Fall 2022
Attend In Person OR Online Plants create the atmosphere we need to breathe and vastly outnumber us. Science fiction films and literature imagine what would happen if they took advantage of that. What if trees went after us, or Venus Flytraps developed a taste for humans? Join us for a thought experiment about plants as […]
Attend In Person OR Online Explore the history and significance of Musical Theatre Dance in the American Musical Theatre genre. Musical Theatre Dance has evolved through the years thanks to many significant choreographers. We will examine the work and style of many of these influential choreographers that have helped shape and mold the American Musical […]
Attend In Person OR Online Madame Bovary and The Portrait of a Lady invite discussion and comparison. Each centers on a remarkable heroine who dares to seek independence even at the risk of violating social norms. The plots conform to the pattern of the standard education novel. But both heroines fall short of the “education” […]
Attend In Person OR Online This four-week course will explore the cello’s magnum opus, J. S. Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello. Through these six masterpieces we will discuss Bach’s life in the 1720s, analyze the compositional ingenuity, examine Baroque musical forms, and delve into the fascinating lore that has emerged around the Suites. As […]
Please Note: The course dates have been adjusted from those listed in our fall brochure in order to avoid Jewish High Holy Days. The course will now begin on October 11 rather than September 27. We hope this makes the course more accessible to everyone wishing to participate. See you in class! This seminar will […]
Attend In Person OR Online Moderate Democrats blame progressives for their divisions, and Republicans use them to depict Democrats as socialists. We will look beyond these partisan divisions to consider how our times parallel those of the Progressive Era. One has to go back a century to find the same levels of economic inequality and […]
Attend In Person OR Online Why is French the most-commonly taught language in the United States after Spanish? Why are Americans so interested in things French? This course suggests that answers may be found in the long and fascinating saga of the French in North America, the topic of this seminar. The names of rivers […]
NEW! HSP Deep Dive Seminar Humans use language not just to communicate information but also to indicate identity, that is, the “self versus other” or “us versus them” distinction. Judges 12:6 describes how the pronunciation of the Hebrew word shibboleth was used by the Gileadites to identify their enemy, the Ephraimites, at the river Jordan. […]
Attend In Person OR Online The course investigates the ecology of war in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century to determine its impact on post-war perception, avant-garde art and architecture, and conceptions of place and memory. The primary focus will be on World War I, with secondary coverage of the U.S. Civil War. Readings […]
In this course, the class will examine how the image of the Roman emperor was and is constructed. We will be investigating questions of source material reliability, genre, and the use and power of rhetoric in history. Through an examination of Rome’s rulers, from Julius Caesar to Emperor Domitian, using the ancient written source material […]
Attend In Person OR Online It is for good reason that China is often called a land of poetry. As the longest continuous form of creative writing in the country, poetry has been a defining feature in the life of China’s elite, from their participation in the civil service exams to their performance of rituals […]
Attend In Person OR Online About 2600 years ago, an “Intellectual Revolution” shifted Greek thinking from mythic world descriptions to observational ones. The first group of thinkers in this new era lived in eastern Greece and started new directions in math and sciences. The next group, notably including Pythagoras, moved from eastern to western Greece […]