Cancer specialist and acclaimed author Siddhartha Mukherjee will kick off the 2017-18 Hall Center for the Humanities Lecture Series at the University of Kansas.

Founded in 1947, the Humanities Lecture Series is the oldest continuing series at KU.

Mukherjee’s and other lectures in the upcoming academic year will focus on topics ranging from the history of the gene to Alexander von Humboldt and the invention of “nature,” according to an announcement from the Hall Center revealing the lineup.

All events are free and open to the public.

Here is the 2017-18 Humanities Lecture Series schedule:

• Siddhartha Mukherjee, “The Gene: An Intimate History.”

7:30 p.m. Sept. 26, Lied Center.

Mukherjee is the author of “The Emperor of All Maladies” and “The Gene.” His lecture responds to a question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to “read” and “write” our own genetic information?

• Joan Breton Connelly, “The Parthenon Enigma.”

7:30 p.m. Oct. 5, Lied Center Pavilion.

Connelly, a classical archeologist and New York University professor of classics and art history, will discuss how much the values of those who built the symbolic and long-venerated Parthenon truly correspond with our own.

• Matthew Desmond, “Evicted: Poverty & Profit in the American City.”

7:30 p.m. Nov. 14, Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union.

Desmond is the John J. Loeb associate professor of the social sciences at Harvard University. As families are forced into shelters, squalid apartments or more dangerous neighborhoods, Desmond’s lecture will provide a ground-level view of one of America’s most urgent issues.

• Peter Balakian, “An Evening with Poet Peter Balakian.”

7:30 p.m. Feb. 22, The Commons at Spooner Hall.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Balakian works from a poetry form he calls “writing horizontal.” His work engages genocide, war, terrorism, climate change and AIDS as well as the personal domains of love, death, art and culture.

• Brian Donovan, “American Golddigger: Law, Culture, and Marriage in the Early Twentieth Century.”

March 26, Lied Center Pavilion. (Time to be announced.)

Donovan, associate professor of sociology at KU, researches the role of law and culture in shaping social inequality. His lecture traces the history of the “gold digger” from 1910s chorus girl slang to a stereotype that has shaped understandings of gender and matrimony. 

• Andrea Wulf, “The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World.”

April 19, The Commons at Spooner Hall. (Time to be announced.)

Wulf, a historian and writer, will focus on the achievements of German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, from his daring expeditions of wild environments around the world to his discoveries of similarities between climate and vegetation zones on different continents. She also discusses his prediction of human-induced climate change.