Stanford Dorm Lectures

About

Dorm Lectures is a place for ideas we don't otherwise have a space to consider. Each Sunday night we bring two students to a dorm on campus to talk for 15 minutes about an idea they care about.

We believe that when the only context we have for engaging with ideas is a formal, strict, academic one – where we think for assignments and write for grades – we've lost the life of the mind. We're therefore interested in ideas at their most alive: ideas before they've been pinned down and bound into a rigid form, when they're still unpredictable, even dangerous. We encourage lectures that are experimental and theses that are unpolished. Above all, Dorm Lectures is a place to think together.

Over the course of more than 50 lectures, we've had the pleasure of hearing about an incredible diversity of topics, among them lost classics, chip fabrication, philosophy of science, biomimicry, Stanford's architecture, constitutional law, AI explainability, and sufi mysticism. And we look forward to hearing yours :)

- LG, AG, and PB
November 2025

Fall Quarter 2025

All lectures are at 8pm in Faizan Lounge, East Flo, unless otherwise noted.

Week 1

Unexpected Places

Daniel Kiss on finding labs at Stanford

Anna Shilling on finding Jesus in Japan

Week 2

Models

Emmanuel Zheng on mapping the earth's crust

Logan Graves on platonic forms in AI

Week 3

Stories

Nate Adam on Norse mythology

Carole Darve on writing books

Week 4

Survival

Trinity Rushing on personhood in Parfit

Jacob Cohen on superintelligence

Week 5

Discourse

Sabine Mazzeo on women in ancient greek literature

Ben Klieger on improvisation and rhetoric

Week 6

The Human Condition

Peter Bennett on terror

Samin Bhan on pickleball

Week 7

God

Lecturers TBA

Week 8

The Erotic

Lecturers TBA

Week 9

Machines

Lecturers TBA

Week 10

The Apocalypse

Lecturers TBA

FAQ

What makes a good Dorm Lecture?

A successful Dorm Lecture is one that the audience can keep talking about once the speaker leaves the room. We don't impose any disciplinary boundaries, since they're all artificial anyway; essays, yes, but equations, even machines that we build ask questions of us, so we do not separate the engineer from the philosopher. With that said, great dorm lectures tend to have the following in common:

Have a meaningful question at the heart. Great dorm lectures orient their 15 minutes (+ 5 minutes for questions afterwards) towards a difficult question, and offer the audience tools to consider it. Even the purest technical problems often have philosophical interpretation.
Begin from a place of great interest. Passion tends to lead to more curiosity, and comes through when speaking. We will always prefer what you want to talk about over what you think we want you to talk about.
Interact with the audience. Asking the audience for guesses, probing their intuitions, and giving them a chance to make discoveries puts them in a better position to think about the ideas when you're not in the room.

How do I lecture?

Come to Dorm Lectures any Sunday night and tell us (Peter, Ailon, or Logan) in person. You can also email us; our emails are at the bottom of this page. To sign up, you don't need to have a finalized topic, but please indicate which week's theme you'd like to lecture for.

Who can give a lecture?

Anyone who wants to, though we limit to 1 per quarter per person to ensure we have space for everyone who wants to lecture. We welcome you to sign up before you know what your lecture will be about.

What should I lecture about?

This one we can't answer for you. But here are some prompts:

You have interests. Where did they begin? (e.g. "this genetics paper/talk I saw was so interesting I had to learn more" or "this physics concept I learned in class challenged my understanding of the world, and so I decided to take more classes in it" or "I read this essay from this philosopher and it convinced me that this philosophical problem is deep and important, and here's how people have tried to engage with it")
What concepts keep coming up in your conversations? Which ones do you love telling people about?
What would you focus on if you had space to think about whatever you wanted?
Interesting ideas/models/theorems/theories from your field(s) of interest
Your interpretation or review of a text that's important to you
What concepts provide scaffolding to how you think about the world, day-to-day? (e.g. "this concept from linear algebra is a helpful metaphor for me think about the world" or "this idea in machine learning gave me a helpful vocabulary for talking about humans as agents" or "this idea in education theory has helped me think about the way I talk to other people")

What if I don't want to lecture?

You can still be an important part of dorm lectures! Every good lecture needs a good audience. There's no pressure to lecture, though we anticipate that you may feel differently once you've come to a couple events. :)

How long are lectures?

Each lecture gets 15 minutes, plus 5 minutes for Q&A. (This tends to leave the audience wanting more, so while all are welcome to leave after the two lectures are over, we tend to stick around for a while after the event is over to continue the conversation informally.)

Is there food?

Dorm Lectures is in Faisan at the moment, and directly follows FloMo's famous Sunday Indian food dinner. Thus we don't provide dinner since there is plenty in the dining hall 30 feet away.