Beauty out of the Ashes

Aaron Douglas. Cover Illustration for Fire!!  Devoted to Younger Negro Artists, ed. Wallace Thurman. New York, 1926..

March 1, 2023.

Professors Ronald D. Patkus, Eve Dunbar, and Caroline Culp discuss their current exhibition in the Thompson Memorial Library, Beauty out of the Ashes: Printed Works of the Harlem Renaissance, 1923-1936, on view through June 15, 2023.

A key focus of the exhibition is the literary production of the Harlem Renaissance. Works of thirteen different authors are presented. Together they provide a window into some of the key aspects of authorship during the Harlem Renaissance. At the same time, it’s also important to note that the exhibition considers not only texts, but also art, since the first editions of these works often included artwork on the dust jackets or within the book itself. By studying not just texts but also physical books, we gain a sense of the visual nature of published works, and thus a wider understanding for how works of the Harlem Renaissance were presented to their reading audience.

 

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Holly Peppe

February 8, 2017.   

Holly Peppe, scholar, editor, and literary executor for the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, discusses Millay's life, her work, the new edition of Millay's Selected Poems (Yale, 2016), and the exhibition "Treasures from Steepletop" on view in the Main Library, Art Library, and Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center from January 22 through June 11, 2017, in celebration of the centennial of Millay's graduation from Vassar College.

"Yale University Press’s edition of the Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, superbly edited by Timothy Jackson, and with a brilliant introduction by Millay scholar Holly Peppe, constitutes a significant addition both to our understanding of Twentieth-Century American Poetry as well as to a fuller, more complex and balanced portrait of who the extraordinary poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was and—more importantly—is to readers searching for a more accurate picture of what made Modern Poetry modern. If she has been too often overlooked in the last half century and more, this edition will undoubtedly help restore Millay’s brilliant, witty, and tragic feminine voice to her rightful place among the company of Hart Crane, Frost, Williams, Pound, Eliot and Stevens."— Paul Mariani, Boston College

58:58 minutes.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay Society: http://millay.org 

Richard E. Wilson

December 21, 2016.

Richard E. Wilson, Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Music, retiring this month after 50 years of teaching at Vassar College, talks aout music, education, his career and his life at Vassar.

"Wilson is a Professor of Music on the Mary Conover Mellon Chair. In addition to his 50 years of teaching at the college, Wilson is the composer of over one hundred works in many genres. His opera, Aethelred the Unready, was staged in 2011 in Symphony Space, New York City. He was a recent recipient of the Roger Sessions Memorial Bogliasco Fellowship as well as an Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has previously received the Hinrichsen Award, the Stoeger Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Burge/Eastman Prize, a Frank Huntington Beebe Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He joined the Vassar Faculty in 1966; he has served as Composer-in-Residence with the American Symphony Orchestra since 1992."

50:18 minutes.

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Joseph Bertolozzi

May 11, 2016.

SEASON FINALE: Composer and sound sculptor Joseph Bertolozzi (VC '81) and photographer Franc Palaia talk about Bertolozzi's percussion compositions employing structures such as the Eiffel Tower and the Mid-Hudson Bridge as instruments.

"Tower Music is a 21st-century homage to the Eiffel Tower, to the Exposition Universelle of 1889 and to Paris itself.  Joseph Bertolozzi presents us with an acoustic version of a deck of old photographs, movie posters, and postcards related to Paris and the Tower.  Once again, as in Bridge Music (2008), the composer uses the substance and structure of an engineering marvel to create a unique sense of place.  This sound creation can only be realized through the resonances of the Eiffel Tower itself.  It is intrinsically of the Eiffel Tower."  -- Andrew Tomasello.


32:55 minutes.

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Mita Choudhury

March 30, 2016.

Mita Choudhury, Professor of History at Vassar College, discusses her book The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint: A Tale of Sex, Religion and Politics in Eighteenth-Century France, published by Pennsylvania University Press in 2015.

“Students of eighteenth-century France have long been aware of the importance of the Cadière affair. Fortunately, the case has now found its historian. Mita Choudhury, a leading expert on the politics of theological conflict in Old Regime France, has given us a rich account of the scandalous provincial encounter in the early 1730s that resounded all the way to the halls of Versailles and the Sorbonne.”—Jeffrey S. Ravel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
52:54 minutes.
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Nicholas Adams

April 15, 2015.

Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Art Nicholas Adams discusses his new book: Gunnar Asplund's Gothenburg: The Transformation of Public Architecture in Interwar Europe (Penn State, 2014).


“This brilliant book offers a unique insight into one of the most cherished models of modern monumentality: the Gothenburg Courthouse extension, designed by Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund and completed in 1936. Setting his subject in an international perspective, Nicholas Adams carefully addresses questions on modern law and modern architecture, reaching far beyond the actual case. Through his inclusively contextual approach, we learn that the introduction of modernism in public architecture was a difficult task, operating on different levels of a democratic society through the interplay of architect, commissioner, and—not least—public opinion.”   -- Anders Bergstöm, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

46:54 minutes.

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Robert Darnton

April 30, 2014.

Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian at Harvard University talks about his book Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Harvard, 2012).

"In 1749 Parisians feasted on a half-dozen poems that ridiculed Louis XV for being humiliated in foreign affairs by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle as well as in the royal bed by an ignoble mistress. The king ordered a crackdown on unauthorized poetry recitals, and the police rounded up fourteen suspects, mostly students, clerks and priests, and gathered evidence. The investigation is the subject of Robert Darnton's fascinating Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris. As Darnton retraces the steps of the police, he branches off into explorations of the world of ordinary people under the ancien régime and the formation of public opinion in an oral culture. He also has a polemical aim. 'The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past,' he writes, 'even a sense that communication has no history' before the days of television and the Internet. Darnton deflates that illusion by showing how poems seeped into the public sphere as they passed through oral and print media: first copied on scraps of paper, then dictated by one person to another, then memorized and sung to an audience. For Darnton, poetry was an information network long before networks were news." -- John Palattella The Nation

58:43 minutes.

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Jamshed Bharucha

February 26, 2008.

Biopsychologist and Tufts University Provost Jamshed Bharucha talks about exciting new research on the cognitive and neural basis of music perception and what it tells us about human thought, communication and development.

42:45 min.

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Michael V. Pisani

October 2, 2007

Michael Pisani, music historian and professor of music at Vassar College, talks about his book Imagining Native America in Music, published by Yale University Press.


60:27 min.

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