A student who chooses to make UVM their home for four years will find that our community brings a wide variety of speakers and guests to campus to enrich our campus experience and broaden our academic horizons. As an English and/or Film & Television Studies major, you will find this to be especially the case, as many guests that the English department and FTS program bring to campus meet our students where they study: in the classroom and, if not in the classroom, through English and FTS exclusive workshops and events. These small guest lectures and workshops allow our students personal experience working with leaders in their fields, offering them connection and guidance that can't be achieved in a large impersonal lecture hall.
Here Is a Glimpse of Some of Our Past Guest Speakers
Luis Guzmán
Guest Lecture for FTS/English Majors
Just back from filming season 2 of the Netflix smash hit Wednesday, Guzmán talked about filming and his career on set as an actor. He has been featured in the films Carlito’s Way, Boogie Nights, Out of Sight, The Taking of Pelham 123, Traffic, Keanu, Narcos, Beverly Hills Cop, and the recent streaming series Wednesday, Poker Face, and Code Black, along with many others.
Miles Millar and Alfred Gough
Guest Lecture with Q&A for English/Flim and Television Studies/Theater Majors
Miles Millar and Alfred Gough (Executive Producers) created and are Showrunners of Netflix’s hit, Wednesday. The duo partnered with iconic director Tim Burton to bring the series to life. With over 250 million views worldwide, Wednesday has become Netflix’s number one English language series of all time.
Millar and Gough also created and served as Showrunners of the critically acclaimed action-adventure television series Smallville. The show became the longest-running comic book-based series of all time and was the number one show in the history of the WB Television Network. They also created and Executive Produced AMC’s groundbreaking martial arts drama Into the Badland, as well as MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles, starring Austin Butler.
Their feature film credits include Sam Raimi’s blockbuster Spider-Man 2, starring Tobey Maguire; the hit action-comedy Shanghai Noon and its sequel Shanghai Knights, both starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson; as well as Lethal Weapon 4, starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, and the global smash The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. The duo also produced the hit film Hannah Montana: The Movie, starring Miley Cyrus. Most recently they collaborated with Tim Burton on the sequel to his classic film Beetlejuice, starring Michael Keaton, Catherine O’Hara, Winona Rider and Jenna Ortega (2024).
Camille T. Dungy
Guest Lecture for English Majors and Public Reading
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her other honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is poetry editor for Orion Magazine.
Jamil Jan Kochai
Guest Lecture for English Majors and Public Reading
Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize. His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Sacramento.
Henri Cole
Guest Lecture for English Majors and Plenary Reading
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan and raised in Virginia. He has published many collections of poetry and received numerous awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent books are Orphic Paris, a memoir (New York Review Books), and Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 (Farrar, Straus, Giroux). From 2010 to 2014, he was poetry editor of The New Republic. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Boston.
No Other Land
Film Screening with prerecorded Q&A from the directors
No Other Land depicts the destruction of Masfar Yatta, a community on the West Bank, by the Israeli military. The film is directed by both Palestinian and Israeli film makers, two of whom, BaselAdra and Yuval Abraham, feature in the film. In 2025, No Other Land won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, the BAFTA for Best Documentary, and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary. Despite its critical acclaim, American studios have not taken it up for distribution.
Brad Lichtenstein
Guest Lecture for FTS Majors and Film Screening with Q&A for FTS/English Majors
Brad Lichtenstein, a UVM alumnus, is an award-winning filmmaker who has been making documentaries since 1998. His recent film, When Claude Got Shot premiered at the 2021 SXSW film festival, was featured in May of 2022 on PBS’ series Independent Lens, and won the 2022 Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. He’s been nominated for two other Emmys: one Sports Emmy for the VR film Ashe ’68, which premiered at Sundance in 2019, and a News and Documentary Emmy for the 2012 Independent Lens/PBS film As Goes Janesville.
Merk Nguyen
Guest Lecture for FTS Majors
Merk Nguyen is a Vietnamese American voice actor from Lynnwood, Washington who specializes in animation voiceover. Her career began as a public radio journalist in the Pacific Northwest, and she went on to co-host the award-winning advice, storytelling, and culture podcast Adult ISH from Radiotopia. Now, she’s best known as the voice of Jasmine Tran in The Fairly OddParents: A New Wish. Nguyen is an expert at talking and thinking about voice — what our voices mean to us, what our voices represent, what kind of information comes through in our voices, and how we can use our voices as storytelling tools.
Erica Heilman
Guest Lecture for FTS Majors
Erica Heilman lives in East Calais, Vermont. She is the creator and producer of the podcast Rumble Strip, where she “invites herself into people's homes to find out what they know, hate, love, what they’re afraid of, and what makes them more like you than you'd realized.” In 2022, The New Yorker named Rumble Strip the best podcast of the year, describing it as “an endlessly inventive, independently produced podcast about her Vermont community, revealing, through an almost miraculous level of attention, what life anywhere is all about.”