Clark's 121st Commencement Ceremonies on May 19, 2025, conferred 468 undergraduate degrees and 1,014 advanced degrees.

NPR journalist Ari Shapiro and Esther Duflo, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, delivered speeches to graduate students and undergraduate students, respectively. Both spoke about the need for care and compassion in the world.

In addresses to their peers, Temera De Groot ’25 and Kumar Gaurav, MBA ’25, spoke about their journeys at Clark as first-generation college students. Relive the highlights of the day on this episode of Challenge. Change.

Challenge. Change. is produced by Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

History Professor Nathan Braccio is a scholar of Indigenous and colonial American history and has a special interest in maps.

"Like many other people, I have a fascination with maps," he says. "A map can be a legal tool that allows you to assert, 'this is where my borders are.' A map could be used to visualize an empire, to visualize a nation."

His forthcoming book, “Creating New England, Defending the Northeast: Contested Algonquian and English Spatial Worlds, 1500–1700,” examines how Algonquian-speaking peoples and Puritan colonists mapped the landscape of present-day New England.

On this episode of Challenge. Change., Braccio explains how maps have changed over time and how English settlers erased Indigenous populations through mapmaking practices.

"One of the things that has changed in maps is the ways that they reflect our different set of values or assumptions about the land, because that is at its heart what a map is doing. It's supporting how we think about the land and the world," he says. "How someone in the 17th century thought about land may have prioritized a different set of things than we do now."

Challenge. Change. is produced by Brenna Moore ’24, MSC ’25, and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

With season two of HBO Max's "The Last of Us," based on the acclaimed video game franchise created by Naughty Dog, hitting screens this weekend, we asked Clark University professors to unpack people's fascination with post-apocalyptic stories and comment on the fictional science of the series.

On this episode of Challenge. Change., English Professor Betsy Huang discusses speculative fiction and the depiction of institutions in catastrophic tales; Becker School of Design & Technology Professor Ulm explains how video games help players explore their fears; and mycologist and biology Professor Javier Tabima Restrepo comments on the depiction of Cordyceps in this wildly popular game and show.

Challenge. Change. is produced by graduate student Brenna Moore '24, MSC '25, and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.