LEWISTON — Bates College has planned a series of events with the theme Bending Toward Justice: Peace and Nonviolence to mark this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Though events kick off Sunday, Jan. 19, most are slated for the holiday itself the next day.

Erica Chenoweth Harvard Kennedy School

The keynote address will be delivered Jan. 20 by Erica Chenoweth, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study of Harvard University, who is an expert on social movements, civil resistance and state repression.

A decade ago, Foreign Policy magazine ranked the 44-year-old Chenoweth among the Top 100 Global Thinkers in recognition of their efforts to promote the empirical study of nonviolent resistance.

It’s a field with clear connection to King and one that Chenoweth has continued to explore, including in a 2021 book titled “Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know” published by Oxford University Press.

Chenoweth is slated to speak at 9 a.m. at Gomes Chapel after a welcome from college President Garry Jenkins. The event is free, though online registrations are strongly suggested.

Many workshops covering a wide range of topics, and some films, are scheduled between Sunday afternoon and Monday afternoon. The annual Rev. Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays Debate between students from Bates and Morehouse College is scheduled for 4:45 p.m. Monday.

One of the workshops, at 3 p.m. Monday, is called “Reclaiming Public Memory” and will feature a conversation about how scholars and activists “have worked to recover public memory — narratives, names and images — that are manifestations of a community’s understanding of its own history and reflective of the stories we tell, or don’t tell, to ourselves or future generations,” according to the Bates website.

Speakers include Joe Hall, a Bates history professor; James Francis, the Penobscot Nation’s director of cultural and historic preservation; and Meadow Dibble, founder and executive director of the Atlantic Black Box.

Another session, at 1:15 p.m. Monday, is titled “Working Class Discontent: A Reckoning of Economic Discontent and the 2024 Elections.”

It will feature a panel discussion “with diverse worker and union voices” that aims to call attention to “key issues left unaddressed in the 2024 election” and to “focus on what it will take to organize for economic security and human dignity in the new political era,” according to the Bates website.

The complete list of events, some geared for children, is online at bates.edu/mlk/. Links to register are also on the site.