Programs - Spring 2010
- Da Vinci Codes and Lost Symbols: The World of Dan Brown, Novelist
A critical look at Dan Brown’s five novels, Digital Fortress (1998), Angels and Demons (2000), Deception Point (2001), The Da Vinci Code (2003) and The Lost Symbol (2009). Those who enjoy mysteries, and who don’t mind the willing suspension of disbelief they require, will enjoy Dan Brown, who is today the most successful, living proponent of short-chapter, page-turner, novelistic-mystery writing. Encyclopedic knowledge of trivial things is somehow woven throughout each novel, often with the same plot and characters placed in different settings, but always with an original twist. With the aid of film-clips from movies and documentary films explaining, praising or damning Brown’s fiction, this course will provide a forum for reading and discussing, chronologically, his five novels to see what is really the nature of Dan Brown’s fictional world.
Kathleen McGrory has an MA from the University of Notre Dame and PhD from Columbia University in Comparative Literature. A native of New York City, she was a Sister of Divine Compassion in New York, then professor of English and founder of the Irish Studies graduate program at Western Connecticut State University, Danbury. She was Dean of Arts and Sciences and Academic Vice President at Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU), President of Hartford College for Women until its merger with the University of Hartford, NEH fellow at Stanford University, and senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change. As Executive Director of the Society for Values in Higher Education at Georgetown University, she also taught medieval literature. She has taught freshman composition at the University of Hartford and currently teaches two courses in Rhetoric/Argument at ECSU. She is now completing a book-length study of the Holy Grail.
Dates: Wednesdays, January 27; February 3, 10, 17, 24, 2010.
Time: 4:30-6:00pm.
Location: Woods Family Classroom.
Cost: $90 (Fellows $65).
Registration Form
- Translations
In connection with a Hartt School performance of Brian Friel’s play Translations, about the relationship between language and community in colonial Ireland, Humphrey Tonkin will examine some of the issues raised by the play – particularly the question of “ownership” of a language, the benefits and limitations of linguistic diversity, and the nature of translation itself. What does it mean to “translate” a text into another language? What are the implications of suppressing or maintaining local languages? What is lost when a language dies? Two sessions of the course will take place in advance of the production; participants will then see the play itself, and two further sessions will take place after the production is over.
Humphrey Tonkin, President of the University from 1989 to 1998, is now University Professor of the Humanities and directs the President’s College. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard, he has been Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University and is a specialist in Elizabethan literature and in sociolinguistics and language policy. He has translated two of Shakespeare’s plays into Esperanto and published numerous other books, articles and translations in or on the language, including the edited volume Esperanto, Interlinguistics, and Planned Language. He edits the scholarly journal Language Problems and Language Planning and the series Studies in World Language Problems. A volume he has edited with Maria Esposito Frank, The Translator as Mediator of Cultures, will be published in 2010.
Dates: Thursdays, February 4, 11; February 25 (performance at 7:30pm);
March 4, 11, 2010.
Time: 7:00-8:30pm.
Location: Woods Family Classroom.
Cost: $90 (Fellows $65).
Registration Form
- Giuseppe Verdi and Italian Opera
This day-long exploration of the works of Italy's greatest and most beloved composer will focus on the three periods of Verdi's compositional output, early, middle, and late. With audio and video examples, Maestro Waters will explore the elements that distinguish these periods, showing Verdi's development as a composer. Nabucco, Macbeth, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Forza del Destino, Don Carlos, Aida, Otello – the succession of operatic masterpieces that Verdi created tells us much not only about musical and theatrical taste of the second half of the 19th century but also about Italy’s struggle for unity and the deep identification of that country with the operatic style. Space is limited: enroll early!
Willie Anthony Waters, General and Artistic Director of Connecticut Opera from 1999 to 2009, has been a guest conductor for the Arizona Opera, Australian Opera, Cologne Opera (Germany), Edmonton Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Fort Worth Opera, Houston Ebony Opera, Kentucky Opera, Lyric Opera of Boston, Manitoba Opera, Michigan Opera Theatre, New York City Opera, Opera Carolina, Opera Colorado, L'Opéra de Montréal, Opera Festival of New Jersey, Orlando Opera, San Francisco Opera, Vancouver Opera, and the opera companies of Cape Town, Pretoria and Durban, in South Africa. He has conducted a wide range of Italian, French, German and American operatic works, among them Porgy and Bess in South Africa and Germany, and the major works of Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini. His orchestral engagements include performances with the Florida Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Hartford Symphony, Bavarian Radio Orchestra (Munich), Essen Philharmonic (Germany), Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Brucknerhaus Orchester (Linz, Austria) and Indianapolis Symphony. He is a regular guest on the Metropolitan Opera Quiz during the renowned Metropolitan Opera live broadcasts.
Date: Sunday, February 7, 2010.
Time: 10:00am-4:00pm.
Location: Woods Family Classroom.
Cost: $80 (Fellows $60), including lunch.
Registration Form
- The Dante Book Club
Glory of the Italian Middle Ages, brilliant poet of faith and politics, Dante Alighieri defined through his Divine Comedy the very course of Italian literature and language. This great work, divided into the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, traces the poet’s journey, accompanied in part by his poetic ancestor Virgil, through an examination of human shortcomings that mirrors his own time, to the very edge of the divine, where time itself comes to an end in perfect stillness. On this occasion, the participants in the semester-long Dante Book Club will engage in a reading of the Inferno under the guidance of their own Virgil, Dante scholar Maria Frank, whose knowledge of the Italian tradition of commentary on Dante will help bring to life the stories that the poet and his characters tell. No knowledge of Italian necessary.
Maria Esposito Frank chairs the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. Educated at the University L’Orientale of Naples, Moscow State University (MGU), and Harvard University (PhD), she has taught at Boston College and the University of California at Los Angeles. She is Associate Professor of Italian Studies, and a specialist in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. Her publications include a book on Renaissance humanism (1999), and articles on Dante, Leon Battisti Alberti, Machiavelli, 15th-century demonology, and Marsilio Ficino. She has also published critical essays on various modern and contemporary poets.
Dates: Mondays, February 8; March 1, 22; April 5, 19, 2010.
Time: 2:00-3:30pm.
Location: Woods Family Classroom.
Cost: $60 (Fellows $40).
Registration Form
- Romantic Visions, Romantic Realities
Patrick McCaughey, will explore how Romanticism came to painting in Spain, Britain, Germany, and France by looking at the work of five major artists – Goya, Turner, Constable, Friedrich, and Delacroix. The Romantics believed that daily, lived experience and the encounter with the world were the sources and seed bed of art. The cult of nature and the rise to prominence of landscape painting were the hallmark of Romanticism, but at the same time Romantic artists and writers gave a new precedence to the imagination and inner life: art should be the product of “the true voice of feeling.” This central tension within Romanticism, the pull of the external world and the claims of the inner life, generated its vitality. Space is limited: enroll early!
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. His numerous books include a memoir, The Bright Shapes and the True Names (2003).
Dates: Fridays, February 12, 19, 26; March 5, 12, 2010.
Time: 4:00-5:30pm.
Location: Dana Mali 2.
Cost: $160 (Fellows $110).
Registration Form
- Minutemen: Myths and Realities
As Americans once again gather in "Tea Parties" to protest what they see as the excesses of their government, it seems a fitting moment to ponder the hold that the American Revolution continues to have on the American political imagination. This course will examine the initial stirring of the Revolution in New England through a discussion of David Hackett Fischer's Paul Revere's Ride. Fischer's book offers a wonderful narrative of the events surrounding the battles of Lexington and Concord, and probes the nature of war as a cultural event. Together we will contemplate the conflict that plunged New England into political turmoil and open warfare, the consequences of political violence on families and communities, and the place of these events within present day libertarian politics.
Robert Churchill teaches history in Hillyer College, at the University of Hartford. He specializes in the history of the American Revolution, early national political culture, and American political violence. He has taught at Princeton University and holds a PhD from Rutgers and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Brown. He is the author of To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement (University of Michigan Press, 2009) and of several scholarly articles on aspects of American history and political violence. He is currently developing several courses in global history, including an interdisciplinary course titled “Atlantic Journeys.”
Date: Wednesdays, March 10, 24, 31, 2010.
Time: 4:30-6:00pm.
Location: Woods Family Classroom.
Cost: $60 (Fellows $40).
Registration Form
- Solving the Mozart Mystery
The music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) is at once easily accessible, musically intricate, and deeply mysterious. What is true of his music is also true of his life. This review of Mozart’s musical achievement will introduce us to the music itself and also to recent discoveries by Mozart scholars. What are we just now learning about the composer and his music? Which questions have we answered, and which answers remain elusive? Participants in the course will learn how we have pieced together our picture: from his sister's reminiscences, from Koechel's catalog, through the smuggling of his manuscripts out of war torn Berlin, to recent handwriting and paper studies and other scholarship today. And, what have we discovered about how he composed, and how his music works? How much of the Mozart mystery still remains?
Michael Schiano is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Hartt School. He received his PhD from Brandeis University, where he wrote his dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg's Grundgestalt. His master’s degree is from King's College London, where he wrote a master's thesis on Webern's Das Augenlicht. He began his undergraduate career as a physics major at The Cooper Union, moving to Princeton for an AB degree in music, with a bachelor's thesis on "Why I Like The Beatles," an unusual topic for an academic paper in 1978, resulting in considerable outside interest. His academic interests are wide, including Mozart, Schoenberg, the Beatles, music analysis, American music, popular music, and computer applications in music theory and analysis. He is an accordionist and a pianist, who has performed with the Hartford Symphony and other orchestras in Connecticut. He is also a member of the Long-Island-based Beatles Magical Orchestra. At Hartt, he regularly teaches classes in theory, analysis, counterpoint, and music history.
Date: Thursdays, March 25; April 1, 8, 2010.
Time: 4:30-6:00pm.
Location: Woods Family Classroom.
Cost: $60 (Fellows $40).
Registration Form
- Alternative Energy Sources, Thermodynamics and Power
Energy policy is driven by science, technology, and political choices. What can we do to reduce fossil fuel use through alternative power plant schemes? How can we get the science right and how can we balance costs and benefits? We will try to answer these questions by using Connecticut energy policy as an example. Connecticut electric rates are driven by wholesale market factors, fuel costs, and the DPUC. We will examine the past and present types of fuel used for power generation, and address the ability of various renewable energy sources to provide significant impact in Connecticut’s electric supply mix. Among the topics to be discussed will be power plant types (combined cycle, simple cycle), fuels (coal, natural gas, nuclear) and all types of renewable energy (biofuels, solar and wind).
Tom Filburn, director of the Connecticut NASA Space Grant Consortium at the University of Hartford, obtained a BSc. and MS in Mechanical Engineering and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Connecticut. He has worked for Northeast Utilities, United Nuclear Corporation and United Technologies (UTC). He has received practical experience in both nuclear and liquid metal combustion power systems, and his last assignment before joining the University was with the Space, Land and Sea group at Hamilton Sundstrand (UTC division), where he performed research on regenerative life support technologies for NASA. His research interests lie in the area of energy, sustainable design, greenhouse gas control and environmental design. He has published in Industrial and Engineering Chemical Research and the Fuels Journal of the American Chemical Society and holds six US patents for chemicals and methods to condition enclosed habitats.
Date: Wednesdays, April 7, 14, 21, 2010.
Time: 5:30-7:00pm.
Location: Woods Family Classroom.
Cost: $60 (Fellows $40).
Registration Form
- The English Musical Tradition
From the flowering of keyboard music in Elizabethan England, the development of the Elizabethan air in the work of Dowland and Campion, and the emergence of a distinctive English choral tradition at the hands of Tallis and Byrd – through Purcell’s creation of the English opera, the arrival of Italian opera and its parody the ballad opera – through the establishment of the oratorio and the anthem in the 18th and 19th century – the distinctive English musical tradition leads to the symphonic music of Edward Elgar, the musical nostalgia associated with the incorporation of folksong by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, the vocal compositions and operas of Benjamin Britten, and on to such contemporary composers as Tavener and Ades. This course will identify the common threads that link English music over the ages and seek to situate the English musical tradition.
Michael Lankester, who served for fifteen years as Music Director of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, combines an international conducting career with work as composer, arranger and commentator in opera, theatre and broadcasting. He has worked as guest conductor with major orchestras in Britain and North America, including the Pittsburgh, Toronto, City of Birmingham, and London Symphonies, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Royal Philharmonic. As Music Director of the National Theatre (UK), he worked with such distinguished directors as Jonathan Miller and Franco Zeffirelli. He collaborated extensively with Laurence Olivier, working with him on several television productions. He served as conductor for the inaugural production of Tom Stoppard's play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (with music by André Previn) at London's Mermaid Theatre. 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.
Date: Mondays, April 12, 19, 26; May 3, 10, 2010.
Time: 4:30-6:00pm.
Location: Wilde Auditorium.
Cost: $120 (Fellows $90).
Registration Form
- "Look After Liberty": The History of West Hartford
In May 1711 the Connecticut General Court granted permission for the establishment of a new parish on the western edge of the village of Hartford – the first formal recognition of what was to become the Town of West Hartford. From its beginnings as an agricultural community to its status today as one of the inner ring suburbs of the City of Hartford, it has seen enormous changes and momentous events. Town historian Tracey Wilson will guide us through this rich history, drawing on the collections of the Noah Webster House and the West Hartford Historical Society, and taking us to visit some of the sites that she discusses. Learn how Hall High School and Conard High School got their names and who the Bishop of Bishop’s Corner was, examine pots made in West Hartford of West Hartford clay, and discover the “other” Thomas Jefferson, who was known as “The Handsomest Horse in the World” and ran at West Hartford's Charter Oak racetrack. The course will be based at the Noah Webster House in West Hartford.
Tracey Wilson teaches history at Conard High School in West Hartford and has also taught at Trinity College and St. Joseph College. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Trinity College and a PhD from Brown University. Her publications include studies of women workers at Colt’s and Travelers, and of the Connecticut woman’s suffrage movement, and frequent columns in local newspapers. In addition to her role as Town Historian of West Hartford, she serves as an advisor to the Noah Webster House.
Date: Thursdays, May 6, 13, 20, 27, 2010.
Time: 4:00-6:00pm.
Location: Woods Family Classroom.
Cost: $70 (Fellows $50).
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.