Nilanjana Dasgupta to Present Commonwealth Honors College Plenary Lecture on Oct. 9

Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta, provost professor of psychology in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, will present the 2025 Commonwealth Honors College (CHC) Plenary Lecture, "Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities," on Thursday, Oct. 9, at 5 p.m. in the Student Union Ballroom.

The CHC Plenary Lecture, which is connected to the Honors course "Ideas that Change the World," is an annual event that features thought leaders from across the spectrum of UMass Amherst faculty.

Dasgupta's talk, co-sponsored by Phi Kappa Phi, will draw from her 2025 book "Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities," published by Yale Press, which offers a science-driven approach to achieving social change. In the book she argues that small changes to the "wallpaper," the local cultures around us, are far more effective in producing structural change locally than seeking change through bias awareness training, symbolic acts or relying solely on good intentions.

An in-depth feature article about Dasgupta's research and book can be found on the CHS website.