Kadist Foundation and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University, and has received press from Artforum, MUBI Notebook, Hyperallergic, The San Francisco Examiner, and KQED Arts. In 2021 she published a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, and her essays have appeared in The Back Room at Small Press Traffic, SFMOMA’s Open Space and Errant Journal. More info about Connie Zheng.

Previous Speakers Include:

Image of Michael Eric Dyson

Muwekme Ohlone seal

Author Julie Lythcott-Haims

David Amram

Toshio Tanahashi

Image of Chinatown Rising cover

Magdalena Yeşil

Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya Portrait

Denis Belliveau

Rick Steves

Khaled Housseini

Dennis Mcnally

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