Southern Miss Forum

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Southern Miss Forum

The University Forum at Southern Miss has been bringing world-class speakers to southern Mississippi for fifty years.

For more than forty years, the University Forum has been the premier lecture series at the University of Southern Mississippi. Sponsored by the Southern Miss Honors College with support from the Office of the President, since its founding in 1974, University Forum has brought some of the most respected and innovative cultural, scientific, and artistic voices in the world to Southern Miss. Under the auspices of Forum, such speakers as Stephen J. Gould, Gloria Steinem, Russell Means, Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut, E.O. Wilson, Art Spiegelman, Lilly Ledbetter, Barbara Ehrenreich, Rick Bragg, Bryan Stevenson, and Carl Bernstein have visited Southern Miss.

10/06/2026

Join us tonight at 6:30 p.m. in Bennett Auditorium for University Forum featuring Michael Farris Smith! We hope to see you there!

10/02/2026

Join us next week as we welcome our next speaker, Michael Farris Smith, on October 6th at 6:30 p.m. in the Bennet Auditorium. See you there!

09/08/2026

University Forum is back! Join us next week as we welcome our first speaker of the semester, Robert P. Jones, on September 15th at 6:30 p.m. See you there!

For more information, please visit USM.edu/forum

09/02/2026

Mark your calendars this fall! 🗓️🍂 We are excited to welcome our exceptional speakers on this semester's Forum schedule, beginning September 15. For questions and more information, visit usm.edu/forum.

04/08/2026

Save the Date - Tuesday, April 14th!

We are excited to welcome Steven Strogatz! Dr. Strogatz is a professor at Cornell University and the author of several widely acclaimed books, including The Joy of x, The Calculus of Friendship, Infinite Powers, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, and Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. He also co-hosts The Joy of Why podcast with Quanta Magazine.

📍 Location: Bennett Auditorium
🕡 Time: 6:30 PM

03/12/2026

Save the date! Join us on March 24th to hear from Jill Sonke!

Jill Sonke, PhD, is a US Cultural Policy Fellow with Stanford University, Co-director of the EpiArts Lab, a National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab in partnership with University College London, and Director of Research Initiatives and a Research Professor in the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida (UF). She is an artist, cultural strategist and mixed-methods researcher, and is the recipient of over 350 grants and awards for her programs and research at the intersection of the arts and health.

This event will be held in Bennett Auditorium at 6:30 PM.

02/05/2026

CARL ZIMMER is an award-winning New York Times columnist, bestselling author, and respected science journalist. During the COVID-19 pandemic, his reporting was part of the team coverage that won The New York Times a Pulitzer Prize. Zimmer has written 15 books, including Life’s Edge and She Has Her Mother’s Laugh. In his latest book, Air-Borne, Zimmer uncovers the hidden world of the air we breathe, teeming with invisible life and unseen dangers. Zimmer is an adjunct professor in Yale University’s Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry

01/29/2026

The countdown is on! We look forward to seeing you all for the first forum of the semester. Carl Zimmer will speak on February 10th at 6:30pm in the Mannoni Performing Arts Center!

For more information, please visit usm.edu/forum

01/21/2026

We are pleased to announce the spring schedule for the University Forum at the University of Southern Mississippi. The series will open on February 10 with Carl Zimmer, an award-winning author and science journalist.

In March, the Forum will feature Jill Sonke, a U.S. Cultural Policy Fellow with Stanford University, Co-Director of the EpiArts Lab, a National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab in partnership with University College London, and Director of Research Initiatives and Research Professor in the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida.

In April, we will welcome Steven Strogatz, Professor at Cornell University and acclaimed author of The Joy of x, The Calculus of Friendship, Infinite Powers, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, and Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order.

To learn more about forum events, please visit: usm.edu/forum

10/27/2025

Next Tuesday!! 📣📣
Dava Sobel is the author of the international bestseller Longitude, the bestselling Pulitzer Prize finalist Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, And the Sun Stood Still, and The Glass Universe, and co-author of The Illustrated Longitude. She is the recipient of the Individual Public Service Award from the National Science Board, the Bradford Washburn Award, the Kumpke-Roberts Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. A former New York Times science reporter, and currently editor of the “Meter” poetry column in Scientific American, she lives on Long Island.

Address

Honors College, 111 Eagle Walk
Hattiesburg, MS
39406

Telephone

+16012664533

Website

https://www.usm.edu/forum

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