Liza Donnelly

Photograph by Elena Rossini

September 30, 2020.

Cartoonist, activist, author, and frequent visiting Vassar professor Liza Donnelly visits to talk about cartooning and the retrospective exhibition of her work, Liza Donnelly: Comic Relief,  on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  Liza is a New Yorker staff cartoonist, a resident cartoonist for CBS News, and has published in a host of news and cultural outlets, including the New York Times, The Nation, CNN, Cosmopolitan, Cobblestone, Habitat, the Daily Beast, Open Salon, Forbes, and the Huffington Post.   She is also a columnist on politics and global women's rights for the online journal Medium Magazine. Among her 17 published books are Funny Ladies: The New Yorker's Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons, and a series of illustrated children's books.

Other links to Donnelly's work:

BBC

Medium "Noteworthy" video

@lizadonnelly

TED Talk 

CBSNews
New Yorker 
lizadonnelly.com

InstagramTV for my daily live drawing at 5pm

HappsTV

Amitava Kumar

January 29, 2020.

Vassar Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair Amitava Kumar returns to the program to talk about his acclaimed novel Immigrant, Montana (Knopf, 2018). The novel was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by the New Yorker, was on the New York Times 100 Most Notable Books list of 2018, and on President Obama's Favorite Books list of the same year.  

"This is a deeply American novel, one that delves into the messiness of love (and sex!), and the meeting point between identity, character, place, and the constant cultural stuff floating around. . . . Kumar's novel is uproariously funny and deeply moving."
—David Means, author of Hystopia

"Amitava Kumar's Immigrant, Montana is a beguiling meditation on memory and migration, sex and politics, ideas and art, and race and ambiguity. Part novel, part memoir, this book is as sly, charming, and deceptive as its passionate protagonist, a writer writing himself into being."
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

Mary-Kay Lombino

Richard Barnes, Murmur #23, Dec. 6, 2006, 2006

October 23, 2019. 

Mary-Kay Lombino, Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, discusses her exhibition Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, on view through December 15, 2019.

Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents a survey of Vassar’s renowned collection of close to 4,500 photographs. Spanning the history of the medium, the exhibition features numerous innovations in the history of photography including various types of photographic practices from daguerreotypes and gelatin silver prints to large-scale Polaroids and digital color prints as well as a wide range of styles and geographic focuses. This extensive exhibition, the first of its kind at the Art Center, aims to highlight the Art Center’s long interest and dedication to the photographic medium and present the unique character, depth, and diversity of the collection. Shape of Light also celebrates twenty years of commitment from the Advisory Council for Photography for supporting photography acquisitions.

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Lindsay Shepherd Cook

October 9, 2019.

Lindsay Shepherd Cook (VC'10), Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College, discusses her essay "Religious Freedom and Architectural Ambition at Vassar College, 1945-1954," and Philip Johnson's unbuilt design for a modernist Vassar Chapel sited near Noyes Circle in the early 1950's.

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

Sally Van Wagenen Keil

September 20, 2017 (SEASON OPENER).

Author and pilot Sally Van Wagenen Keil (VC ' 68) discusses her narrative history of the WASPs (Women's Air Service Pilots) of the Second World War, Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines (Four Directions, 1990).

"Those Wonderful Women in their Flying Machines hones in on World War II to recount the story of the over 1,000 women pilots who flew in the military as part of the Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASP). Over 25,000 women applied and 1,800 were selected to train at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. From 1942 to '44, these pilots flew over 60 million miles in every type of plane the airforce had, and 38 women lost their lives in service. Here, in biography style, the niece of one of these pilots recreates the amazing story of what she calls 'one of the best-kept secrets of World War II.'"

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Dawn Seymour Interview on NPR's The Moth, November 2013. (10:31 minutes.)

Stella Beratlis

Photo: Jeremy Center (www.ogalthorpe.com)

November 16, 2016.

Stella Beratlis, Modesto California's Poet Laureate and managing librarian at Tracy Library of the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library, talks about poetry and librarianship, and reads from and discusses her new book of poems Alkalai Sink, (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2015).

57:45 minutes.

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Sally V. Keil

September 21, 2016 (SEASON OPENER).

Writer and Jungian psychological counselor Sally V. Keil (VC '68) talks about her book on Carl Jung's personality typology To Live in the World as Ourselves: Self-Discovery and Better Relationships Through Jung's Typology (Four Directions, 2014, rev. 2017).

"What Quiet has done for introversion, To Live in the World as Ourselves does for the entire scheme of Jung's typology. Extraversion, introversion, thinking, feeling, intuition, and sensation, and the ongoing dynamics of psychological experience they represent, are all made clear in an accessible style that goes to the heart of Jung's pioneering concepts." - Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 

55:21 minutes.

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