2023 Fall Online & In-Person Courses

Epic Proportions: Songs of Glory

Group Leader: GEORGE MESZOLY
Meets on: Thursdays 10:00 am to noon
Starting: 10/5/2023
Venue: The Engineering Center
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 24

In this seminar we will examine a set of oral works that are often referred to as “epic poems”: Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, the Iliad and Odyssey, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Beowulf, and the Song of Roland. While these works are often classified as literature (“something to be read”), they really are not. For example, no Sumerian ever sat up in bed reading a stack of clay tablets of the story of Gilgamesh to lull himself to sleep. So why were they actually written down? We will not…

Exodus: The Journey Home

Group Leader: OLGA TURCOTTE
Meets on: Mondays 3:30 to 5:30 pm
Starting: 10/16/2023
Venue: online
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 20

Join us to study and discuss The Book of Exodus, the second of the five books of the Torah and the Pentateuch (five books in Greek) in the Bible. The Book of Exodus tells the story of the Israelites’ travails and tribulations in trying to leave Egypt and return to their homeland and is full of events that are as topical today as they were thousands of years ago. Studying this divine story of the journey home will provide deeper insight into an understanding of the single God…

French Resistance: Myth or Reality? The story of Dora Bruder

Group Leader: DIANE COUTU
Meets on: Thursdays 10:00 am to noon
Starting: 10/5/2023
Venue: King's Chapel Parish House
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 14

This course will focus on a short (124-page) book, Dora Bruder, by French Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. Part investigation, part memoir, Dora Bruder is about a teenage Jewish girl who disappeared during the German occupation of France. This gentle, engaging read, set in wartime Paris and the early post-war years, blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction and offers alternative versions of reality. The book is a searching exploration of how the French understand (or imagine) their past, and of how all of us interpret our present.   You don’t need to know anything about occupied…

Italian Mannerism: The Art of Contestations

Group Leader: LIANA DE GIROLAMI CHENEY
Meets on: Wednesdays 3:30 to 5:30 pm
Starting: 10/4/2023
Venue: online
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 50

Under the artistic spell of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, the next generation of Italian painters, including Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmigianino, Beccafumi, Lavinia Fontana, and Vasari, began to conceive new artistic conceits between 1520 and 1575. These painters cultivated a personal style, contradicting the laws of anatomical proportions, pictorial space, light effects, and coloration. They composed artificial and beautiful images, evoking the spirit of viewers and daring their intellect and knowledge. In Mannerist paintings, the refinement of form and content produces an inventive art filled with graceful poses and…

John le Carré and the Living of History

Group Leader: ETHAN MACADAM
Meets on: Fridays 10:00 am to noon
Starting: 10/6/2023
Venue: online
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 20

This course is shaped by a close reading of the late John le Carré’s greatest novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. In addition to its incredibly clever plot and penetrating account of life in the world of Cold War intelligence, Le Carré’s novel offers an encyclopedic look at England and Europe (with important glimpses of America and the rest of the world) in the long postwar period and remarkable opportunities to discuss the paradoxes of intelligence, security and transatlantic politics; class, imperialism, sexuality, and other aspects of British culture…

Mirrors in the Visual Arts: Reflections, Visions, and Illusions

Group Leader: NINA MORIARTY
Meets on: Mondays 10:00 am to noon
Starting: 10/16/2023
Venue: Fisher College
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 24

Reflections have fascinated people for millennia. Mirrors and art have been inextricably entwined for about 80,000 years, and many are so well crafted that they can be considered works of art. Mirrors may be the physical material of works of art like the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles or the mirror paintings of Roy Lichtenstein or the Infinity Mirrors of Yayoi Kusama. Metaphorically, all art is a mirror reflecting its culture. Mirrors have been used as symbols of capture, death, the eye of God, lust, piety, pride, prudence,…

Morality Play: An Examination of the World in the 14th Century

Group Leader: LEE BEHNKE and MOLLY SHERDEN
Meets on: Fridays 10:00 am to noon
Starting: 10/13/2023
Venue: Chilton Club
Sessions: 5 | Class Size: 12

This course will focus on the book entitled Morality Play by Barry Unsworth, a master of time and space in fictional settings. The book follows a band of "Players" roving around England in the 14th century who come upon a murder mystery and using the power of drama, are able to solve the mystery. In class discussions we will explore the layers of meaning in the plot, the characters, and the interplay of events that are depicted as real with those that are portrayed as fictional. The book also offers the…

Music in Context 1600-1850

Group Leader: ANDRUS MADSEN
Meets on: Fridays 10:00 am to noon
Starting: 10/6/2023
Venue: online
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 25

This seminar will explore the primary venues for the performance of Western art music before public concerts became common. These settings, which included royal courts, churches, and private salons throughout Europe, played important roles in the music’s composition and performance and influenced the development of various music genres. We will start with the incredible culture of the Parisian salon in the 1650s-1670s and examine how private vocal and instrumental music performed there laid the groundwork for the opera and ballet that were the mainstay at the French Court…

Reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

Group Leader: DIANE THOMPSON
Meets on: Fridays 1:00 to 3:00 pm
Starting: 10/6/2023
Venue: online
Sessions: 4 | Class Size: 25

--NOW ONLINE-- Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, and for over 50 years it was her only novel until Go Set a Watchman was released in 2015, a few months before her death. In the half century between the two novels, To Kill a Mockingbird won a Pulitzer Prize (1961), was adapted as an Academy Award winning movie (1962), and became a well acclaimed Broadway play (2018). It has been published in over 40 languages and sold over 40 million copies. Based on Lee’s childhood,…

Recent Advances in Aging & Aging-Related Disease Research

Group Leader: AMY TSURUMI, CARLA CARISI & JANE HA
Meets on: Fridays 1:00 to 3:00 pm
Starting: 10/6/2023
Venue: online
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 50

This course offers a series of lectures covering recent advances in research topics in aging and aging-related diseases (including cancers, neurological and cardiovascular diseases, susceptibility to infectious diseases, etc.) and the use of cutting-edge methods such as CRISPR and stem cells to address them. In partnership with the Mass General Postdoc Association (MGPA), current investigators (MD/PhD research fellows, staff, and faculty) at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School will deliver talks about their ongoing research and related topics in aging. The weekly class format will entail…

Reconstruction: Extending America’s Vision

Group Leader: JOHN HODGMAN
Meets on: Wednesdays 10:00 am to noon
Starting: 10/11/2023
Venue: online
Sessions: 5 | Class Size: 20

America’s vision is described in the Declaration of Independence: “All men (humans) are created equal.” The Reconstruction period after the Civil War produced three critical amendments to the Constitution that extended this vision. They were the 13th banning slavery; the 14th establishing birthright citizenship; and the 15th prohibiting laws that would ban the right to vote based on race, color or previous condition of servitude. However, it would not be until 1920 when the 19th amendment established women’s right to vote that the original vision seemed to be…

Rubens: His Art and his Circle

Group Leader: AMY GOLAHNY
Meets on: Thursdays 3:30 to 5:30 pm
Starting: 10/5/2023
Venue: online
Sessions: 4 | Class Size: 50

Peter Paul Rubens was a prolific artist, diplomat, devout Catholic, and learned humanist. His associates in Antwerp included Anthony van Dyck, Jan Brueghel and Jacob Jordaens, and he was favored by rulers in Italy, the Spanish Netherlands, Spain, France and England. We will look at a range of magnificent works by Rubens and his associates and delve into their associated histories and myths. Special reference will be made to those works held by American museums. Note: An optional field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts will follow…

Spectacular Sonnets You Should Know

Group Leader: LIZ CABOT
Meets on: Mondays 1:00 to 3:00 pm
Starting: 10/16/2023
Venue: King's Chapel Parish House
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 20

The sonnet, a tried-and-true poetic form stretching back to 13th-century Italy and England, continues its longstanding popularity among contemporary British and American poets. The standard form is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with various end-rhyme patterns, but poets have experimented with that structure within both the Italian (Petrarchan) and English (Shakespearian) versions. We’ll look closely at sonnets by Shakespeare, Donne, poets of the Romantic period, and during the two World Wars, as well as some by Frost, cummings, Heaney, Wilbur, and some living poets you probably haven’t heard…

The Cold War 1973 – 1991

Group Leader: LAWRENCE CLIFFORD
Meets on: Tuesdays 3:30 to 5:30 pm
Starting: 10/3/2023
Venue: King's Chapel Parish House
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 20

The Cold War 1973 - 1991 will explore the domestic pressures within the Soviet Union that caused the Communist Party to dissolve. It will also discuss the impact Yuri Andropov had on the demise of the Soviet Union. As head of the KGB prior to becoming the 1st Party Secretary, he had traveled widely around the world. As a consequence, he was well aware that the Soviet Union needed to change. The course will also study the developments that followed immediately upon the end of the Cold War.…

The Devil Made Him Do It: Faust in Music

Group Leader: BRADFORD CONNER and BENJAMIN SEARS
Meets on: Tuesdays 3:30 to 5:30 pm
Starting: 10/3/2023
Venue: The Engineering Center
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 24

The legend of Doctor Faust, one of the most compelling in Western culture, is based on an actual person, Johann Georg Faust (d. 1540). Adaptations of his story began in the 16th century and have continued to the present day in novels, plays, operas, ballets, films, comics, and even Anime. Early settings such as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus interpreted the story as a tale of Christian morality. In the 19th century, after the 1808 publication of Goethe’s Faust, Part I, European composers created new views of the legend. Settings…

The Federal Reserve: A Curse or a Blessing?

Group Leader: CARROLL PERRY
Meets on: Tuesdays 1:00 to 3:00 pm
Starting: 10/10/2023
Venue: online
Sessions: 5 | Class Size: 20

Probably no government entity creates more controversy than the Federal Reserve. Some of this is certainly politics. But many of the battles involve deeply held feelings/beliefs on one side of an economic issue or another. The Fed, our central bank, is certainly not a quiet cave for nerds. It can have a dominant influence on economic outcomes. What the Fed decides matters, and no sense of how our country works is complete without some understanding of how it operates. Furthermore, the Fed itself has changed dramatically over the…

The House of Habsburg: A Dynamic Dynasty

Group Leader: JOSEPH HERN
Meets on: Wednesdays 3:30 to 5:30 pm
Starting: 10/4/2023
Venue: Fisher College
Sessions: 7 | Class Size: 25

The House of Habsburg took root in the 13th century at a small castle in the canton of Aargau in modern day Switzerland. Over the ensuing centuries it expanded and mutated to dominate at various times Central Europe, the low countries, parts of Italy, Iberia, large tracts of North and South America, and the Philippines. It was the first empire on which the sun never set. Its head usually held the elective title of Holy Roman Emperor. This growth was accomplished not so much by conquest but through…

The Iliad: Books 1-6

Group Leader: ROBERT MANNING
Meets on: Wednesdays 10:00 am to noon
Starting: 10/11/2023
Venue: King's Chapel Parish House
Sessions: 6 | Class Size: 16

This course will be a book-by-book close reading of the first six books of the Iliad, the great epic of ancient Greece. The Iliad is the earliest work in ancient Greek, written down sometime around 750–730 B.C.  Attributed to Homer, the Iliad was constructed by generations of bards orally retelling and commemorating in song a war fought in previous generations over the plains of Troy. The epic tells the tale of the wrath of the Greeks’ greatest warrior, Achilles, whose withdrawal from the conflict changes the course of…

The “Cruel” GOP vs. The “Unimaginative” Democrats: Current American Politics 

Group Leader: ED QUATTLEBAUM
Meets on: Wednesdays 1:00 to 3:00 pm
Starting: 10/11/2023
Venue: King's Chapel Parish House
Sessions: 4 | Class Size: 16

Trump or DeSantis or Haley vs. the Biden/Harris ticket:  Is this the best we can do? In this seminar we’ll discuss as many domestic and foreign issues in today’s American politics as we have time for.  As of this March 2023 writing, top stories would include a toxic train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio and Covid-19 likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.  Long-term issues keep trudging onward, like annual deficits and the national debt, climate change, gargantuan spending on elections, seemingly weekly mass shootings, and of…