Program

  • January 16 - Spring 2009 Preview Reception
    Meet the professors and learn about the President's College courses being offered for Spring 2009.
    Location: Mortensen Library
    Time: 4:30-6:00pm
    Registration Form

  • Love's Labor: Shakespeare's Early Comedies - Four lectures by Humphrey Tonkin
    A review of four of Shakespeare's early comedies - The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Love's Labors Lost - in preparation for the Hartt School's production of Love's Labors Lost on February 19-22.
    Humphrey Tonkin     is Director of the President's College, President Emeritus of the University, and University Professor of the Humanities. He is well known for his lectures on Shakespeare, which often reveal new ways of thinking about well-known plays, and which set the plays in the context of their time.
    Dates: Mondays - January 26; February 2, 9, 16, 2009
    Location:     Woods Family Classroom
    Time: 4:30-6:00pm
    Cost: $80 (Fellows $60)
    Registration Form

  • Opera at the Met: Live in HD! - Three opera talks by Bob Gruskay
    Opera enthusiast Bob Gruskay will give three introductory talks on Lucia,  Butterfly and La Sonnambula in preparation for the high-definition performance transmissions of the Metropolitan Opera coming to Hartford in the Spring.
    One of Puccini's best loved operas, Madama Butterfly is his subtlest and most highly-finished score. He has wrought his music into the very substance and spirit of the drama of the geisha and the American naval officer. Butterfly denotes an advance over his previous operas in the matter of fine detail and the powerful effect of orchestration and the manipulation and development of themes.
    Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor is one of the most intriguing operas in the bel canto repertoire. Based on a story by Sir Walter Scott, Lucia has two of the most famous scenes in this genre, namely the sextet and the mad scene. In addition, its clear and taut libretto is complemented by its concise score and colorful orchestration.
    Another bel canto opera, La Sonnambula by Vincenzo Bellini is a melodrama concerning the dual elements of sleep and wakefulness. The rustic setting together with the subject of an innocent village maiden traduced and finally vindicated is the theme for Bellini's hauntingly lyrical score in the mode of his other works such as Norma and  I Puritani.
    Bob Gruskay has been a host of the opera program Live from the Connecticut Opera on WHC-TV West Hartford for many years. A former member of the Connecticut Opera Board, Bob teaches a weekly course on opera at the West Hartford Senior Center, and he gives talks on opera throughout the Greater Hartford area.
    Dates: Wednesdays - February 4; March 4, 11, 2009 respectively – in preparation for the performances on the following Saturday in each case.
    Location: Woods Family Classroom
    Time: 4:30-6:00pm
    Cost: $20 per session or $40 for the series of three (Fellows $15 or $30 for series).
    Registration Form

  • Masters of Reality: Caravaggio to Vermeer - A series of five lectures by Patrick McCaughey
    The 17th century was a period of intense and exciting change in art and architecture. Although Rome became the dominant centre, important national schools emerged across Europe. Rubens in Flanders, Rembrandt and Vermeer in Holland and Velasquez in Spain all contributed to the brave new landscape of art in the 17th century.
    Everywhere there was a sense of turbulence and change, from Galileo’s "new philosophy" to the stridency of the Counter-Reformation. For much of the century Europe was in a state of war. The Netherlands struggled for their independence from Spain. The Thirty Years War 1619-1648, fought in the main by mercenaries, lays claim to being the first “total war” and devastated the German states and the Low Countries. The English Civil War 1642-1649 divided the nation and resulted in the first modern regicide. It was a violent time. Old truths were challenged. Scientific inquiry threatened religious beliefs. Sharply divergent views of the world struggled for supremacy. Artists were enlisted on both sides in depicting the new truths, the new realities of the age. The course will concentrate on five painters, each a master of reality, who sought in different ways to show their contemporaries the truth about their rapidly changing world.
    Patrick McCaughey, art historian and critic, was raised in Australia and studied there and in the US. After several years as director of the National Gallery of Victoria and enfant terrible of the Australian art scene, he became successively director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and director of the Yale Center of British Art in New Haven. He now lives and writes in New Haven. 
    Dates: Fridays - February 6, 13, 20, 27; March 6, 2009.
    Location: MALI 1, Dana
    Time: 4:00-5:30pm
    Cost: $160 (Fellows $110). The course is filling fast. Sign up early!
    Registration Form

  • Sensation, Mystery, and Subversion: The  Woman in White and the Moonstone - A series of five lectures by Dianne Harrison and Catherine Stevenson
    In The King of Inventors (1991), Catherine Peters wrote “Wilkie Collins’s novels give glimpses into the secret places of his time, revealed by a man whose own refusal to conform was open and unashamed.”  In 1860 A Woman in White introduced the Victorian public to the novel of sensation—suspenseful and dramatic works that exposed the dark underbelly of Victorian propriety by treating bigamy, adultery, murder, fraud, drug addiction. In 1867 Collins  published The Moonstone, a deftly plotted mystery involving the theft of a fabulous jewel.  This course will explore the roots of these novels in Gothic and crime fiction, investigate their innovative narrative structures and talk about their impact on later novels—from the works of Dickens and Thomas Hardy to the contemporary mystery novels.  We will also discuss the life and career of Wilkie Collins, Dickens’ close friend, collaborator and partner in adventures.
    Catherine Stevenson is Academic Dean for International and Honors Programs and author of Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa (G.K. Hall, 1982) and many scholarly articles on English literature, theater, and women’s studies. At the University, she has served as department chair, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, Assistant Provost and Dean of the Faculty and the Harry Jack Gray Distinguished Teaching Humanist. She has received a Yale Visiting Faculty Fellowship, a Danforth Fellowship, and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship as well as the University of Hartford's Outstanding Teachers Award and the Trachtenberg Award for Service to the University.
    Dianne Harrison received a BA and MA from the University of Michigan, followed by six years of doctoral work at the University of California, Davis, where she focused on Victorian literature, especially the work of Anthony Trollope. She has taught courses through the President's College, and also teaches classes each semester on mystery fiction at the Prosser/Bloomfield Public Library.
    Dates: Tuesdays - February 10, 17, 24; March 3, 10, 2009.
    Location: Conferences
    Time: 4:30-6:00pm.
    Cost: $100 (Fellows $80).
    Registration Form

  • The Ulysses Book Club - A six-session exploration of James Joyce’s novel led by Joseph Voelker
    James Joyce's Ulysses is a challenging modernist text, and it is not a book to read alone. The Ulysses reading club will rely on shared discovery and mutual encouragement to bring everyone to the immense pleasures of the text.  Also, Ulysses is based in the geography of Dublin, Ireland, and because of that fact, reading it is more like moving into a neighborhood than following the linear plot of a  conventional novel. Joseph Voelker has volunteered to serve as a guide to this neighborhood, and he will accentuate the comic aspects of the book as a key to understanding it. The project will start with Joyce's relatively more accessible Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to which Ulysses is in fact a sequel, and then move on to Ulysses
    Joseph Voelker, dean of the University’s College of Arts and Sciences, has devoted a lifetime to the study of Joyce, and is an ideal guide through the literary Dublin that Joyce creates in his novel. 
  • Dates: Thursdays - February 12, 26; March 12, 26; April 16, 30. 2009
    Location:     Conferences
    Time: 2:00-3:30pm
    Cost: $60 (Fellows $40)
    Registration Form

  • Problem Solving — (Re) Discovering Mathematics - Three talks by Jean McGivney-Burelle
    Mathematician Jean McGivney-Burelle will take participants on a tour of basic mathematics, involving them in solving engaging mathematics problems. In doing so, she will explore the heuristics that mathematicians use to attack complex problems such as working backwards, solving a simpler problem, and considering individual cases. Participants will also rediscover fundamental ideas of elementary mathematics including prime numbers, Pascal's triangle, the Pythagorean Theorem, and more!
    Jean McGivney-Burelle, one of the University’s most popular younger teachers, is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Hartford where she also serves as Director of the Secondary Mathematics Education Program. Jean earned her PhD in Mathematics Education from the University of Connecticut. Her research interests are in the areas of mathematical problem solving and the teaching and learning of mathematics.
    Dates: Tuesdays, March 24, 31; April 7, 2009
    Location:     Woods Family Classroom
    Time: 5:00-6:30pm
    Cost: $60 (Fellows $40)
    Registration Form

  • Technology: The Leading Edge - Five lectures by some of our leading scientists
    The University’s College of Engineering, Technology and Architecture, under the leadership of Dean Louis Manzione, has created a program of five lectures dealing with contemporary technological issues and emerging technologies: Michael Crosbie, architect, will talk on “The Architecture of Worship;” Thomas Filburn, mechanical engineer and Director of the Connecticut Space Grant, on “Life Support Systems for Lunar Exploration,” Tim Britt, electrical engineer, on “Music Recording Technologies,” Michelle Vigeant, acoustical engineer, on “Aural Simulations of Building Designs,” and Dean Manzione himself on “Healthcare Technologies.”  This is a unique opportunity to learn about research at the University is addressing the challenges and opportunities of the new technologies.
    Lou Manzione, Dean of CETA, is Chair of the Connecticut Legislative Council on Broadband Internet, and Chair of the State Nanotechnology Curriculum Initiative.  He came to Hartford from Bell Laboratories where he managed R&D efforts developing leading edge technology in wireless, photonics, consumer electronics, and health monitoring.  He was the Executive Director of Bell Labs Ireland, a division of Bell Labs devoted to next generation manufacturing and global supply chains.
    Dates: Wednesdays - April 1, 15, 22, 29; May 6, 2009
    Location:     Woods Family Classroom
    Time: 4:30-6:00pm
    Cost: $80 (Fellows $60)
    Registration Form

  • The Symphony After Beethoven - Five lectures by Michael Lankester
    In the years between the death of Beethoven in 1827 and the death of Mahler in 1911, the symphonic form grew, in a series of often violent contortions, from the gentle, early works of the Viennese classical school to the wild, extravagant creations of the early twentieth-century.  Following on from his recent acclaimed series of lectures on The Nine Symphonies of Beethoven, Michael Lankester follows the course and development of the symphonic form by examining the works of five composers, each of whom is rooted in the Beethoven tradition - Schubert, Brahms, Berlioz, Bruckner and Mahler. 
    Michael Lankester served for fifteen years as Music Director of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. He combines an international conducting career with work as composer, arranger and commentator in opera, theatre and broadcasting.  As guest conductor, he has worked with major orchestras in Britain and North America. As Music Director of the National Theater of Great Britain, he worked with such distinguished directors as Jonathan Miller and Franco Zeffirelli. He studied at the Royal College of Music with Sir Adrian Boult and has had close professional collaborations with Benjamin Britten, William Walton, and Michael Tippett.
    Dates: Mondays - April 6, 13, 20, 27; May 4, 2009
    Location:     Wilde Auditorium for first three sessions
    Time: 4:30-6:00pm for first three sessions
    Cost: $120 (Fellows $90)
    Registration Form

  • The Beatles: A Confluence of Musical Styles - Three lectures by Michael Schiano
    Gershwin, Elvis, doowop, the classical aesthetic: in this course, we will examine how the Beatles found a way to take from many corners of the musical world and create a body of works of such quality and variety that had never before been imagined in popular music.
    Michael Schiano, Associate Professor of Musical Theory in the Hartt School, is interested in every aspect of 20th-century music – from Schoenberg to pop.  His last-minute participation in the President’s College Showcase last September wowed the participants, and now he will take his chosen subject, the Beatles, a little further in this series of three lectures
    Dates: Wednesdays - May 6, 13, 20, 2009
    Location:     Woods Family Classroom
    Time: 6:00-7:30pm
    Cost: $60 (Fellows $40)
    Registration Form


    We need your advice, ideas, suggestions, support. Let us know what you think, what you are willing to do, what ideas you have. We are eager to have your involvement and for you to feel part of the President's College community. Write to Humphrey Tonkin at tonkin@hartford.edu or call him at 768.4448, or contact Nancy Mather (633.7778) or any other member of the Steering Committee.