Mary Anna Barbey

September 14, 2022: SEASON OPENER

Mary Anna Barbey (VC 58, 73) discusses her life as a journalist and novelist in Switzerland and her new English translation of her 2004 French novel Prosperity Mill (Independently published 2022).

Susannah Marshall was fourteen when the strike broke out at Prosperity Mill. For months, her small town in North Carolina would be shaken by scenes of conflict, terror and even murder.

Sixty-five years later, a renowned historian, Susannah returns to her hometown in a final attempt to understand the world-famous walkout led by the communists. Will she discover some clue, some piece of information that will put her mind at rest? What role did her own family play in the tragic events? And if she finds the truth, will anyone want to hear her story?

Based on the history of the 1929 textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, this work of fiction explores the way historical conflict can impact individual lives. By reviving events almost forgotten, Susannah's quest also reaffirms the importance of passing on stories from one generation to the next.

Mary Anna Pope Barbey was born in Durham, North Carolina. She grew up in Connecticut, then married and moved to Switzerland where she has lived for over sixty years. She has published twelve books in French. Her translation of Prosperity Mill is her first publication in English.

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Elizabeth Nogrady and Jill Schneiderman

 Joseph Tairraz. Traversing a Crevice on Mt. Blanc 1870 Albumen print from glass plate negative.

April 6, 2022.

Elizabeth Nogrady (VC'99), Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, and Jill Schneiderman, Professor of Earth Science at Vassar College, discuss their exhibition, Cryosphere: Humans and Climate in Art from The Loeb, on view January 18 - May 22 in the Focus Gallery of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar.

In 1914, literary naturalist and Hudson Valley resident John Burroughs wrote, “In the snow-storm: we are admitted into Nature’s oldest laboratory.” This laboratory is part of the cryosphere, the term given to places on Earth where water is in solid, rather than liquid, form. Describing the fleeting and varied forms of the cryosphere—ice and snow in particular—is a challenge shared by artists and scientists alike. This Focus Gallery exhibition applies the approach and knowledge of an earth scientist to art that focuses on the cryosphere, with the aim of enhancing viewers’ understanding of not only the works themselves, but also the planet we inhabit. It features paintings, prints, photographs and sculpture from the nineteenth century to the present day, including works by Sanford Robinson Gifford, Taguchi Beisaku, Doris Lee, and Oshutsiak Pudlat. This exhibition is co-organized by the Loeb and Jill Schniederman, professor of Earth Science.

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Julia Bolton Holloway

February 2, 2022.

The scholar, librarian, and Catholic Hermit Julia Bolton Holloway, Custodian of the English Cemetery in Florence, talks about her scholarship, her role as keeper of an historic cemetery, about cemeteries and libraries as vital mirrors of memory, and her project to develop a cultural heritage library documenting the Cemetery's many notable residents and their histories. 

"Julia Bolton Holloway was born in London, grew up in Sussex, went to America at 16, studied at San Jose State University for the BA, and at the University of California, Berkeley, for the doctorate. Her Comparative Literature dissertation was published in three editions as The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer. She next published books on Brunetto Latino, a bibliography and an edition of Il Tesoretto, later a full length study of his life and writings as Twice Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, and is currently editing Brunetto Latino's Latin and Italian Opera.  She edited and translated Birgitta of Sweden's Revelations, in Saint Bride and her Book. That work led to research on Julian of Norwich, resulting in the definitive edition of the extant manuscripts in France and England with Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., and published by SISMEL, Anchoress and Cardinal: Julian of Norwich and Adam Easton, O.S.B., published by Analecta Cartusiana, ed. James Hogg, Julian among the Books: Julian of Norwich's Theological Library, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and Mary's Dowry: Contemplative and Pilgrim Women's Writings, Analecta Cartusiana, ed. James Hogg. She completed her father's work on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and published editions of Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, Penguin, and Casa Guidi Windows (in English and Italian), Aureo Anello Books. She raised three sons, taught at Quincy University, Princeton University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she was Director of Medieval Studies. She took early retirement to enter an Anglican convent, is now a Catholic hermit in Florence, Italy, where she directs an ecumenical polyglot library and is custodian of the Swiss-owned 'English' Cemetery where Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Savage Landor, Frances Trollope and many famous others, particularly slavery Abolitionists, are buried."

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Laurie Lisle

Photo credit: Edward Spiro, 1980.

May 12, 2021.

The author and biographer Laurie Lisle returns to the program to talk about her new memoir, Word for Word: A Writer's Life, newly published by Artemis Editions.

"With Word for Word, Laurie Lisle enters the pantheon of great memoirists . . . Bolstered by exquisite, evocative observations of the physical world that inform her prose, past and present, she threads a fine line between revelation and reticence, generously exposing her most intimate feelings about the conflicts and sacrifices inherent in the need for both love and freedom, as a woman and a writer. If ever there is a book that will trigger a desire to pen one's own memoir, this is it." --Marnie Mueller, author of My Mother's Island

 

"Word for Word is a perfect title for a memoir about the hard-earned creation of a writer's life that is wrested out of the honest self-examination of a woman who faces the personal, family, class, and social forces that shaped—but did not determine—the person and writer she would become. A richly rewarding read."--Lois Rudnick, author of Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds

 

"Word for Word is a beautifully told story about the growth of a woman writer of the second-wave generation, whose intellectual and spiritual debts are to women writers, feminism, and, more generally, strong women." -- Carol Ascher, author of Afterimages: A Family Memoir

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Miriam Cohen and Mark G. Seidl

November 4, 2020.

Miriam Cohen, Professor of History on the Evalyn Clark Chair at Vassar College, and Vassar Special Collections Librarian and Cataloger Mark G. Seidl will discuss the exhibition entitled Votes for Women: Vassar and the Politics of Women's Suffrage, sponsored by the Vassar College Libraries to celebrate the centenary of the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in the United States.

Video of Robyn Muncy Lecture, Nov. 12 at 5:30 p.m.

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Bryan W. Van Norden

 

Kano Toshun Yoshinobo (1747-1797). The Three Laughers of Tiger Ravine, 1886 (Fenollosa-Weld Collection).

September 23, 2020.

Bryan W. Van Norden, Professor of Philosophy on the James Monroe Taylor Chair at Vassar, talks about his recent monograph, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (Columbia UP, 2017).

Are American colleges and universities failing their students by refusing to teach the philosophical traditions of China, India, Africa, and other non-Western cultures? This biting and provocative critique of American higher education says yes. Even though we live in an increasingly multicultural world, most philosophy departments stubbornly insist that only Western philosophy is real philosophy and denigrate everything outside the European canon. In Taking Back Philosophy, Bryan W. Van Norden lambastes academic philosophy for its Eurocentrism, insularity, and complicity with nationalism and issues a ringing call to make our educational institutions live up to their cosmopolitan ideals.

 

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Lindsay Shepherd Cook

May 20, 2020.

Lindsay Shepherd Cook (VC'10), Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College, returns to discuss her English translation of a new monograph by former Vassar Professor of Art Andrew Tallon and Dany Sandron, University Professor at the University of the Sorbonne, entitled Notre Dame Cathedral: Nine Centuries of History(Penn State, 2020).

Since its construction, Notre Dame Cathedral has played a central role in French cultural identity. In the wake of the tragic fire of 2019, questions of how to restore the fabric of this quintessential French monument are once more at the forefront. This all-too-prescient book, first published in French in 2013, takes a central place in the conversation.

The Gothic cathedral par excellence, Notre Dame set the architectural bar in the competitive years of the third quarter of the twelfth century and dazzled the architects and aesthetes of the Enlightenment with its structural ingenuity. In the nineteenth century, the cathedral became the touchstone of a movement to restore medieval patrimony to its rightful place at the cultural heart of France: it was transformed into a colossal laboratory in which architects Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc anatomized structures, dismembered them, put them back, or built them anew—all the while documenting their work with scientific precision.

Taking as their point of departure a three-dimensional laser scan of the cathedral created in 2010, architectural historians Dany Sandron and the late Andrew Tallon tell the story of the construction and reconstruction of Notre Dame in visual terms. With over a billion points of data, the scan supplies a highly accurate spatial map of the building, which is anatomized and rebuilt virtually. Fourteen double-page images represent the cathedral at specific points in time, while the accompanying text sets out the history of the building, addressing key topics such as the fundraising campaign, the construction of the vaults, and the liturgical function of the choir.

Featuring 170 full-color illustrations and elegantly translated by Lindsay Cook, Notre Dame Cathedral is an enlightening history of one of the world’s most treasured architectural achievements.

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Michael Joyce

September 18, 2019 (SEASON OPENER).

Michael Joyce, acclaimed novelist, poet, critic, media wayfinder,  and Professor of English at Vassar College, talks about his most recent novel, Remedia: A Picaresque (Steerage, 2018), and about creative writing, teaching, hypermedia and other conceptual wormholes, and about his relationship with media and literature. 

Count on Michael Joyce to reinvent the genre of the picaresque novel in a mode suited to the 21st century! With a light touch and sure sense of prose rhythm, he introduces a leitmotif of randomly appearing doorways, thresholds into and out of the world, to puncture the narrative space of this engaging novel. Scenes appear within scenes as the tales unfold in true keeping with the genre that recounts a hero’s progress. The sequence of events is made to make sense by sheer deftness of Joyce’s skill as a narrator and his willingness to use the unexpected as a structuring device, as well as an excuse to delight. Making sense of the past through the telling of his tales, Joyce offers his readers a fresh experience of a classic form filled with contemporary references. — Johanna Drucker

Thomas Edward Hill

Tina Barney (American, (b.1945) The Librarian, 2010, Chromogenic color print © Tina Barney Courtesy of the artist and Janet Borden, Inc.

October 10, 2018.

In this installment of our series on the value of the liberal arts in contemporary society, Milly Budny (VC'71), Founding Director of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, turns the table to interview Library Cafe host and Vassar College Art Librarian Thomas Hill about the Library Cafe, his career as a librarian at Yale University and Vassar College, and his background and views on subjects that include the connection between education and friendship, and how library education and practice might be better integrated into academic research and culture.

Part 1:
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Katherine Mangiardi (b. 1982). Kerchief, 2018. Acrylic on board, 12.7 x 12.7 cm.

October 17, 2018.

Part 2:     
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Arielle Saiber

Season Opener: September 26, 2018.

Arielle Saber, Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures at Bowdoin College, discusses her book Measured Words:   Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy, winner of the 19th annual MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication and the Newberry Library's 2017  Weiss-Brown Publication Award (U Toronto, 2017).

Arielle Saiber explores the relationship between number, shape, and the written word in the works of four exceptional thinkers: Leon Battista Alberti’s treatis on cryptography, Luca Pacioli’s ideal proportions for designing Roman capital letters, Niccolò Tartaglia’s poem embedding his solution to solving cubic equations, and Giambattista Della Porta’s curious study on the elements of geometric curves. Although they came from different social classes and practiced the mathematical and literary arts at differing levels of sophistication, they were all guided by a sense that there exist deep ontological and epistemological bonds between computational and verbal thinking and production. Their shared view that a network or continuity exists between the arts yielded extraordinary results. Through measuring their words, literally and figuratively, they are models of what the very best interdisciplinary work can offer us.


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Susan Hassler

April 4, 2018.

Susan Hassler (VC '76), Editor-in-Chief of the  journal of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), IEEE Spectrum, talks about STEM, publishing, higher education, and trends in technology in this installment of our series on the value of liberal arts education in contemporary society. She has been included in “Folio 40: The Most Influential People in the Magazine Industry” and was inducted into min magazine’s Editorial and Design Hall of Fame in 2011.

IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences. Its charter is to keep over 400,000 members informed about major trends and developments in technology, engineering, and science. Under Susan Hassler's editorship, Spectrum has won numerous awards for both its print and online efforts, including three Grand Neal Awards and a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in the Thought Leader category.

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann

January 31, 2018.

Ellen Condiffe Lagemann, Levy Institute Research Professor at Bard College and Distinguished Fellow in the Bard Prison Initiative, discusses her book Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison (New Press, 2017) in the next installment of our series on The Role of the Liberal Arts in Contemporary Society.

“An excellent new book that makes a compelling case. Lagemann’s is a reasoned, knowledgeable, and compassionate voice for higher education as a means to achieve the goal of prison as a place for rehabilitation.” —  Vartan Gregorian, president, Carnegie Corporation of New York
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Robert O. McClintock

Morningside Park Stairway with Seligman Fountain, New York City

May 3, 2017.  

We continue our series on the value of the liberal arts in contemporary society with a conversation with Robert O. McClintock, John L. and Sue Ann Weinberg Professor Emeritus in the Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education at Teacher's College, Columbia University in the City of New York, about his monograph, Formative Justice: To Make of Oneself What One Can and Should Become.

Text of Formative Justice (pdf).

44:28 minutes.

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Danielle Allen

April 5, 2017.

Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, will contribute to our series on the role of liberal arts education in contemporary society by discussing her recent work on language and politics: Education and Equality (Chicago University Press, 2016) and Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Norton, 2014).

"Featured on the front page of the New York Times, Our Declaration is already regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. Combining a personal account of teaching the Declaration with a vivid evocation of the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen, a political philosopher renowned for her work on justice and citizenship reveals our nation's founding text to be an animating force that not only changed the world more than two-hundred years ago, but also still can. Challenging conventional wisdom, she boldly makes the case that the Declaration is a document as much about political equality as about individual liberty. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Our Declaration is an “uncommonly elegant, incisive, and often poetic primer on America's cardinal text”  -- David M. Kennedy.

 “Education and Equality mounts a powerful philosophical argument for putting ‘participatory readiness’ for civic and political life at the center of American education. Developing a rich, pragmatic account of the purposes of schooling, Allen shows the poverty of reductionist notions of education as preparation for work and global economic competition alone. To achieve the political equality that is indispensable for democratic governance, a humanist education for all is required. A must read for all concerned about the future of American education and American democracy.”  -- Leo Casey, executive director, Albert Shanker Institute 

40:41 minutes.

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Adam Michaels and Jeffrey T. Schnapp

October 26, 2016.

In a new installment of our series on the role of liberal arts education in contemporary society, c0-authors Adam Michaels, principle designer at Project Projects and founder of Inventory Press, and Jeffrey T. Schnapp (VC'75), Co-director of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and Faculty Director of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's knowledge design studio metaLAB, talk about their reissue of Blueprint for Counter Education (Inventory, 2016).

"Perhaps one of the most extraordinary books ever issued by an American commercial publisher.” —Richard Kostelanetz

"Blueprint for Counter Education is one of the defining (but neglected) works of radical pedagogy of the Vietnam War era. Originally published in 1970 and integrated into the design of the Critical Studies curriculum at CalArts, the book was accompanied by large graphic posters that could serve as a portable learning environment for a new process-based model of education, and a bibliography and checklist that map patterns and relationships between radical thought and artistic practices—from the avant-gardes to postmodernism—with Marcuse and McLuhan serving as points of anchorage."

Blueprint Archive

43:22 minutes.

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Maxine McClintock

Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial, Riverside Park, New York by Penelope Jencks

April 27, 2016.

For our last discussion of the season in our series on the value of liberal arts education in contemporary society, historian Maxine McClintock, emeritus teacher at Trinity School in New York, talks about her book Letters of Recommendation (Collaboratory for Liberal Learning, 2014) and the role of the liberal arts in secondary education.

"This is a remarkable and rewarding book. In the best tradition of John Dewey's vision of education as a journey that makes for more fully formed, flourishing human beings as well as a more informed citizenry, Maxine McClintock has constructed an intricate and compelling account not just of the fictional student Emilia's winding "senior year odyssey" toward college (and beyond) but also of the mentor-mentee educative process by which both share insights, learn, and develop through intellectual exchanges. The erudition here is striking and subtle. William James, Randolph Bourne, Dewey, Thomas Jefferson, and scores of other major thinkers appear and serve to propel the narrative as well as the analysis, provoking much bigger questions and concerns than simply: where should Emilia go to school? This is a book that interrogates the proper and best role of intellectuals and educators in society. It ponders the city "as educator." It critiques and embraces the drawbacks as well as the opportunities provided by Emilia's elite private school. It investigates the history of ideas and the "purposes of a liberal arts education" in a democracy. And it challenges readers to consider how self-awareness is and might be enabled via education as the book probes how and why this is not happening more in the U.S. At the core of this book, then, lies the so-called "education crisis" and the "crisis of the humanities" as integral to the "dysfunctional meritocracy" endemic to the contemporary educational landscape." -- Christopher M. Nichols.

54:57 minutes.

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C. Stephen Jaeger

February 10, 2016. 

Our series on the role and value of the liberal arts in contemporary society continues with a conversation with the cultural historian C. Stephen Jaeger, Gutsgell Professor Emeritus in Germanic Languages and Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, about his research into the transcendental function of charisma in education and the arts and his book:  Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2012).  

"What is the force in art, C. Stephen Jaeger asks, that can enter our consciousness, inspire admiration or imitation, and carry a reader or viewer from the world as it is to a world more sublime? We have long recognized the power of individuals to lead or enchant by the force of personal charisma—and indeed, in his award-winning Envy of Angels, Jaeger himself brilliantly parsed the ability of charismatic teachers to shape the world of medieval learning. In Enchantment, he turns his attention to a sweeping and multifaceted exploration of the charisma not of individuals but of art."

44:41 minutes.

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Michael S. Roth

November 25, 2015. 

In the second edition of our series on the value and uses of liberal arts education in contemporary society, intellectual historian Michael S. Roth,  President of Wesleyan University, talks about his book Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, published in 2014 by Yale University Press.

"Conflicting streams of thought flow through American intellectual history: W. E. B. DuBois’s humanistic principles of pedagogy for newly emancipated slaves developed in opposition to Booker T. Washington’s educational utilitarianism, for example. Jane Addams’s emphasis on the cultivation of empathy and John Dewey’s calls for education as civic engagement were rejected as impractical by those who aimed to train students for particular economic tasks. Roth explores these arguments (and more), considers the state of higher education today, and concludes with a stirring plea for the kind of education that has, since the founding of the nation, cultivated individual freedom, promulgated civic virtue, and instilled hope for the future. "

41:50 minutes.

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Grace G. Roosevelt

October 7, 2015. 

In the first of a series of episodes to be aired this season devoted to the value and uses of the liberal arts and liberal arts education in contemporary society, Grace G. Roosevelt, intellectual historian and Associate Professor of History and Education at Metropolitan College of New York, returns to the show to talk about pragmatism, service learning, and the liberal arts and her book Creating a College That Works: Audrey Cohen and Metropolitan College of New York (SUNY, 2015).

 “In 1964 educational activist Audrey Cohen and her colleagues developed a unique curricular structure that enables urban college students to integrate their academic studies with meaningful work in community settings.  Creating a College That Works  chronicles Cohen’s efforts to create an innovative educational model that began with the Women’s Talent Corps, evolved into the College for Human Services, and finally became, in 2002, what is now Metropolitan College of New York (MCNY), a fully accredited institution of higher education that offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees."

48:46 minutes.

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Tobias Armborst

September 30, 2015.

Tobias Armborst, Associate Professor of Art and Urban Studies at Vassar College and principal of the award-winning architecture and urban planning firm Interboro Partners, talks about design thinking and the liberal arts, urban planning, and Interboro's project to reform areas of the Long Island shoreline to protect communities from rising sea levels and future hurricanes.

40:59 minutes.

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