Virtual Indigo Talk with Dr. Anita Patterson
Join us virtually on Thursday, July 16, at 7 pm ET, for our 2026 Indigo Talk with Dr. Anita Patterson, Professor of English at Boston University. Her talk, titled “Daisaku Ikeda’s Dialogues of the Heart,” coincides with the publication of Daisaku Ikeda, Transnationalism, and American Literature: Dialogues of the Heart (Routledge, May 2026), which was edited by Dr. Patterson and published in association with the Center. In her lecture, Dr. Patterson will explore Daisaku Ikeda’s engagement with literature as a core element of his broader philosophy and as a vital component of his global peacebuilding vision.
Dr. Patterson is Professor of English at Boston University. Her first book, From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (Oxford University Press, 1997), explored how Emerson’s legacy informed the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In her second book, Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge University Press, 2008), she showed that Whitman, Poe, Eliot, Pound and their avant-garde contemporaries served as a heritage for Black poets such as Langston Hughes in the US as well as St.-John Perse, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, and other poets in the Caribbean. She has published numerous articles on modernism, race, and interculturality, and is currently researching an American literary tradition of transpacific exchange extending from Emerson and Eliot up through the haiku-inspired poetry of Robert Hayden, Richard Wright, and Sonia Sanchez. In addition to teaching in Core, she also teaches courses in the English Department and the American and New England Studies Program.
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