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During the 2010-2011 academic year, the Kahn Institute and its long- and short-term projects will present a series of lectures by distinguished visiting scholars and artists; details about the visitors and their talks appear below. All are free and open to the public. We hope you enjoy them.
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The nationalist competitions and concerts of the Oireachtas ("Gathering") and the Feis Ceoil ("Festival of Music") sought to promote traditional and art music in early twentieth-century Ireland. Today, however, custodians of Irish traditional music history consider the winners of such competitions eminently forgettable because they are presumed not to have been rural, "traditional" players, but rather urban bourgeois musicians performing Irish tunes in feminized "classical" styles. This association between women and classical music has complicated the posthumous recognition of champion traditional fiddlers Mrs. Bridget Kenny, Teresa Halpin, and Mrs. Sheridan. In this lecture, Tes Slominski, the 2010-2011 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Recent Doctoral Recipient Fellow at the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute, traces assumptions about class, gender, and musical style in Irish traditional music. Using archival recordings and written materials, including two recordings of the reel "The High Road to Galway," she explores the possibility that these women musicians helped popularize a competition style that influenced Michael Coleman and other acknowledged traditional musicians. She will conclude with a brief discussion of the social, musical, and historiographical implications of using "folk" and "traditional" to define genres of cultural production.
4:30 pm Neilson Browsing Room, Neilson Library
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The year 1963 is often considered the symbolic start of the modern women’s movement, especially in the United States, primarily because of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. In retrospect, we can see that decades of political, legal, and social developments for women preceded the 1960s; yet, those movements were often overlooked because their activism was so different from what followed.
In this lecture, Linda Eisenmann, Provost and Professor of Education & History at Wheaton College, examines the contradictions facing postwar U.S. women by juxtaposing two important books published in 1963: Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, which questioned common understandings of women’s needs and roles, and the report of the first presidential Commission on the Status of Women, later released as American Women.
Although Friedan’s work became better known and appeals to today’s readers for its lively feminism, American Women is, in many ways, a truer picture of the era. Placed side by side, these books crystallize the era’s changing views and confusions about women, including different perspectives on advocacy and activism, and on the use of individual vs. collective solutions.
This lecture is presented by
7:30 pm
Neilson Browsing Room, Neilson Library
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TThe metaphor so familiar in religious and even in political discourse, "The New Testament tells us...," or "The Bible teaches...," conceals complex strategies. What do we mean when we claim that a text "speaks" with authority? How does a text get to be sacred? Communities may be created by sacred texts—but sacred texts evolve in communities. What is the social and cultural process by which this dialectic works? Professor Wayne Meeks will explore the complex interplay of religious text and community in this first lecture in the Neilson Professor series.
4:30 pm Neilson Browsing Room, Neilson Library
Use the audio player below to listen to a recording of Professor Meeks' lecture.
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The earliest followers of Jesus struggled to find appropriate images to say who Jesus was—to themselves and to others. This was a self-involving process, for it was at the same time a struggle for the identity of a new movement. It was at heart an interpretive process, both in the broad sense that the work of forming an identity always interprets the world and simultaneously interprets one's own being in it, and in the specific sense that sacred texts and traditions about their meaning were centrally involved. In this second lecture in the Neilson Professor series, Wayne Meeks will discuss this process and explore how comparing it with other movements of the time, both within Judaism and in the wider culture of the Mediterranean basin, helps us to understand it better.
4:30 pm Neilson Browsing Room, Neilson Library
Use the audio player below to listen to a recording of Professor Meeks' lecture.
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From a village in Malaysia to Smith College and beyond, Hoon Eng Khoo, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and the Head of Student Affairs & Admissions at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore, describes her journey and the influences that have shaped her passion for womens education. As a biochemist and educator, she believes that all-girls schools and womens colleges have an important role in increasing the number of women scientists. She will share her vision for an Asia where girls grow up to lead in academia, business, and political life. This lecture is presented by the project titled Why Educate Women? Global Perspectives on Equal Opportunity. It is free and open to the public.
7:30 pm Neilson Browsing Room, Neilson Library
Use the audio player below to listen to a recording of Professor Meeks' lecture.
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The emergence of what we have called scientific history and confidence
that such history could determine what the New Testament means have been
a central theme in post-Enlightenment history. That confidence has, to say the least, been severely shaken in recent decades. We have discovered that, inevitably, our pictures of the past are shaped by reflections of ourselves and our cultures. But if history can't answer our questions, what can? What remains the useful role of history in interpretation—and what kind of history? Wayne Meeks will examine these challenging questions in his third and final lecture in the Neilson Professor series.
4:30 pm Neilson Browsing Room, Neilson Library
Use the audio player below to listen to a recording of Professor Meeks' lecture.
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Click a link below to access a list of Kahn Institute lectures that were recorded during the 2009-2010 academic year.
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