Calendar of Events
Humanities for Everyone
December 2019
The Other America II
Using as inspiration Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 speech “The Other America,” author Mitchell S. Jackson reflects on his childhood in a poor, black community in Portland, Oregon—where he witnessed drug use, gang violence, and sexual exploitation—and reveals how he transformed despair into hope. Read More »
January 2020
How to Read a Renaissance Portrait
Renaissance portraits were serious undertakings, carefully crafted to indicate wealth, status, interests, trade, and family ties of the subject. Dartmouth professor Jane Carroll leads a visual exploration of the messages encoded in these portraits. Read More »
February 2020
Daybreak Express: Duke Ellington’s Train-Inspired Compositions
Reuben Jackson, jazz scholar and former host of VPR’s Friday Night Jazz, shares some evocative Ellington recordings and discusses Ellington's love for trains and the role they played in his orchestra's work in the then-segregated United States. Read More »
March 2020
I Am a Man: Martin Freeman, Colonization, and Identity
Martin Freeman was the second black graduate of Middlebury College (1849) and the first black president of an American college. But he left to teach at Liberia College in Monrovia, Liberia. Middlebury professor Bill Hart discusses what eventually convinced Freeman that he could only experience freedom, full citizenship, and self-determination in exile in a black republic. Read More »
April 2020
A Slight Sound at Evening: Why Thoreau’s Quiet Writing Endures Today
Drawing upon Thoreau’s journals and letters, Dartmouth professor Nancy Jay Crumbine examines the spirituality, inherent and explicit, in his walking and writing life. Read More »
May 2020
Edward Gorey’s Morbid Nonsense
Critics never knew quite what to make of Edward Gorey (1925-2000), the author and illustrator whose picture books full of murder, mayhem, and discreet depravity influenced Tim Burton, Lemony Snicket, and Guillermo Del Toro. In this illustrated lecture, cultural critic Mark Dery reveals the surprisingly serious themes woven through Gorey’s whimsically sinister work. Read More »