Seminars 2022-23

This two-day seminar offers an intimate look at theatre-in-action at Boston’s leading professional company. Through discussions with the artists and artisans responsible for producing, designing and managing a full-scale production, participants will gain valuable insight into the theatrical process. Participants will attend two matinee productions at the Huntington Theatre:

1. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, October 27, 2022. August Wilson’s masterpiece returns to The Huntington. At a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911, Herald Loomis arrives in search of his lost wife – but first he must regain a sense of his own heritage and identity. A stunning story of spiritual and emotional resurrection, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone pays tribute to a makeshift community that springs up in the Great Migration in this new production helmed by Lili-Anne Brown.
   
2. Clyde’s, April 6, 2023. Playwright Lynn Nottage (Sweat, Ruined) returns to Boston with her most recent Broadway hit. A truck stop sandwich shop offers its formerly incarcerated kitchen staff a shot at reclaiming their lives. Even as the shop’s callous owner tries to keep them under her thumb, the staff members are given purpose and permission to dream by the enigmatic, zen-like chef and his belief in the possibility of the perfect sandwich. Funny, moving, and urgent, Clyde’s shows playwright Lynn Nottage’s “genius for bringing politically charged themes to life by embodying them in ordinary characters living ordinary lives.” (The Wall Street Journal).

Marisa Jones, Huntington Theatre Co.
Dates: October 27, 2022 & April 6, 2023. (9:00-2:00)

MARISA JONES: With a B.F.A. from Emerson College and Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Marisa Jones joined the Education Department at the Huntington Theatre Company in 2002. As a long-standing member of the Huntington’s Department of Education, Marisa facilitates and manages multiple programs while serving as a director, writer and teaching artist. Marisa currently serves as the department’s Associate Director of Education and Practical Learning

In this three-day seminar you will be introduced to various kinds of prints and will learn how to use the new, easy to use and clean water-soluble inks (AKUA) in your classrooms. Printmaking is a marvelous introduction to other art forms as it stimulates both creative and analytical problem solving. We will start with trace monotypes, and move on through stencils and viscosity monotype, to exploring various ways to achieve variety and texture by making collographs. I emphasize experimentation and encourage investigation of personal imagery. Please note that even if you don’t have access to a press in your classrooms, you will learn techniques that can be used without equipment. Teachers of all subjects and grade levels are welcomed and encouraged to enroll. The seminar will be conducted in Randy’s Somerville Mix-It studio in Davis Square.

Randy Garber, Artist
Dates: November 8, 16, & 21, 2022

RANDY GARBER’s art practice is divided between her studio in Somerville, MA and the Mixit Print Studio also in Somerville, MA. She teaches printmaking at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a recipient of many artist awards and grants including The Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and awards from the Puffin Foundation, St. Botolph Foundation, and Somerville Artists Grants, Randy’s work can be found in museum, corporate, and private collections including The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the DeCordova Museum, the Boston Athenaeum, The Boston Public Library, the Children’s Hospital, Karp Cancer Research Building, and the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf in Portland, ME. Recent solo and group exhibitions of her work include the Currier Art Museum, Lesley University, Simmons College, Sage College of Albany, DeCordova Museum, Boston Convention Center, and the Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, Texas.

In this collage class, we will use design principles, intuition, choices about scale, texture, and detail for emphasis and storytelling. Collage is simultaneously an accessible art form and sophisticated design practice; personal and pre-eminently modern, it grabs materials from the rush of daily life. “What is around you” becomes your materials and even your subject, while making choices to express a meaning. We will consider the use of text as part of a design or work of art, whether your own writing or another’s. Materials will be provided, and you can also bring your own. Exploring the materials of collage includes different kinds of adhesives and mediums, cutting tools, and resources. Also, we’ll share – explaining our intentions can expand our ideas and incorporate narrative into our images. The course will include discussion about using collage as part of curriculum, and also a brief slide show about collage in art history. You will need to purchase some basic supplies in a provided supply list.

Laurie Sheffield
Dates: November 29 & December 6, 2022

LAURIE SHEFFIELD is a printmaker, painter and collage artist, focused on landscape, close observation, painterly gesture, and creating narratives through imagery. She earned her BFA and BA at Cornell University in printmaking, painting and English literature, and her MAT at Simmons College. She has done advanced work at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts College of Art, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Boston University and is part of an online collage community/ongoing class through the South Shore Art Center. Along with teaching English in the Brookline Public Schools (retired 2019), Laurie studied printmaking at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education for 20 years and now teaches printmaking at CCAE. Her work has been shown at CCAE, the Cambridge Art Association, the Nave Gallery in Somerville, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, South Shore Art Center, and the Brickbottom Artists Building

Ancient Nubia, extending from Sudan into southern Egypt, was an unquestionably Black civilization that prospered for over 6,000 years and produced colossal statuary of kings, delicate gold jewelry, fine ceramics and more pyramids than its northern neighbor. Yet today this amazing culture – its monuments and its contributions to world culture – have, until recently, been largely ignored. Together we will rediscover Nubia’s sophisticated art and culture in its historical context and explore its relevance and resonance today. This seminar will take place at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

Rita Freed, Chair Emerita, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Dates: December 1, 2022

RITA FREED received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her M. A. and Ph. D. in Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She was Associate Professor of Art at the University of Memphis and founding Director of the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology before coming to the MFA, Boston, to head the Department of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art, a position she now holds as Emerita. Last year she was the Michael Cohen Fellow in Art History at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University, and she is currently a non-resident Fellow. She is pursuing research in Nubian art and developing methods to make it more widely available. She also teaches Egyptian and Nubian Art at Wellesley College.

This course (which neither assumes nor requires previous training in music) follows the line from Rhythm and Blues and the influential Motown, Atlantic, and Stax labels of the 1960s and ‘70s, through funk, concluding with the influence of this music on Rap, sampling, and hip-hop culture. These records provided the soundtrack for African-American identity, from the civil rights protests of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, to the Black Power movement of the 1970s and, eventually, to the urban commentary of the Hip Hop era. Embedded within America’s quest for equality, the racial inequities laid bare by the Vietnam war, the urban decay and poverty corroding cities, and the promise – and mirage – of the “American Dream,” are the lyrics and sounds produced by the artists of this music – Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, The Supremes, The Temptations, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, to name just a few. As we find ourselves today at yet another critical stage in this history, the cry for justice and reparation echoes more loudly than ever in the music that anticipated this moment.

Participants in this class will become familiar with the history of Black American music through recordings (including field recordings) and performances. The class format will be interactive to permit discussions about the music, film clips, performances, and class readings.

Victor Coelho, Boston University
Dates: December 2 & 9, 2022

VICTOR COELHO is Professor of Music in the Dept. of Musicology and Ethnomusicology and Director of the Center for Early Music Studies at Boston University. A musicologist and performer on lute and guitar, he works primarily in the areas of Renaissance music and popular culture, with a particular interest in interdisciplinary approaches, global perspectives, music and culture, African-American music, rock history, blues, improvisation, and performance issues. His books include Instrumentalists and Renaissance Culture,1420-1600 (with Keith Polk) (Cambridge), Music and Science in the Age of Galileo (Kluwer), Performance on Lute, Guitar, and Vihuela (Cambridge), The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, and the recently published Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones (ed. with John Covach). http://people.bu.edu/blues/

What happens when we gather before a work of art? How do we view and understand it? This two-day seminar will introduce participants to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s learner-centered approach to teaching visual art. Participants will develop and practice concrete strategies for facilitating discussions that make art accessible to all students and allow their ideas and perspectives to take center stage. From team building and mindfulness to critical thinking, we will reflect on the benefits of using the Visual Thinking Strategies approach to talking about art. Much of the seminar will be spent in the galleries of the Museum, learning with and through artworks in the collection. Teachers of all subjects and grade levels are encouraged to enroll. The seminar will be conducted at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Sara Egan, Asst. Director, School and Teaching Programs, ISGM
Dates: December 5 & 12, 2022

SARA EGAN is a museum educator whose work is grounded in constructivism and the use of discussions about works of art to affirm all voices. She connects Boston students and teachers with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as Assistant Director of School and Teaching Programs. Sara holds a BA from Vassar College and an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is an Adjunct Professor of Art at Simmons College.

This two-day class will focus on the history of American musical theater and more specifically on highlighting the groundbreaking yet often forgotten (or appropriated) achievements of artists of color, such as “Master Juba,” Ernest Hogan, and Aida Overton Walker. We will look closely at the largely un-taught theatrical sub-genre of the minstrel show, revealing the huge and lasting influence both black and white performers who got their start in these shows had on American stage and screen musicals. We will analyze film clips of songs, scenes, and dance numbers and hopefully visit the Harvard Theater Collection to see archival materials related to this topic.

This course is open to all teachers who are interested in the topic and all grade levels of music teachers are especially encouraged to consider enrollment.

Marah Gubar, MIT
Dates: January 12 & 19, 2023

MARAH GUBAR, who earned a B.F.A. in musical theater performance from the University of Michigan, somehow ended up as an Associate Professor of Literature at MIT. Her book Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009) contains chapters about the nineteenth-century cult of the child actor and the emergence of Anglo-American children’s theatre. She has since written a series of articles about the early and later history of American musical theater and edited the first special issue on “Children and Theater” published by a U.S. children’s literature journal, the April 2012 installment of The Lion and the Unicorn. 

We know that drawing and writing helps us to remember and process information. It is also a meaningful way to record ideas, feelings, people and places. Using a variety of watercolor techniques, pens, markers, and collage, we’ll use our 2 days together to discover ways of sketching and journaling that can help bring meaning to our daily lives and discover new parts of our creativity. We will also explore ways of integrating visual learning with your students. Whether you consider yourself artistic or not, this is for everyone to discover ways of mark making and recording that can become a lifelong skill and one that can also help your students learn in new ways. We’ll look at journals in a variety of styles and cover basic drawing, perspective, color mixing, page design, mixed media techniques, and enjoy artmaking. You will need to purchase some basic supplies in a provided supply list.

Miranda Loud, Artist
Dates: January 24 & February 7, 2023

MIRANDA LOUD is a multimedia artist producing works in a variety of media: video, painting, collage, photography and music. She has held fellowships at the Banff Center for the Arts in Banff, Canada, the St. Botolph Club of Boston and, among a variety of awards, won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Gold Star Award for her multimedia performance Buccaneers of Buzz: Celebrating the Honeybee which was performed as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. Her work is available at www.mirandaloudartist.com.

18th-century writer Horace Walpole’s claim — “The world is a comedy to those that think and a tragedy to those that feel” — suggests that comedy serves purposes beyond simply making us laugh. While delighting and distracting us, many comedies also comment on the prevailing ethos by imagining a more moral and just social order. This seminar explores the history, theory, and intentions of comic form in American movies from the silent era to the present moment, when satire and dark humor are significant contributors to our public discourses and communal sensibilities. Through films, readings, and discussions, we will examine how such narrative modes as satire, irony, and surrealism have confronted social issues and addressed power relations with irreverent insight. As we view select excerpts and films, we will consider the ways in which comic narratives both contribute to and, often, critique social norms, cultural myths and national ideologies.

Julie Levinson, Babson College
Dates: April 6 and 13, 2023

JULIE LEVINSON is Professor of Film and Chair of the Arts and Humanities division at Babson College. She is the author of The American Success Myth on Film, editor of Alexander Payne: Interviews, and co-editor of Acting, part of the ten-volume Behind the Silver Screen book series. Her publications in journals and edited collections focus on a wide range of topics including genre and gender, documentary film, metafiction, and narrative theory.​​​ She has been a film curator for arts institutions including Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Boston Film/Video Foundation, the Flaherty Film Seminar and the Celebration of Black Cinema. She has served as an editorial consultant for many documentary films and as a grants panelist for such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

“How Can We Not Talk About Family When Family Is All That We Got?’ (Wiz Khalifa, “See You Again”). 

Our starting point is my conviction that The Wire, one of the most popular serials in U.S. television history, is exceedingly traditional in form and theme. It is not simply the fact that it is a serial, and that most major works of nineteenth century fiction were also introduced to their publics in similar increments designed to create an appetite for their stories and characters. It is also the way it combines graphic violence with verbal invention and eloquence, powerful characters with epic failure and criminality, and, above all, how it represents the myth of family. In The Wire, as in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, or The Godfather films, the family is presented in grimly realistic terms; but no matter how provisional, battered, or broken these families appear, the idea of family prevails–all their characters are devoted to the idea of blood bonds and loyalty to kin.  We will study The Godfather and The Wire’s first season and the differences between film and television in our culture and draw on my biography of Marlon Brando to discuss acting techniques and other aspects of the Coppola film. Other sources will include Frederic Jameson’s “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” and other theories on film and television. 

Susan Mizruchi, Boston University
Dates: May 4 & 10, 2023

SUSAN MIZRUCHI is William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Humanities Center at Boston University. She is editor, most recently, of “Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age,” 2020, Palgrave Macmillan, and has a “Very Short Introduction to Henry James” forthcoming with Oxford University Press. She is the author of a biography of Marlon Brando, “Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work”, 2014, Norton. Her other books include: “The Power of Historical Knowledge”, 1988, Princeton; “The Science of Sacrifice”, 1998, Princeton; “Becoming Multicultural”, 2005, Cambridge; “The Rise of Multicultural America”, 2008 University of North Carolina; and she has edited, Religion and Cultural Studies, 2001, Princeton.  She has published articles on “Risk Theory and the Contemporary American Novel” (2010); “Canons for the Study of Religion and Literature,” (2009); “Lolita’ in History” (2003) and “The School of Martyrdom: Culture and Class in ‘Catcher in the Rye.”  Her teaching has ranged from courses on Henry James and Renaissance Love Poetry to courses on Representing Gender in Literature and Film and 1950’s America.

Today, immigration has become a hot-button political issue as new immigrants from across the world are remaking American society. Historians believe that a better understanding of the historical past can help us put into context the problems of our own time. During this two-day seminar, we will look at the history of American immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We will do this by focusing on the history of Ellis Island, the federal government inspection station that processed three-quarters of all immigrants who came to America during this period. In doing so, we will look at the experiences of immigrants and their reasons for leaving, the process of immigrant inspection, the attitudes of native-born Americans toward new immigrants, the evolution of American immigration laws, and the experiences of immigrants after their arrival. We will also discuss how the historical memory of sites like Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty have evolved over time.

Vincent Cannato, UMass Boston
Dates: November 7 & 14, 2022

VINCENT J. CANNATO is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He received his BA with honors in Political Science from Williams College and his PhD in History from Columbia University. At UMASS Boston, Prof. Cannato teaches courses on New York City history, Boston history, immigration history, and twentieth-century American history. He is the author of American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins, 2009); The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and his Struggle to Save New York (Basic Books, 2001); and co-editor of Living in the Eighties (Oxford University Press, 2009). He is currently working on a political biography of Francis Cardinal Spellman, former archbishop of New York. Professor Cannato has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, Humanities Magazine, and The New Republic.

In the wake of the SCOTUS decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) that struck down Roe v. Wade (1973), we explore some of the Court’s most significant decisions on key women’s rights, specifically political, economic, and bodily autonomy and privacy rights. At issue in many of these cases is whether women constitute a special and separate class in need of unique treatment (in terms of opportunities and protections) or women comprise a group of citizens with rights equal to those of men, in terms of both opportunities and protections. Among the cases we’ll analyze and discuss are: Minor v. Happersett (1874) which held that the 14thAmendment did not guarantee women the right to vote; rather women constituted a special class of non-voting citizen; Muller v. Oregon (1908) which opined that the state could limit women’s working hours in order to protect women’s health in direct contrast to Lochner v. New York (1905) where the state was barred from restricting men’s working hours; and Buck v. Bell (1927) which affirmed a state’s right to forcibly sterilize a person considered unfit to procreate and enabled the sterilization of nearly 70,000 people, mostly women of color and poor women from the 1920s to the mid-1970s.

Maura A. Henry, Holyoke Community College
Dates: November 15 & December 7, 2022

MAURA HENRY is an historian who has taught in and co-led Harvard’s History and Women’s Studies programs. Having earned her bachelor’s degree at Smith in History and Philosophy and her master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard, Maura explores gender, power, and culture in her scholarship and interdisciplinary courses. Her writings include A Duchess’s Grand Tour, The Making of Aristocratic English Culture, The Soul of the People and the WPA’s Writer’s Project, and Rescue (an award-winning screenplay). She has previously led a TAS study tour to Dublin. Currently, she is working on a manuscript on family, dysfunction, and meaning.

The story of the Mayflower and the creation of Plymouth Colony in 1620 maintains
a strong hold on the American imagination and popular culture. America’s founding myth depicts the establishment of the Puritan settlement, celebrated at Thanksgiving, as the point of origin of the country. The history of the indigenous peoples on whose lands the English moved are too often a marginal or a neglected part of the founding myth of New England and America. Our workshop will not attempt to provide a comprehensive history. We will focus on a few select case studies, historic sketches, and biographies from throughout New England, we will explore the complex story of Native Americans in the region. We will pay close attention to how the experience of indigenous peoples is representative of other regions in the United States, but also how New England had divergent developments. While this workshop will not turn a blind eye to the impact that colonization, disease, dispossession, and racism had on the lives of indigenous peoples in New England, it will also emphasize Native American resistance, adaptation, and survival under often harsh and unfavorable circumstances.

Christoph Strobel, University of Massachusetts (Lowell)
Dates: December 7 & 14, 2022

CHRISTOPH STROBEL is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is the author of Native Americans of New England, The Global Atlantic: 1400-1900, The Testing Grounds of Modern Empire, co-author with Alice Nash of Daily Life of Native Americans from Post-Columbian through Nineteenth-Century America, and he has published three books on immigration. Christoph’s scholarly essays appear in many academic journals and in various edited collections.

Known as the “Cradle of Liberty,” Boston often prides itself for its progressive politics, but many locals argue it is one of the nation’s most racist cities. Why is the city’s racial past hidden? Why is the city obscured in dominant civil rights movement narratives? In this two-day seminar, teachers will be introduced to Boston’s postwar racial history, including segregation, migration, and “urban crisis” in Boston’s “Black Boomerang” neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and the South End. We will examine how African American and Latinx residents organized the local long freedom movement, a series of interconnected grassroots mobilizations around issues like poverty, welfare, housing, and education from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Tatiana Cruz, Simmons University
Dates: January 13 & 20, 2023

TATIANA CRUZ is an Assistant Professor and Director of Africana Studies at Simmons University. She also holds a Faculty Fellowship at the New England Board of Higher Education. She received her B.A. from Williams College, and a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her research interests include African American and Latinx history, urban history, 20th century social movements, comparative race and ethnic studies, oral history, and women’s and gender studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Deep North Uprising: African American and Latinx Identity, Community, and Protest in Boston.

Maps tell stories. Historic maps in particular can tell us much about how our views of our world have evolved and also connect us to historic events both globally and in our own backyards. Helping students of all ages to read and analyze maps is key, not only for the where and what but also to help them evaluate the source critically, asking about the context, author’s purpose and motivations. This two-day seminar will introduce teachers to the collections of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, a wealth of over ​250,000 maps, atlases, digital geospatial data, globes and other primary source materials dating from 1482 to the present. Participants will explore maps in the collection​, as well as learn to create maps with data, and connect to a variety of topics and time periods such as immigration, urban renewal and world maps. We will also go onto the streets of Boston to use digital mapping tools to explore how the city has changed over time and learn how geo-referenced historic maps open up amazing possibilities for discovery.

Michelle LeBlanc
Dates: March 2 & 10, 2023

MICHELLE LeBLANC has over 20 years of experience in museum and classroom settings, teaching history and designing programming for varied audiences. Since 2013, she has been Director of Education for the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library where she directs teacher training, school programming and curriculum development around teaching with maps, both historical and digital. She has served as Project Director for two Teaching American History grants, a federal program that provided professional development for K-12 teachers. She holds an M.A. in American History and Public History from Northeastern University and is a licensed teacher for grades 5-8 social studies in Massachusetts.

This two-day seminar examines how race has informed a particular narrative of American history. Due to the deliberate racialization of American citizenship, this historical narrative amplified certain voices, while muting others, particularly those of African descent. Hands-on analyses of primary artifacts (e.g. letters and newspapers), specifically drawn from archives located in Boston, will be used to identify and discuss concrete examples of historical privileging and repression—two devices employed in the “making” of a monolithic depiction of American history. The seminar concludes with the creation of a digital timeline of a specified period in American history that captures a more inclusive historical narrative.

Margarita Simon Guillory, Boston University
Dates: March 10 & 17, 2023

MARGARITA SIMON GUILLROY is an Associate Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Boston University. She is the author of Social and Spiritual Transformation in African American Spiritual Churches (Routledge 2018) and co-editor of Esotericism in African American Religious Experience (Brill 2014). Her current project, Africana Religion in the Digital Age (under contract with Routledge), considers how African Americans utilize the Internet, social media, mobile applications, and gaming to forge new ways to express their religious identities.

Have you ever gone into a home décor store and seen Buddha heads for sale? What do those dismembered heads evoke and how does a Buddha in a retail store compare to one in a traditional religious setting? Have you heard of mindfulness meditation? Where does this practice come from and what is its relationship to Buddhism? In this course, we answer these questions by illuminating the invisible contexts and assumptions related to Buddhism. We begin by examining how textual, visual, and material forms of religious expressions have been conceptualized and used by Buddhists in different times and cultures. Then, we will focus on how Buddhist objects are understood and re-contextualized in the West. Specifically, we examine the collection and display of Buddhist objects in museums as well as the use of Buddhist imagery in Western pop culture and in war propaganda. We will also look at the use of meditation practices in non-Buddhist spaces. All are welcome in this course—those with only a basic curiosity as well as those with a deep knowledge of the subject.

April Hughes, Boston University
Dates: March 13 & 21, 2023

APRIL D. HUGHES teaches Buddhism and East Asian religions at Boston University, where she is associate professor of religion. Her research centers on an archeological site near Dunhuang on the Silk Road where a treasure trove of medieval (pre-14th century) manuscripts and wall paintings were discovered in the 20th century. Her book, Worldly Saviors and Imperial Authority in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021), examines the centrality of apocalypticism to Chinese imperial sovereignty, particularly during the reign of the only woman emperor, Wu Zhao (Wu Zetian, r. 690-705). She holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University and M.A. degrees in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

One of the best ways of understanding poetry is writing poems yourself. Whether you want to jump-start your own writing, to gather ideas for teaching poetry to students, or just to learn more about poetry yourself, this workshop will serve as inspiration and support. In a model different from the usual TAS offering, we will meet online on four Monday evenings from 7-8:30pm. Each week participants will prepare for class by responding to a writing prompt focused on a particular aspect of poetic technique (line breaks, sound, image, revision) with options to play with narrative poems, poems in form, prose poems, and poems that bend reality. In each session there will be time to share and respond to participants’ poems while we deepen our appreciation of poetry from a writer’s perspective. We will find inspiration in the work of published poets as well as in each other’s work. Teachers of all grade levels and disciplines, with or without experience in poetry, are encouraged to enroll. This workshop will be kept small to allow for individual feedback.

Mary Burchenal, Teachers as Scholars
Dates: November 7, 14, 28 & December 5, 2022 (evening online sessions)

MARY BURCHENAL began her teaching career in independent schools, and then joined the English department at Brookline High School where she stayed for twenty-nine years — the last fifteen as department chair. Her favorite course to teach was a year-long creative writing course for seniors. After retiring from teaching in 2019, Mary joined Teachers as Scholars, a program that fed her teaching life for 25 years. Mary writes poetry and lives in Jamaica Plain. Mary holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an M.A. in Curriculum and Teacher Education from Stanford University.

…. or a concise presentation of people responding to demanding and complex circumstances. In this two-day seminar we will read and discuss four masters of the short story –Tobias Wolff, Adam Haslett, ZZ Packer and Louise Erdich–who present the way we live with startling clarity and generosity of spirit. Most importantly, they offer excellent opportunities for teachers to show their students how these stories reveal what it takes to live a fulfilled life.

Theo Theoharis, Harvard University
Dates: December 8 & 16, 2022

THEO THEOHARIS teaches at Harvard University.  He is the author of James Joyce’s Ulysses: An Anatomy of the Soul and Ibsen’s Drama: Right Action and Tragic Joy.  His latest book is Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy.  He has lectured throughout Europe and the U.S. and has led many professional development activities for teachers.

This seminar situates the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) within the slave narrative tradition—a popular genre in pre-Civil War America that remains vital to literary history today. We will begin by focusing on Douglass’s Narrative before moving outward toward relevant contexts—from the form, production, and reception of slave narratives, to their relationships with other genres of the period (autobiography, the novel, conversion narratives), to their broader influence on the slavery crisis and African American literature. The format of the seminar will be discussion-based with short readings, exercises, and group projects done in class. The aim is not only to expand the knowledge-base of participants but to workshop strategies, supplementary materials, activities, and assignments for classroom use.

Maurice Lee, Boston University
Dates: January 11 and 18, 2023

MAURICE S. LEE is Professor of English at Boston University, where he specializes in nineteenth-century American literature. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, 2009) and the author of three books: Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature (Cambridge, 2005), Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford, 2012), and Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution (Princeton, 2019).  

Historically, young people have been leading activists and advocates for many key movements for social justice and change, despite schools and curricula often failing to share these stories or teach these skills. This two-day seminar will explore how teachers might disrupt their current curricula by incorporating rich and engaging texts for young adults into a more equitable and social justice-driven curriculum. We will explore a wide range of texts for young adults that might explore issues of equity and help students explore their own activism and identity development. Participants will choose and read 2 entire works from a selected list of possibilities (fiction and nonfiction) and work with segments of others. We will use frameworks such as the Learning for Justice Social Justice Standards and the HILL equity framework to consider how incorporating these texts might create spaces to disrupt inequality based in racism, cis-heteronormative patriarchy, ableism, and dominant English monolingualism in classrooms and schools.

Christina Dobbs, Boston University
Dates: February 3 & 10, 2023

CHRISTINA DOBBS is an Assistant Professor in English Education. Her research interests include language diversity and development, the argumentative writing of students, and professional development for secondary content teachers. She has authored a variety of publications on these topics, following the completion of her doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Investigating Disciplinary Literacy and Disciplinary Literacy Inquiry and Instruction, as well as the editor of Humanizing Education: Critical Alternatives to Reform. She is a former high school teacher in Houston, Texas, as well as a literacy coach and reading specialist.

One of the best ways of understanding the craft of writing is writing short fiction pieces yourself. Whether you are looking for a way to jump-start your own writing, or for new ideas about teaching creative writing to students, or just for a way to learn more about fiction, this workshop will serve as inspiration and support. In a model different from the usual TAS offering, we will meet online on four Monday evenings from 7-8:30pm. Each week participants will prepare for class by responding to a writing prompt focused on a specific aspect of craft working toward complete works of flash fiction. In each session there will be time to share and to respond to participants’ work, as well as to deepen our appreciation of short fiction from a writer’s perspective. We will find inspiration in the work of published writers, as well as in each other’s work. Teachers of all grade levels and disciplines, with or without experience in poetry, are encouraged to enroll. This workshop will be kept small to allow for individual feedback.

Mary Burchenal, Teachers as Scholars
Dates: Feb 6, 13, 27, & March 6 (evening online sessions)

MARY BURCHENAL began her teaching career in independent schools, and then joined the English department at Brookline High School where she stayed for twenty-nine years — the last fifteen as department chair. Her favorite course to teach was a year-long creative writing course for seniors. After retiring from teaching in 2019, Mary joined Teachers as Scholars, a program that fed her teaching life for 25 years. Mary writes poetry and lives in Jamaica Plain. Mary holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an M.A. in Curriculum and Teacher Education from Stanford University.

Twelfth Night is the perfect play to introduce your students to Shakespeare as it is chock full of humor, wit, sarcasm and more—the lingua franca of your students. We will laugh. Shakespeare uses farce, satire, burlesque in plot; wit, coinages, and deliberate misuse of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary in language; exaggeration, distortion, and  inconsistency in content. 

The play explicitly announces, a number of times, that it contains “zanies” and fools, A love story of mistaken identity, inconstant loyalty, preposterously wrong wooing, and deceived vanity that works out just fine in the end for the good guys and a little too cruelly for the bad guy. That Romantic Love should be presented in such antic ways may be the biggest reason to laugh, the most satisfying, and the most relieving one offered by the play, and study of it. Buckle up.

Theo Theoharis, Harvard University
Dates: February 7 & 15, 2023

THEO THEOHARIS teaches at Harvard University. He is the author of James Joyce’s Ulysses: An Anatomy of the Soul and Ibsen’s Drama: Right Action and Tragic Joy. His latest book is Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy. He has lectured throughout Europe and the U.S. and has led many professional development activities for teachers.

This two-day seminar examines the development and history of the picaresque, one of the most revolutionary genres in European literature.  Published anonymously in 1554, Lazarillo de Tormes inaugurates the picaresque that is characterized by an unforgiving sense of socio-political critique.  This genre found its way into some of the most important literary works of the time in Spain and has infused Latin American literature and film until today. In our time together we will examine the founding works of picaresque against the evolution of heroic paradigms in the early modern period, consider its central place in Cervantes’s Don Quijote, and trace the genre’s influence in Latin American texts from the earlier colonial period to the present day. Finally, we will consider how picaresque-influenced texts have shaped U.S. imaginations of the Spanish-speaking world.  This seminar will be taught in Spanish.

Daniel Cuenca, Northeastern University
Dates: February 16 & March 2, 2023

DANIEL CUENCA specializes in modernity theory from the perspective of literary and film studies and focuses specifically on the (de-)construction of the binary fictions of “First and Third Worlds” as textual and epistemological functions of mass media. He has written extensively on Guy Debord’s theories on the society of the spectacle and is currently working on updating the French philosopher’s postulations on time-space, dérive, and psycho-geographies as they apply to “post-” modernity and literary theory

The term “Afrofuturism” was coined in the 1990s to describe the dynamic multimedia genre now known for authors such as Octavia Butler, N. K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor and films such as Black Panther. Writer Jamie Broadnax describes Afrofuturism as “the reimagining of a future filled with arts, science and technology seen through a black lens.” Scholar Ytasha Womack adds that “In some cases, it’s a total reenvisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques.” In this two-day seminar we will examine this genre from historical, literary, artistic, and philosophical perspectives and share recommended texts and activities that can be used to engage students in the classroom. Together we will explore the questions central to the genre: “How does Afrofuturism dismantle oppression and create a future world where everyone is free?” and “What is the potential of science fiction to create this world in our own future?” We will model ways of structuring discussions, debates, and writing assignments about this topic. We will provide examples of how students can create their own Afrofuturist-inspired pieces. Finally, we will discuss how this genre can be taught in conjunction with traditional histories and literature.

Laura Honeywood and Talmadge Nardi, Brookline High School
Dates: March 1 & 9, 2023

LAURA HONEYWOOD is currently the 10-12 grade history teacher in the Alternative Choices in Education program at Brookline High School. She has spent 10 years teaching history in 8-12th grade classrooms in Washington DC and Boston. She is a graduate of Brown University and American University. Laura has previously presented workshops for teachers through The International Institute of Rhode Island, American University, the Center for Civic Education, the Pioneer Institute and Primary Source.

TALMADGE NARDI is an English teacher at Brookline High School where she currently teaches a course in Future World Literature to high school sophomores. She began teaching Afrofuturism after her history colleague Laura Honeywood started introducing her to Afrofuturism book recommendations. Talmadge has previously presented workshops for teachers through UMass Boston/Teach Plus and Primary Source. She is a graduate of Lesley University and The Evergreen State College. She has been teaching high school English in the Boston area for 15 years.

In this seminar we look at some significant ways in which the English language has developed over the last thousand years. How did Old English “cniht” become Modern English “knight,” with both a different pronunciation and spelling, and with a modified meaning – and what about those silent letters?  Why do we have the word “motherly,” from the native word “mother,” but also “maternal,” from the Latin “mater”? We’ll look at how English has “borrowed” thousands of words from other languages, especially Latin and Greek, and how they have enriched the language.  We’ll also consider how, by dropping most of its grammatical inflections – no more tables of verbs or nouns to learn – English has become much less flexible in its word order. As well as looking at individual words, we’ll read passages from various periods of English literature, such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and T. S. Eliot, observing how English has changed from being a virtually “foreign” language into the familiar vernacular we use today. We’ll spend some time reading these extracts aloud, so as to get a better feel for the language at each stage of its development.

Prerequisite: nothing specific, except an interest in language and a willingness to explore some moderately technical details.

Graeme Bird, Gordon College
Dates: March 3 & 9, 2023

GRAEME BIRD studied classics and mathematics in his native New Zealand, before coming to the US in 1981 to pursue his interest in jazz piano at the Berklee College of Music.  He later got his PhD in classical philology at Harvard, and has been involved in education ever since.  He currently teaches linguistics and classics at Gordon College, and mathematics, including Greek mathematics, at Harvard Extension and Summer School.

An introduction to the ideas of data science using spreadsheets.  We will find and display data illustrating climate change, the pandemic, and topics of participants’ choice. In addition, we will build spreadsheet models of credit card debt or make projections. The seminar will not expect prior knowledge of spreadsheets. A computer which can access the internet and a google login are helpful; participants can work in google sheets or in Excel.

Deborah Hughes Hallett, University of Arizona and Harvard Kennedy School
Eric Connally, Harvard Extension
Dates: November 8 & 18, 2022 

DEBORAH HUGHES HALLETT is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. With Andrew M. Gleason at Harvard, she organized the Calculus Consortium based at Harvard and she is an author of several college level mathematics texts. Her work has been recognized by prizes from Harvard, the University of Arizona, the Association for Women in Mathematics, the Mathematical Association of America, and was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for contributions to mathematics education.

ERIC CONNALLY is principal software engineer at Illustrative Mathematics, a non-profit organization that develops K-12 curriculum materials. He has taught math at Harvard College, Harvard Kennedy School, and Wellesley College, and has co-authored several math textbooks. He currently teaches a course on spreadsheets at Harvard Extension School, where he has been an instructor for close to 30 years.

A matrix is a rectangular array of numbers.  Matrices have been a tool of mathematicians for centuries, but are now more important than over with applications in big data analytics, sports, science, social choice and other fields. We examine a variety of these applications that could be introduced to students from the elementary grades through upper level high school courses.  We will do some simple examples by hand, and we will examine how more complex problems give shape to modern ideas in computing.

Richard Cleary, Babson College
Dates: March 7 & 14, 2023 

RICK CLEARY teaches at Babson College where he is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics. He has previously taught at Bentley University, Harvard University, Cornell University and St. Michael’s College.  He works as an applied statistician in various fields, with recent publications related to sports, fraud detection in accounting, measuring creativity in business students, and biomechanics.  Rick is active in the leadership of the Mathematical Association of America, having served six years on the Executive committee and working on several initiatives including an Instructional Practices Guide.  He enjoys participating in sports, particularly running and golf, and coaching youth baseball and basketball.

The ability to encode information so that only certain recipients can read it (or, conversely, to read information you are not supposed to have!) contains some of the most exciting applications of pure and applied mathematics. Since at least the time of Julius Caesar (the title to this course is encoded with the cipher he made famous), codes and ciphers have been used to protect important information. We’ll discuss various cryptosystems used over the centuries, mixing history and theory. In the course of our studies we’ll discuss results from number theory, group theory, graph theory and combinatorics. This seminar is most appropriate for middle school and high school math teachers, but anyone who enjoys numbers and problem solving is welcome. A goal of the class is to work with teachers to have grade appropriate units that can be used with their students.

Steven Miller, Williams College
Dates: March 20 & 27, 2023 

STEVEN J. MILLER is a Professor of Mathematics at Williams College. He has written over 100 papers in accounting, computer science, economics, geology, marketing, number theory, probability/statistics, and sabermetrics, and 5 books on Benford’s law, cryptography, number theory, operations research and probability. He is active in high school mathematics, lecturing and mentoring at programs for talented students, participating in education conferences and writing problems for the American Mathematics Competitions, and serving as an elected member of the Lanesborough-Williamstown Regional School District. His math riddles webpage is in the top 10 in Google searches.

What is the Earth’s place in the Universe? We will begin locally with the Goldilocks problem: Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold, and the Earth is just right. How did this come about, and how special is the Earth? We will explore global warming, runaway greenhouses, and cosmic threats to life, such as giant asteroid impacts that may have killed off the dinosaurs. At Jupiter and Saturn, we will visit worlds with swirling storms, beautiful rings, and a hoard of exotic moons–some with active volcanoes, rivers of methane, and underground oceans. Next, we will explore the bizarre and provocative planetary worlds orbiting other stars in our galaxy, and  consider the prospects for life elsewhere in the universe. We’ll conclude with a whirlwind tour of the origin and fate of the universe itself, from the Big Bang to the unimaginably distant future. Class will be held at Wellesley College’s on-campus Whitin Observatory.

Richard G. French, Wellesley College
Dates: January 10 & 24, 2023

RICHARD G. FRENCH is the McDowell/Whiting Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics at Wellesley College, where he was awarded the Pinanski Prize for Teaching Excellence. Professor French enjoys sharing the wonders of the universe beginner and experts alike and exploring the interconnections between the science and the humanities. He was a science team member of NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn from 1990 until the spacecraft was intentionally crashed into Saturn in 2017, and he enjoys collaborating with colleagues from around the world, a reminder that we are common inhabitants of spaceship Earth with a deeply shared wonderment about the world we inhabit.

In this two-day seminar we will explore the life of Alan M. Turing, pioneer of AI,  mathematician and codebreaker par excellence, widely known through the movies “Breaking the  Code” and “The Imitation Game”, as well as the Turing Test (“Bladerunner”, “Ex Machina”) and “Turing’s Law” (2017), which granted posthumous pardons to over 30,000 men in Britain  unjustly convicted (as Turing was) of “gross indecency” for their homosexuality. Turing is  undoubtedly one of the most important scientists of the last 500 years. He was also a gifted and  prescient philosopher-humanist, with deep ideas about the challenges that the computer  revolution would generate for everyday life in a computationally-driven world. Insisting on the  centrality of the human quest for culture, meaning, and what he called “phraseology” – something always partial, tentative, and in need of repair – Turing took the human and social  perspective to be fundamental to our ideas about machines, algorithms and truth.  

As everyday life, society, the economy and culture become ever more deeply enmeshed  in AI-generated delivery of content and labor (social media, dating apps, social services,  YouTube, journalism, robots, etc.), growing concerns about whether it is humans or machines that will be the culturally creative driving forces of the future need philosophical and ethical  reflection. By the conclusion of our time together teachers will better understand Turing’s work  and how it connects to life beyond this class, i.e., What is the importance of AI? What does it  promise? What are its problems and challenges for us?

Juliet Floyd, Boston University
Dates: April 28 & May 5, 2023

JULIET FLOYD teaches Philosophy at Boston University, researching the history of 20th century philosophy, pragmatism, philosophy of logic, mathematics, language, symbolism and new media. Her   recent books include Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics (Cambridge, 2021) and (with Felix Mühlhölzer) Wittgenstein’s Annotations to Hardy’s Course of Pure Mathematics (Springer 2020), as well as the co-edited volumes Future Pasts: Perspectives on the Analytic Tradition in  20th Century Philosophy (with S. Shieh, Oxford, 2001/2004), Philosophy of Emerging Media (with James E. Katz, Oxford, 2016), Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing (with A. Bokulich, Springer, 2017), Perceiving the Future Through New Communication Technologies (with James E. Katz and Katie Schiepers, Springer, 2021), and Stanley Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? at Fifty (with Greg Chase and Sandra Laugier, Cambridge, 2021).  She has authored over 75 articles and ran a recent faculty-development Mellon Sawyer Seminar at Boston University focusing on everyday life in a computational world (see  https://www.mellonphilemerge.com/). Recently she has been teaching, not only the philosophical implications of Wittgenstein’s, Gödel’s and Turing’s works, but also the thought and writings of William and Henry James.

An offsite course with visits to both public and private gardens, farms, and outdoor space. We will use the outdoors as our classroom. During this course, we will learn from landscape architects, designers, and educators. These professionals all combine to bring a holistic view of the outdoors. Teachers will complete the course with a newfound or renewed appreciation of the outdoors and be able to incorporate new information into their curriculum.

David Epstein, Meteorologist
Dates: May 3 & 10, 2023

DAVID EPSTEIN has been a meteorologist and horticulturist for over 30 years. Dave writes for Boston Globe and freelances weather for various stations including WBZ and WBUR. Dave has two podcasts one Weather Wisdom takes a look at the weather each day. Growing Wisdom gives tips on gardening and other aspects of the natural world. Dave has a large following on Twitter @growingwisdom and a successful YouTube channel with hundreds of how-to videos and 65 thousand subscribers.

The amount and complexity of information produced in science, engineering, business, and everyday human activity is increasing at staggering rates. The goal of this seminar is to expose you to visual representation methods and techniques that increase the understanding of complex data. Good visualizations not only present a visual interpretation of data, but also do so by improving comprehension, communication, and decision-making. In this seminar you will learn how the human visual system processes and perceives images, good design practices for visualization, and tools for visualization of data from a variety of fields.      

Hanspeter Pfister, Harvard University
Dates: January 6 & 13, 2023

HANSPETER PFISTER is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Brain Science. His research in visual computing lies at the intersection of visualization, computer graphics, and computer vision and spans a wide range of topics, including biomedical image analysis and visualization, image and video analysis, interpretable machine learning, and visual analytics in data science. Pfister has a PhD in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an MS in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. From 2013 to 2017 he was Director of the Institute for Applied Computational Science. Before joining Harvard, he worked for over a decade at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, where he was associate director and senior research scientist. He was the chief architect of VolumePro, Mitsubishi Electric’s award-winning real-time volume rendering graphics card, for which he received the Mitsubishi Electric President’s Award in 2000. Pfister was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2019. He is the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award, the 2009 IEEE Meritorious Service Award, and the 2009 Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Award. Pfister is a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy, the IEEE Visualization Academy, and a director of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee.

In this two-day class we will look at the common manifestations of clinical anxiety and depression in adolescent girls in the school setting including drug abuse, self-mutilation, sexual acting out, panic attacks, truancy, sadness, social isolation, suicidal ideation and how the COVID pandemic has accelerated these symptoms. We will address how to differentiate mood disorders from “normal” adolescent moodiness and oppositional behavior. We will also look at treatment techniques and learn how motivational interviewing, bibliotherapy, cognitive-behavioral and interpersonal models of therapy are useful in effecting therapeutic change. An opportunity for both observation and hands-on practice will be available.  

Christine Miller, LCMC
Dates: April 3 & 10, 2023

​​CHRISTINE MILLER, Ed.M., LCMHC, is a psychotherapist in Bedford, NH and has been adjunct faculty at Plymouth State University Graduate School, NHTI, and New England College. She is a clinician with 40+ years of experience in treating women and adolescents in varied settings including schools, juvenile justice, a group home and family planning clinics. Christine specializes in integrating therapeutic tools, tailoring them to the individual and providing short-term, focused and brief psychotherapy. Christine designs and leads day-long workshops for mental health professionals and educators with UNH Professional Development & Training. Her particular interests are the biological basis of behavior and psychopharmacology, anxiety disorders, psychiatric disorders associated with reproduction, and teens/women’s issues.

When we deliberate about important moral issues, we often reason about the relative significance of values (like equality, justice, and autonomy), and the extent to which those values should weigh on policy and on our own decision making. When we deliberate about moral issues with others in the face of profound disagreement, we face two difficult tasks: (1) the need to engage in complex reasoning and (2) the need to contain our emotion, listen carefully, and interpret precisely others’ views, especially when those views conflict with our own. This course will explore argument mapping, a method for visualizing moral reasoning and identifying exact points of disagreement. It will also survey the habits of mind needed to engage critically and thoughtfully in moral disagreements, and discuss ways to build those habits over time. Participants will leave this course with an understanding of the pedagogical research supporting argument mapping, and strategies and tools for teaching moral argumentation in the classroom that can be used off the shelf in grade 6-12 and higher education settings.

Anne L’Hommedieu Sanderson and Aidan Kestigian, Harvard University and ThinkerAnalytix
Dates: April 5 & 14, 2023

​​THINKERANALYTIX is an education non-profit organization working in partnership with the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. The ThinkerAnalytix mission is to teach reasoning skills so that students can have more constructive conversations about current events and controversial issues. ThinkerAnalytix staff leading this course have expertise in ethics, logic, as well as secondary and higher education pedagogy.