A special celebration for Professor Boukary Sawadogo as The 2024-2025 Stuart Z. Katz Professor in Humanities and the Arts. Prof. Sawadogo's lecture: Of Here and Afar: The World in Me. Our identities are not static or singular, but instead are cobbled together out of many influences, strands, and experiences. Answering the question of how one becomes oneself often requires that we reencounter the community that saw us come of age, navigate transnational influences, and engage with the world in terms of one’s place and trajectory in it.

The Stuart Z. Katz Professorship in the Humanities & the Arts at The City College of New York was established in 2017 by a generous gift from Mr. Stuart Z. Katz, a 1964 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of CCNY. The endowment supports one outstanding professorial faculty member in the Division of Humanities & the Arts for an academic year, providing the professor up to two months of summer salary plus $10,000 to support research and creative activity.

Mr. Katz, a retired attorney, established the gift for the importance of the study of humanities and the arts for a thorough education and life.