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.

Geography Professor Asha Best has lived in a handful of cities across the U.S., Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Atlanta among them. Experiencing each place’s unique culture, transportation, and education systems has given Best insight into how different cities are designed and how they function. A curiosity to understand this more drives some of her current research.

Best, an urbanist who studies mobility and urban informality, is researching how planners and developers can build just cities, where everyone lives equitably. One thing she’s noticed throughout her studies is that there is no common definition of what justice looks like, however.

“We often know what injustice looks like in cities, but we don't often know what justice looks like. I think that equality is a good start. Do we have equal access to shared resources, and are vital resources distributed in a way that's consistent and even — and I'm talking about things like water and food and shelter, the basics,” she says.

Best believes just cities are ones in which planners and officials address current problems and work to right historical wrongs.

“I think it's about how cities deliver vital resources, discovering who doesn't have access to them and how to fix that, and creating a space that's livable, where people have dignity,” she says.

Challenge. Change. is produced by Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

In 2008, just as the film adaptation of "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer was about to hit theaters, Sarah Gallagher was a doctoral student in Boston and saw everyone walking down Commonwealth Avenue with their heads buried in the book with an apple on its cover. Initially, she wasn't interested. But once she inevitably got her hands on the book, she tore through it in one night.

"I can never explain what it felt like to read that book for the first time and to just fall in love with it. I immediately was so obsessed with Edward. There's something in the pages of that book that makes you fall into the world," says Gallagher, now the associate dean of students and operations in Clark's School of Professional Studies.

Vampires don't age, but the series did, and not necessarily gracefully. On this episode of Challenge. Change., Gallagher explains some of Twilight's flaws and why the fandom is still so passionate about Bella and Edward despite the saga's issues. These topics are at the heart of Gallagher's book, "Why We Love (and Hate) Twilight," which is being published in April. Gallagher encourages the fandom to think critically about the kinds of media we love.

"I think if we can start being critical about things that we love, then it will be a lot easier to be critical about terrible things that are happening," she says. "I think it's an exercise in evaluating the things in our life."

Challenge. Change. is produced by Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Most people aren't thinking about just how many sounds they encounter on an average day. But Professor Matt Malsky, the Tina Sweeney, M.A. '49, Endowed Chair in Music, director of the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and director of the interdisciplinary Media, Culture, and the Arts program, part of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, is immersed in it.

"Our vision is something that we have some control over. We have eyelids, we can close our eyes, and we can stop seeing things," he notes. "But we don't have earlids. Hearing is always on, and there's no way to stop the sensations that come with sounds."

As Malsky teaches his students about soundscapes and acoustic ecology — including walking tours around Worcester to partake in all the noises of nature and traffic — he's also thinking about the intersection of sound and our changing climate.

"Lots of sea creatures depend on sounds to communicate with other creatures and to get feedback about their environment. As the climate changes, as the temperatures rise on the planet and the temperature of the ocean increases, it changes the way that sound is transmitted through water — it speeds it up, it increases the distance that it travels," Malsky says. "Combined with all the ways in which humankind is adding sounds to the ocean with increased traffic of tankers, underwater mining operations, and offshore wind turbines, we're adding an enormous amount of sound to the ocean, and it's changing the way that sea creatures are able to operate — to their deficit."

Challenge. Change. is produced by Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Professor Christina Gerhardt, Clark's Henry J. Leir Endowed Chair in Foreign Languages and Cultures, Language, Literature & Culture, is an open water swimmer who typically lives near oceans and grew up with a front-row seat to her aunt's political work as one of the co-founders of the Green Party in what was then West Germany.

It created a clear path to Gerhardt's current work as a scholar of the environmental humanities with a focus on sea level rise. Her book, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean, provides a history of sea rise while telling the stories of frontline communities, with poems and art made by Islanders woven into the volume's pages. The reality of sea change is urgent and daunting, and Gerhardt prioritizes solutions and hope in her book — and in her classroom.

"I'm trying to equip people with all the tools to go into the world and make it a better place," she says, "with the optimism and feeling that they have the tools in their toolbox to accomplish that work."

In this episode of Challenge. Change., Gerhardt discusses why the environmental humanities is at its best when it is interdisciplinary, and explains some of the soft and hard engineering options to address sea level rise.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out "Sea Turtles and the Role Charismatic Creatures Play in Environmental Humanities with Professor Stephen Levin."

Challenge. Change. is produced by Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Is online influencing just for entertainment? Or does it have a place in the business world? LinkedIn has been a networking platform since 2002, but lately, it has evolved into something more.

So-called LinkedInfluencers are using the platform in the same vein as other social media sites, injecting inspiration into their posts to boost their personal brands and shape conversations about their industries.

On this episode of Challenge. Change., Professors Lawrence Norman and Tim Hally, who teach marketing at Clark’s School of Business, weigh in on whether this kind of content is beneficial and share how one can develop their personal brand messaging to cut through the online clutter to form genuine connections.

“LinkedIn has evolved from a work and internship job hub to a place to post entertainment that's linked to work,” Norman says. “It's become a powerful space where you're able to promote your brand in a way that you couldn't years ago.”

Challenge. Change. is produced by Melissa Hanson for Clark University with the help of Brenna Moore. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.