We have to be creative: BU Sociology Alumna Emma Kalff’s 2025 Commencement Speech
We were delighted to welcome back to Boston University our guest speaker, Emma Kalff, Class of 2015. Emma continues our tradition of welcoming back alumni to our graduation ceremonies.
Emma Kalff graduated from BU 10 years ago with a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and a minor in Art History. She is now working as a professional oil painter in Colorado, and runs a nonprofit called Libraries for Liberation. Kalff was classically trained in oil painting at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. In 2018 and 2019, Kalff traveled across the United States working on farms, and made a series of paintings inspired by the places she lived and worked. This body of work, called Finding America, was noticed in Telluride, Colorado, where she later had her first solo show at the Telluride Arts Headquarters Gallery in 2020.
Additional recognition followed, and her work was recently featured in Southwest Art magazine’s “21 Under 31: Young Artists to Collect Now”, as well as in American Art Collector magazine, Aesthetica magazine, and Studio Visit magazine. In 2023 Kalff was listed as an “Artist to Watch” by Plein Air Magazine. Her paintings are in private and public collections, and have been shown at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art. She is represented by Abend Gallery in Denver, Colorado.
Congratulations class of 2025!
What an incredible accomplishment to be sharing with you today. I’m so honored to be here. I’d like to thank Dr. Nazli Kibria and Dr. Japonica Brown-Saracino for inviting me to speak. And a huge thank you to everyone in the Sociology department who gave me such a world-class education. My life truly would not have been the same without all of you.
In May of 1940, my grandmother Jacoba, or Coos, as she was affectionately called, was living under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. She was 15 years old, and in high school. She graduated high school and started medical school under the occupation as well. But eventually, the time came when all Dutch students had to sign their allegiance to the Nazi party. She refused, and was removed from the program.
She went to live at home with her parents in Haarlem, a little ways outside of Amsterdam. A friend of the family was working in the Dutch resistance. She asked my grandmother for help. My grandmother had a rebellious streak and was angry about the war. She was not among those persecuted by the Nazis, and she wanted to do something to help.
At 20 years old, she decided to join the resistance. She didn’t tell her parents, because she knew they would worry about her and wouldn’t approve. Yet, she had this small voice inside of her, telling her that this was the right thing to do.
She went to work for Dr. Cox, a resistance leader who was a local dentist. She was a messenger, responsible for incoming and outgoing mail from Dr. Cox’s office. She transported all mail and packages by herself, on her bicycle.
On Christmas Day, 1944, she unexpectedly had to bike across town to report at the dentist’s office. She had a bad feeling in her stomach, but she went anyway. When she arrived, she went in through the back door, and sat in the downstairs waiting room of the practice. She could hear the family upstairs, in the living quarters. As she sat quietly at the table, she heard a knock at the front door. Two Germans entered the home. She could hear them talking, kicking things around. Everyone was ordered into the waiting room. My grandmother was punched in the face. In the chaos, Dr. Cox escaped through his back door.
That left Mrs. Cox, her two children, and several other resistance members, including my grandmother. They were ordered outside into the yard and held at gunpoint in the freezing cold until dark. Eventually, they were all taken to Nazi prison in Amsterdam. My grandmother spent the next five months imprisoned. She was often in solitary confinement, in a cold cell with little to eat. She was released on May 6th, 1945, following the defeat of the German occupying force. Strangely, she was the last person let out of the prison. She had to stay and clean the whole place by herself.
These were the stories my father grew up hearing around the dinner table every night, and although my sister and I were raised in the US, we live with the legacy of this history in many ways as well.
I’m not telling you my grandmother’s story because it is extraordinary or unusual. She was one of hundreds of women involved in resistance work in the Netherlands alone. She was an ordinary person living in an extraordinary time. But she knew right from wrong, and she wasn’t afraid to do something about it. And because of this, she made a difference for the people in her community. She made the world a little bit better. You all have something much more powerful than my grandmother ever had. You have this degree.
You are highly trained in understanding and explaining systems of oppression. This makes you extremely valuable. We need this now more than ever. Share your knowledge and use it for good in whatever way you can. In whatever way works best for you. The world isn’t always built to receive our knowledge, so we have to be creative.
I, like you, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from BU. The classes I took here opened my eyes in ways I never could have previously imagined. It might sound corny, but I loved my studies so much. I felt like every class I went to opened a door to a whole new world for me to uncover. I felt empowered and proud of everything I had learned. But when I graduated, I felt lost. It’s no secret that there isn’t always an obvious job choice for a kid with a Sociology degree.
I drifted in and out of small jobs for several years after graduating, not quite sure what the point of all that learning had been. I tried to keep all of the important knowledge I had learned in the front of my mind, but I suddenly felt like I had nowhere to put it. I was in the real world now, and that world spun on its own crazy axis, completely indifferent to me or my desires or worries. I moved to New Orleans, and started taking classes at a local art academy. Something in me clicked. I had done my thesis at BU on how context affects the way people interact with art. I had always been interested in art, and I was realizing that learning how to make it was the best thing ever. I now work as a professional oil painter and am based in rural Colorado.
Unexpectedly, my skills as an artist and my sociological training have worked together in many ways over the years. In 2020, George Floyd was murdered on my birthday. Like so many other people, I was greatly affected by his death. There was this little voice inside of me saying, do something. I painted a portrait of George Floyd and sold prints of it at local protests. I donated the money to racial justice nonprofits. But I didn’t sell that many prints, and I wanted to do something with a lasting impact. Having studied art, I knew I had to try and fail a few times, and experiment with different techniques before finding something good. So I kept trying.
After brainstorming for a while, I started to think about all the wonderful books I had read in my life that had made me realize the truth about systemic racism. I thought, how cool would it be to share those books all around the country? I started calling friends in different states, and asking if they would be willing to distribute shipments of books to their local Little Free Libraries – they’re those little free-standing libraries you see in neighborhoods and on sidewalks, sometimes made out of old microwaves or cabinets.
My dad had called me around this time and said he wanted to do something to help. Without his desire to share some of his financial privilege, we wouldn’t have been able to get the project off the ground. He funded the first several sets of books, but soon, we had way more book requests than we could handle. My friend Sandra Soto, also a BU grad, shoutout Sandra, was one of the first distributors, and immediately started helping me build our project into a proper non-profit organization. We’re now officially called Libraries for Liberation. People from anywhere in the US can sign up to receive free boxes of books for their communities. Book boxes come in one of four themes: positive racial identity development, healing and hope, critical consciousness, and solidarity and activism. So far, we’ve distributed books to 40 states and received roughly $80,000 in donations.
I’m so grateful to my family and friends for helping me build this organization. And I’m glad that I didn’t forget the knowledge I learned here, despite those years of being lost. Because the truth is, this degree is extremely precious. It represents a set of knowledge that so many people never have access to. It’s a chance to see the world zoomed out. It’s a ride on an airplane. Suddenly, everything fits together like a vast tapestry of land and air. That view is worth everything. And the chance to see something like that is once in a lifetime stuff.
You are highly trained in understanding and explaining systems of oppression. This makes you extremely valuable. We need this now more than ever. Share your knowledge and use it for good in whatever way you can. In whatever way works best for you. The world isn’t always built to receive our knowledge, so we have to be creative. If it doesn’t work out how you thought it would, that’s okay. Try again. It’ll be worth it, because you possess the power to move worlds.
I hope you feel inspired by the things you’ve done here at BU, that you always want to learn a little bit more, and that the work you end up doing brings you joy and peace.
Congratulations class of 2025!
The 2025 Sociology department convocation ceremony was held on Sunday May 18th at 9:00 am in the Questrom auditorium. More information can be found about Emma Kalff and her artwork at: www.emmakalff.com