First Wednesdays

A Humanities Lecture Series, October through May

2016-2017 First Wednesdays Talks Online

Here’s a list of the talks from our 2016-2017 First Wednesdays series that have been video recorded.

Return to the First Wednesdays home page.

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All About Eve
Video: Dartmouth professor of religion Susan Ackerman considers both traditional and contemporary interpretations of the Adam and Eve story and how recent scholarship on women and the Bible pushes us to rethink our common assumptions about Eve.
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America in a New, More Dangerous World
Video: Distinguished veteran diplomat George Jaeger discusses recent rapid changes in world power relationships and the key challenges America faces: from our perception of our world role and management of nuclear policy to our critical relationships with Europe, Russia, and China.
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Beethoven's Sketchbooks
In this performance lecture, pianist Michael Arnowitt considers Beethoven’s creative process by exploring Beethoven’s sketchbooks.
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Building for a Gilded Age
Video: Middlebury College art and architecture professor emeritus Glenn Andres explores how the US asserted itself architecturally on the world stage around the turn of the twentieth century, a time of bold experiments, proud philanthropy, and a desire to rival the Old World in splendor.
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Celebrating E. B. White
Video: From Charlotte’s Web to his exquisite essays in The New Yorker, E. B. White remains the master’s master of elegant prose, sophisticated wit, and graceful irreverence. Drawing on his stories, essays, poems, and letters, Dartmouth professor Nancy Jay Crumbine celebrates White’s versatility and enormous legacy.
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Conversations That Change How We Live and Die
Video: Dartmouth professor and memoirist Irene Kacandes draws our attention to passages from great literature and nonfiction that can help launch or deepen conversations about living and dying.
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Face to Face with the Emotional Brain
Video: Whether around the caveman’s fire or the conference table, no signal is more important to humans’ interpreting social interactions and future behavior than the smile. Dartmouth professor Paul Whalen explores how the human brain processes the facial expressions of others and what these responses mean for understanding our emotional lives.
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Hamlet in Prison
Video: Celebrated literary critic Ilan Stavans discusses his teaching Shakespeare’s Hamlet in correctional facilities, and shares insights his classes have made about the play and revenge, freedom, and redemption.
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Jane Austen in Her Time
Video: Jane Austen lived in exciting times, and yet until recently was considered “untouched by the political, intellectual, and artistic revolutions of her age.” Drawing on Austen’s novels, Dartmouth visiting assistant professor Suzanne Brown shows how Austen was in fact a keen observer of her era’s values who both shared and critiqued them.
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Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art
Video: New York Times journalist Virginia Heffernan considers the Internet as a vast, collective work of art—a masterpiece made and remade by over three billion of us inhabiting our digital civilization.
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Paul Revere’s Ride: A New Look at an Old Story
Video: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer looks at what actually happened the night of April 18, 1775, and examines the character and actions of Paul Revere, a far more complex man than the myth suggests.
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Picturing Frederick Douglass: The Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American
Video: Professor of English and African American Studies at Harvard John Stauffer shares excerpts and images from his new book Picturing Frederick Douglass, presenting Douglass as a pioneer in photography, both as a stately subject and prescient theorist who understood the power of the nascent art form.
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Pursuing Happiness Through the Ages
Video: Dartmouth professor Darrin McMahon explores the pursuit of happiness, past and present and in other cultures, and discusses how the recent “science” of happiness is consistent with truths long understood by the world’s major religious and wisdom traditions.
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Putting The Sword To The Pen
Video: Journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Rumor of War Philip Caputo reflects on how, in his work, war is a context in which our contradictory natures play out, often with stark clarity.
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Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
Video: Yale professor David Blight discusses America’s collective memory of the Civil War and the perilous path of remembering and forgetting.
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Reading for the Life of the World
Video: Vermonter Katherine Paterson, award-winning author of Bridge to Terabithia and The Great Gilly Hopkins, considers the importance and many benefits of reading.
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The Examined Life
Video: Socrates famously proclaimed, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Philosophy scholar Suzanne Claxton explores what constitutes the examined life and how we may best pursue it.
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The Science of Happiness
Video: Amherst College professor Catherine Sanderson describes cutting-edge research from the field of positive psychology on the factors that do (and do not) predict happiness, and shares practical ways to increase one’s own psychological well-being.
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The United States and NATO: Lead or Leave?
Video: During the 2016 presidential campaign, some questioned traditional US policy by calling NATO obsolete. Stan Sloan, Visiting Scholar at Middlebury College and author of Defense of the West, considers the costs and benefits of America’s leadership of NATO and discusses options for US relations with its European allies.
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The Voyage of the St. Louis
Video: Keene State professor Paul Vincent shares the story of the May 1939 voyage of the St. Louis—carrying mostly Jewish refugees fleeing Germany but denied entry into the US—and argues that many historians have failed to account for the event’s complex political context or the history of US immigration in their criticism of the Roosevelt’s Administration’s actions.
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Video Games: Changing Stories and Changing Behaviors
Video: Ann DeMarle, director of Champlain College’s Emergent Media Center, explores digital gaming, how designers and players both participate in the storytelling process, and ways some game creators seek to effect social change through gaming.
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Walt Whitman and the Civil War
Video: Whitman’s Civil War writings give us a dual portrait, first the war as “a strange, unloosen’d wondrous time,” and second the emergence of a new Whitman. UVM professor Huck Gutman examines some of the most remarkable poems about war ever published and looks at Whitman’s remarkable development.
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What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life
Video: Harvard Professor of Chinese History Michael Puett and journalist Christine Gross-Loh, co-authors of the international bestseller The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life, share how Puett’s hugely popular course on Chinese philosophy is life-changing for many of his students.
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What This Country Needs is a Secretary of the Future
Video: David Brancaccio, host of NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report, considers one way our democracy might get beyond the short-term focus of politics and address long-term challenges such as sustainability, infrastructure, education, and healthcare. It’s an approach once suggested to him by a beloved American author.
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Where Am I? The Power of Uniqueness
Video: Former Scenic America President and TED talk lecturer Ed McMahon, who holds the Charles E. Fraser Chair on Sustainable Development at the Urban Land Institute, highlights the importance of a sense of place and explores why our physical surroundings are worth caring about.
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William Carlos Williams: America’s Most Revolutionary Twentieth Century Poet
Video: UVM professor Huck Gutman considers how William Carlos Williams changed American and world poetry forever by creating a new poetic language and new poetic forms.
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World War II: American Perceptions and Historical Realities
Video: Americans have held strong beliefs regarding WWII’s causes, consequences, and historical lessons—lessons cited to justify postwar US policies. UVM History Professor Emeritus Mark A. Stoler compares these beliefs about the war with what historians now maintain.
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Zen, Past and Present: Where Did It Come From and Where Is It Now?
Video: Most Americans have heard of Zen Buddhism, and some Americans practice it. What is this form of Buddhism and how did it arise? Middlebury College religion professor Elizabeth Morrison examines the history of Zen and its place in the U.S.