Ronald Patkus, Nikolai Firtich, Dan Ungurianu

April 10, 2019.

Historian and Associate Director of the Library for Special Collections Ronald D. Patkus joins Professors Nikolai Firtich and Dan Ungurianu of the Vassar Department of Russian to discuss the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) and the exhibit on view 23 January through June 10, 2019 in the Thompson Memorial Library entitled Ivan Turgenev and His Library, celebrating the bicentennial of Turgenev's birth.

Download the exhibition catalogue (PDF)

Wendy N. E. Ikemoto

April 11, 2018.

Wendy N. E. Ikemoto, Associate Curator of American Art at the New York Historical Society and former Vassar professor, talks about her new book Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking (Routledge, 2017).

Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking marks the first sustained study of pendant paintings: discrete images designed as a pair. It opens with a broad overview that anchors the form in the medieval diptych, religious history, and aesthetic theory and explores its cultural and historical resonance in the 19th-century United States. Three case studies examine how antebellum American artists used the pendant format in ways revelatory of their historical moment and the aesthetic and cultural developments in which they partook. The case studies on John Quidor’s Rip Van Winkle and His Companions at the Inn Door of Nicholas Vedder (1839) and The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849) and Thomas Cole’s Departure and Return (1837) shed new light on canonical antebellum American artists and their practices. The chapter on Titian Ramsay Peale’s Kilauea by Day and Kilauea by Night (1842) presents new material that pushes the geographical boundaries of American art studies toward the Pacific Rim. The book contributes to American art history the study of a characteristic but as yet overlooked format and models for the discipline a new and productive framework of analysis focused on the fundamental yet complex way images work back and forth with one another.

 

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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