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SPECIAL EVENTS Arts & Humanities Division Spring 2009 Semester Arts and Humanities Foundation Course
AHF1300 (Spring)
Nature, Culture, Progress Humans are part of nature yet distinct from it in complex ways. Our natural instincts do not completely define us; we are also cultural beings with traditions, identities and technologies that distinguish us from nature. This distinction has led to the claim that humans are superior to nature and so are entitled to manipulate it. Humans' divergence from nature also suggests that we are capable of progress: of bettering ourselves intellectually, morally, technologically. In this course, we will examine these claims by asking questions such as: to what extent are humans a product of nature and to what extent are we formed by culture? How does our answer to this question affect our perception of ourselves, others, and the world around us? When is progress good, and when does it instead decrease the quality of human life and harm nature? We will explore these questions through readings of literature and philosophy, and through film and the visual arts. Spring 2009 A&H Foundation Course related performances, screenings, and events Thompson Visiting Poet Series at Babson College
February 11, 2009 Wednesday
Sorenson Center for the Arts Theater 7:30 - 9:00 pm February 12, 2009 Thursday
Glavin Chapel 9:45 - 10:45 am
We announce with great pleasure the Charles D. and Marjorie J. Thompson Visiting Poet for 2009: Tom Sleigh. Mr. Sleigh will read from his poetry in the Sorenson Center for the Arts Theater Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 7:30 pm. Following his reading that evening, a reception will be held in the Sorenson lobby, and Mr. Sleigh will sign copies of his books. On Thursday the 12th he will take part in an informal discussion at the Glavin Chapel from 9:45 to 10:45 am. All members of the Babson community and beyond are welcome to both events. Tom Sleigh is the author of Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, and Far Side of the Earth (2003), named an Honor Book by the Massachusetts Society for the Book. His earlier collections are After One, winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series Prize, 1983; Waking (1990), a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and a finalist for the Lamont Poetry Prize; The Chain (l996), nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize; and The Dreamhouse (1999), a selection of the Academy of American Poet’s Poetry Book Club and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He has also published a translation of Euripides's Herakles (Oxford University Press, 2000), and a book of essays, Interview With a Ghost (Graywolf Press, 2006). Among his many awards are an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letter, the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace Fund, and grants from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merill Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown where he is a Writing Committee member. Sleigh attended the California Institute of the Arts, Evergreen State College, and earned an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Over the past twenty years, the Thompson Visiting Poet Series has brought to campus such internationally known poets as Robert Pinsky, Paul Muldoon, David Ferry, Alicia Ostriker, C.K. Williams, Edward Hirsch, Sonia Sanchez, Galway Kinnell, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Mary Oliver, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Marjorie Agosin and Natasha Trethewey. Please join us on February 11 & 12, 2009, to hear Tom Sleigh share his poems. Mary O'Donoghue,
Coordinator, Thompson Visiting Poet
Assistant Profesor of English, Arts and Humanities BFRF Faculty Research "Chat"
Part of a Series of Informal Research Luncheon Presentations for Babson Faculty and Staff Brian Seitz - Arts and Humanities
March 4, 2009
“Dasein Lost in Iroquoia” Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time contains a description of the role of death in the constitution of human subjectivity. This description is linked to his description of our relation with others. Both descriptions suggest that to be human is to be “inauthentic.” Seitz argues 1) that Heidegger’s descriptions are skewed and extremely limited and 2) that rather than being the product of a phenomenological bracketing, they are the product of a set of culturally-bound metaphysical assumptions. As a methodology, he deploys a comparative phenomenology by offering the Iroquois as a counter-argument or counter-model, showing that formal practices of relating to dead people, which might appear simply to be funerary practices, can be significant sources for the constitution of specific configurations of subjectivity. Confronting both the implicit universalism and abstract individualism of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, alternative cultural formations provide models of the way that death informs the constitution of forms of life enmeshed in community.
Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Day Events
Speaker: Kevin Powell
"The New Activism Power, Global Citizenship, and the Path to Equality,"
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
5:00 pm Carling-Sorenson Theater Kevin Powell is a poet, journalist, author, political acticvist, and a social entrepreneur. He was one of the founders of Katrina on the Ground, an organization that sent over 700 students to rebuild the area devastated by the hurricane. BFRF Faculty Research "Chat"
Part of a Series of Informal Research Luncheon Presentations for Babson Faculty and Staff
Mary Pinard - Arts and Humanities
February 5, 2009 “Song Net for an Estuary”
"Song Net for an Estuary" is a linked series of fifteen elegiac sonnets on the ecosystem of an estuary: its definition and configuration, as well as its considerable degradation over time through ecological damage and over navigation. As background for these poems, Pinard studied two estuaries in particular: the Thames, for its science and its historical association with the poet John Keats, and a little-known estuary in Grays Harbor, Washington, for its connection to a personal story. She found a suitable form for this project in the sonnet redoublé: a French invention that features fifteen sonnets of any type linked together by the fact that each line of the first sonnet becomes, in its turn, the last line of the following fourteen. Arts & Humanities Division Fall 2008 Semester Arts and Humanities Foundation Course
AHF1300 (Fall)
Dwellings: Body, Home, and City (A&H Foundation) Dwellings are physical structures that house us and provide the external conditions for our development: We dwell in a body, a home, and a village, town, or city. Paradoxically, however, dwelling is also a mental and emotional activity. When we dwell on an idea, an event, a person, or a place, we find it difficult to let it go: it quite literally occupies us. Our dwellings-both in space and in time-shape the ways we identify with ourselves and others. In this course we will analyze works of art and philosophy that help us explore questions about dwelling: How do our bodies as lived in and as represented influence how we view ourselves and are viewed by others? What is the nature of home? What do our dwellings have to do with our own and others' sense of belonging in the world? How do the forms and voices that artists and philosophers invent encourage new ways of understanding dwelling in relation to such structures as family, education, class, gender, and race? Fall 2008 A&H Foundation Course related performances, screenings and events
October 29, 2008
7:00 – 8:00 pm in Sorenson Center
Caryl Phillips
Caryl Phillips, who has authored over 16 books of fiction, non-fiction and drama, as well as multiple screenplays and radio plays, has been called one of the world's "literary giants." Winner of multiple awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, a PEN/Faulkner Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Phillips' work has been celebrated for its incisive attention to themes of identity and migration, particularly in the historical context of the African diaspora. His works, including The Nature of Blood, which Babson Arts and Humanities students will read in preparation for his visit, have helped shed light on the implications and consequences of a globalization that, as he notes, is not a recent phenomenon, but rather began in the 15th century with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Phillips will explore such issues in a contemporary context, linking them to current world affairs as well as to the course theme of how humans dwell in the world. www.carylphillips.com BFRF Faculty Research "Chat"
Part of a Series of Informal Research Luncheon Presentations for Babson Faculty and Staff Lisa Colletta - Arts and Humanities
October 7, 2008 Intermodern Travel: J.B. Priestley’s English and American Journeys
After working in the Hollywood studios during the 1930s, writers like J.B. Priestly looked back to England for cultural origins that might resist the modern forces of American capitalism and popular culture. Most, as writers of satires and social comedies, doubted that they would find them, and their comedies often reveal an ambivalence about both American culture and the attempts to reclaim a traditional English one. However, Priestly, who resisted the “astonishing unreality of Hollywood,” felt that post-imperial England might offer a modern national identity able to resist the transnationalism of global capitalism, suggesting an idea of Englishness based on cultural traditions rather than imperial power. This is most evident in his BBC radio broadcasts during the forties that embodied “the voice of the common people,” but his travel narratives: English Journey and Midnight on the Desert, also reveal his understanding of the globalizing power of American popular culture and how this power would reshape traditional ideas of Englishness.
Elizabeth Goldberg – Arts and Humanities
September 24, 2008 Cross-Currents and Convergencies: Emerging Cultural Paradigms in African-American Literature
This project comprises a chapter of the Cambridge History of African American Literature (CHAAL), forthcoming from Cambridge University Press 2010. The CHAAL will present both a chronological description of African American literature in the United States (1600-2006) and an explanation of the convergence of multiple oral and printed literary traditions in its development. This chapter examines African American literary history from the period 1970 – 2005, contextualizing its explosion of feminist and postmodern literary texts in terms of related historical and literary movements. The chapter specifically addresses experimental literature that revises existing historical and literary tropes; that brings together various genres in one literary text; and that extends the borders of African American literature to emphasize connections among literatures of the African diaspora. Goldberg will address not only the substance of the chapter in her talk, but also the complex process of writing literary history. Arts & Humanities Division Spring 2008 Semester Waterline Reading Series
April 15, 2008
Goff Faculty Lounge, 6:30 pm Featuring Babson Faculty Creative Writers Featured Readers: Kim Freeman, Aaron Tillman and Deb Vlock Refreshments & Open Mic to follow Waterline Reading Series
March 12, 2008
Glavin Chapel, 6:30 pm Featuring Babson Faculty Creative Writers Featured Readers: Lindsay Coleman, MaryEllen Beveridge and Ellen Goldstein Refreshments & Open Mic to follow BFRF Faculty Research "Chat"
Part of a Series of Informal Luncheon Research Presentations for Babson Faculty and Staff
Mary O'Donoghue - Arts and Humanities Division
March 5, 2008 Not Their Muse: Irish-Language Poetry in Translation and the Problem of Pharaoh's Daughter
Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s bilingual poetry collection Pharaoh’s Daughter (1990) features English translations by a variety of notable Irish poets. An Irish Times review by Douglas Sealy appears to posit Ní Dhomhnaill as somehow blameworthy for spawning the book’s “bewildering variety”, and suggests that she is but the conduit by which the largely male roster of translators in fact create their own poems: a damning critique of the translation enterprise. In referring to Ní Dhomhnaill’s original poems as “starting points”, Sealy’s criticism is underpinned by the notion of Ní Dhomhnaill as but the inspiration – the muse – of these poets, who take what she has to offer and mold it into work that is, as Sealy would have it, emphatically theirs. In its attention to the linguistic and literary ventriloquism at work in Pharaoh’s Daughter, Sealy’s forgotten review provides an entry point into the overlooked area of gender as it plays out in the translation of Irish-language poetry. Drawing on studies of feminization and translation, as well as notions of feminist translation, both within and without the Irish literary setting, this paper examines Sealy’s nexus as it informs, and is seen to deform, the fortunes of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems in translation. Babson College's SEED Seminar, Academic Year 2007-08
Facilitied by Kerry Rourke, Director of Babson's Writing Center and Lecturer in English, Arts and Humanities Kerry Rourke has facilititated a seminar series for Babson faculty which focuses on issues of diversity and equity at Babson, since September. This series or "SEED" Seminar consists of monthly 3-hour seminars during this academic year. It is considered an important professional development opportunity for all Babson faculty. The acronym, "SEED," stands for Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity, and also alludes to the idea that each human being can plant seeds of understanding."The National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum, a staff-development equity project for educators, is in its twenty-first year of establishing teacher-led faculty seminars...throughout the U.S. and in English-speaking international schools" (Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College). SEED is administered through WCW. Thompson Visiting Poet Series at Babson College
February 13, 2008
Sorenson 7:30 pm Informal Session
February 14, 2008
Glavin Chapel 10:00 to 11:00 am We announce with great pleasure the Charles D. and Marjorie J. Thompson Visiting Poet for 2008: acclaimed poet Natasha Trethewey. Ms. Trethewey will read from her poetry in the Sorenson Center for the Arts Theater, Wednesday, February 13, 2008, at 7:30 p.m. Following her reading that evening, a reception will be held in the Sorenson lobby, and Ms. Trethewey will sign copies of her books. On the following day, Thursday, February 14, from 10:00 to 11:00 am, Natasha Trethewey will meet informally with interested students, faculty, and staff in the Glavin Chapel to discuss her work. Both of these events are free and open to the community.
Natasha Trethewey is author of Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), which was named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association, and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). Domestic Work was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Poetry 2000 and 2003. Currently, she is Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University.
Over the past twenty years, the Thompson Visiting Poet Series has brought to campus such internationally known poets as Robert Pinsky, Paul Muldoon, David Ferry, Alicia Ostriker, C.K. Williams, Edward Hirsch, Sonia Sanchez, Galway Kinnell, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Mary Oliver, Ellen Bryant Voigt and Marjorie Agosin. Please join us on February 13, 2008, to hear Natasha Trethewey share poems from her astonishingly accomplished body of work. Mary O’Donoghue, Arts and Humanities
Coordinator, Thompson Visiting Poet SAVE THE DATE BABSON IS PLEASED TO PRESENT
THE FIFTH ANNUAL MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. LEGACY DAY
Brothers and Keepers: Freedom and Self-Determination in the Global Era
Wednesday, February 27, 2008 – 5:00 pm Carling-Sorenson Theater
featuring keynote speaker
John Edgar Wideman
Esteemed writer, professor, and Rhodes Scholar John Edgar Wideman grew up in Homewood, an impoverished African-American community in Pittsburgh that is the setting of one of his best-known works, The Homewood Trilogy. He was the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University where he earned a B. Phil. in literature in 1966.
After writing several novels, Wideman taught at the University of Pennsylvania, helping found the school’s Afro-American Studies Department. The only American writer to twice win the PEN/Faulkner Prize, Wideman has written three memoirs about events that have indelibly marked him—the life imprisonment of his younger brother, Robby, in Brothers and Keepers, and the life imprisonment of his son, Jacob, in Fatheralong. His latest critically acclaimed collection of short fiction, God’s Gym, was released in 2005. Come together to reflect on the work and teachings of Dr. King, and the efforts that continue in his name today. The MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. leadership award winner(s) will be announced at the Legacy Day celebration. This award honors members of the Babson community (students, group organizations, faculty, or staff) who reflect Dr. King’s principles and ideals in philosophy and action. Also, the first- and second-place winners of the MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ESSAY AND SPEECH CONTEST will deliver their speeches. This year for the first time, the results for the new MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. CREATIVITY CONTEST will be announced. |
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