Calendar of Events
Calendar of Events
Previously
Hand Held: a reading by lê thi diem thúy
Thursday, April 12, 2007
4:30 - 6:00 p.m., Kanbar Hall, Room 107, Bowdoin College
Reception to follow
lê thi diem thúy is a Vietnamese-American writer, poet, and performance artist. Born in Phan Thiet, southern Vietnam, she left her native country in 1978, by boat, and eventually settled in southern California. Her first novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, is a lyrical exploration of the experience of displacement, of a life that moves between categories of refugee, exile, and immigrant. Her prose and poetry have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Harpers Magazine, and Muae, and her solo performance works have been presented at, among other venues, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, the International Women Playwrights Festival in Galway, Ireland, the New World Theater at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Marfa Theater Company in Texas. lê is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in western Massachusetts.
Sponsored by the Luce Project Fund, the Alice Cooper Morse Fund for the Performing Arts, the Asian Student Association, and the departments of English and Gender and Women's Studies.
Open to the public and free of charge
Margot Livesey reading from her novel, Banishing Verona
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
4:30 p.m., Lancaster Lounge, Moulton Union
Reception to follow
Margot Livesey grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands and is the acclaimed author of a collection of stories and five novels. She has taught at a number of colleges and universities including Boston University, Brandeis University, the University of Iowa, the University of California at Irvine and Williams College. She is currently Writer in Residence at Bowdoin College. Her new novel will be published by Harper Collins in March 2008.
An author "noted for her penetrating knowledge of the human heart coupled with respect for all its essential mysteries." (Kirkus Reviews)
Sponsored by the English Department
Open and Free to the Public
"Aesthetics and Desire: A Renaissance Meditation"
Leonard Barkin
Friday, April 20, 2007
12:30 p.m., Main Lounge, Moulton Union Reception to follow
Leonard Barkan, the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, is a leading American scholar of Renaissance literature and visual arts. A fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Council for Learned Societies, Professor Barkan has also received a Guggenheim fellowship (2005), the PEN Architectural Digest Prize for Literary Writing in the Visual Arts (2001), and the Morton Dauwen Zabel award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters given triennially for criticism (2004). Two of his books have also received the prestigious Christian Gauss prize. A wide-ranging scholar who possesses the layered learning of a comparativist, his works explore many complementary subjects, including Italian Renaissance Art, the relations between Literature and the Visual Arts, the survival of antiquity in the Renaissance, the history of Archaeology, Medieval and Renaissance drama, and Renaissance cultures of food and wine.
One of Professor Barkan's special interests is sexuality and eroticism in the European Renaissance, and he has written several groundbreaking articles on the topic, including "Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis," The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (Yale 1986), and Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford 1991).
Sponsored by the Jacob Stahl Lectureship and the English Department
Open and Free to the Public
Maud Ellman Lecture
Thursday, March 29, 2007
7 – 9 p.m., Visual Arts Center - Beam Classroom
Reception to follow
Maud Ellmann is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and Endowed Professor of English, at the University of Notre Dame. In 2004, she won several prizes and was nominated for the British Academy Book Prize for her monograph on the Irish writer, Elizabeth Bowen. Her talk derives from her current project, "The Ghosts of Animals," which responds to the current considerations of the "post-human."
Sponsored by the English Department, Residential Life and Lectures and Concerts
Open and free to the public
Poetry Reading by John Wilkinson
Friday, March 30, 2007
4 – 5 p.m., Lancaster Lounge, Moulton Union
Reception to follow
John Wilkinson is a British poet is currently the Writer in Residence at the Keough Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His poetry reflects his diverse intellectual backgrounds, bringing them experimentally into play. He has won several awards for his poetry, including the Chancellor’s Medal of Poetry, at Cambridge University, the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship at Harvard and the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in 2006.
Sponsored by the English Department, Residential Life, the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund and a Mellon Grant
Open and free to the public
Sunday, April 9th, 2006 4:00 p.m.
Ladd House, Bowdoin College
Please join us as Peter Makuck reads from his new volume of verse, Off-Season in the Promised Land. These are poems that speak to the various ways we exile ourselves from a paradise that is available at any given moment. His short lyrics and long narratives vary from comic to elegiac, often finding their locus in the landscapes of coastal North Carolina.
Distinguished 
Professor of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University, Peter Makuck has published five collections of poetry, a collection of short stories and a book of essays on the Welsh poet Leslie Norris. The recipient of the 1993 Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum, and editor of “Tar River Poetry”, he is the author of three earlier collections of poetry including Where We Live, Sunken Lightship, and Against Distance. His most recent book of short stories, Costly Habits, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award.
March 31, 2006
"Buddha and the Brain: Investigating the Mind in the 21st Century"
Evan Thompson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto
What does Buddhism have to teach Western science about the mind? What have Western scientists found out about the effects of meditation on the brain? This lecture will discuss recent scientific findings and philosophical issues at the heart of the dialogue between Buddhism and Western mind science.
Please join us for this talk by Professor Thompson on Friday March 31, 4:00-5:30 in the Asian Studies Conference Room.
Evan Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He works in the areas of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and comparative philosophy. He received his B.A. in Asian Studies from Amherst College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. He is the co-author (with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch) of the groundbreaking book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press 1991), one of the first books to explore systematically the relationship between Buddhist philosophy and cognitive science and to argue for the "embodied" approach in cognitive science. His new book, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2007. He is also the co-editor, with Philip David Zelazo and Morris Moscovitch, of the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness .
Sponsored by the Departments of English, Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Asian Studies
April 3rd
The English Department and Residential Life are pleased to present a reading by Bowdoin Alumnus and Chair of the English Department at Carleton College, Gregory Blake Smith. The reading will be held at Ladd House, 4:00 p.m., April 3rd, with a reception to follow.
Gregory Blake Smith holds an A.B. summa cum laude from Bowdoin College and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His writing has earned numerous awards, including a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board.Gregory Blake Smith is the author of three novels, The Devil in the Dooryard, The Divine Comedy of John Venner, which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, and the recently released The Madonna of Las Vegas.
This event is open to the public and free of charge.
April 12th
"To Those Born After" -- Please join us for a film and discussion by Christopher Pavsek, to be held Wednesday, April 12th, 7:00 p.m., in Room 315, Searles Science Building. A reception will follow at Ladd House.
The film presents an image of a world fallen into darkness but populated by prophets who declare that the world is full of light, that it is possessed of a moral design bestowed upon it by a divine creator. It is a film about a world possessed, however, of no real moral design other than that of rapacious greed and indifference toward the future.
Christopher Pavsek, Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Haverford College, received his B.A from Cornell and his Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. His films include the documentary "Welcome to the New World Order, AIDS in Vietnam" as well as "To Those Born After."
Sponsored by the English Department and Residential Life.
Open to the Public and Free of Charge
November 18, 2004
Lecture by Author Rick Moody
Hawthorne Longfellow Hall, Nixon Lounge.
2:30 PM
Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm (1994), is regarded as one of the most acclaimed American novelists of his generation. A graduate of Brown University and the Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia University, he published his first novel Garden State in 1992. Since then, his writings have included Demonology (2000), Purple America (1997), The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, and his latest novel, The Black Veil. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review, and Harper's.
Set in New Canaan, Connecticut, The Ice Storm is a novel about the disintegration of a suburban American family that takes place during the course of a single Thanksgiving weekend in the early 1970s. Chicago Tribune's Adam Begley in 1994 wrote, "a bitter and loving and damning tribute to the American family, belongs to a subgenre I think of as suburban Gothic-tidy lawns and two-car garages, all the vulgar complacencies of affluence, mixed with brooding horror, melodramatic violence, extreme psychological states."
"This is a blackly funny, beautifully written novel. It is also remarkably mature, containing far more insights about family life and far more wisdom than any 29-year-old author should reasonably possess." - The London Sunday Times
Moody's most recent book is The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions (2002). The Black Veil takes its title from a Hawthorne story, which, Moody contends, was based on a colonial ancestor of his who wore a black veil as penance for accidentally killing a friend.
"a profound meditation on madness, shame and history, and it's also a rigorous and generous contemplation of heart, land and family.Its timeless exploration of issues that are essential to what it means to be an American makes it likely that 'The Black Veil' will take its place among classic American memoirs." - Jeffrey Smith, The Washington Post Book World on The Black Veil.
Rick Moody has been awarded a Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award, an Addison Metcalf Award, an Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work. He is also an art critic who has contributed text to several contemporary art and photography books, including Roy Lichtenstein: Times Square Mural (2003), Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson (2002), Fred Tomaselli: Ten Year Survey (2001), and Hover: Artist Monographs with Fiction (1998). He resides in Brooklyn.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar spoke about his book Brothers In Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroes, Wednesday, October 6, in Morrell Gymnasium, on the Bowdoin College campus.
A powerful wartime saga, Brothers in Arms recounts the extraordinary story of the 761st Black Panthers, the first all-black armored unit to see combat in World War II. Abdul-Jabbar first learned about the battalion from family friend Leonard "Smitty" Smith, a veteran of the battalion.
Working with acclaimed writer and Bowdoin College faculty member Anthony Walton, Abdul-Jabbar interviewed some of the surviving members of the battalion and their descendants to weave together a page-turning narrative based on their memories and stories, from basic training through the horrors on the battlefield to their postwar experiences in a racially divided America. ( archive event link » )