Washington College Celebrates French Week with Variety of Offerings

Chestertown, MD — The Washington College Department of Foreign Languages, in celebration of National French Week, is sponsoring a series of Gallic-themed events.

The film "Indigènes" will be shown in Litrenta Lecture Hall on Tuesday, November 6, at 8 p.m. The movie tells the story of the North African Colonial Soldiers' involvement in World War II as part of the Free French forces that liberated France. Pamela Pears, Chair of the Foreign Languages Department, will give a brief introduction prior to the film.

On Wednesday, November 7, at 4:30 p.m., Dr. Colin Dickson, Professor Emeritus of French at Washington College, will present a lecture titled "William Smith's Design for Early America's Colleges and the Teaching of Foreign Languages in the New Nation" in the Sophie Kerr Room at Miller Library. The lecture is part of an ongoing series of talks by Dr. Dickson that explore the teaching of language in the time of Washington College's founding.

A celebration of French culture would be incomplete without a celebration of French cuisine, so the Washington College Dining Hall will be offering a "Night in Provence" dinner On Wednesday, November 7, from 5-8 p.m. The menu includes foods popular in Southern France as well as well-known French standards: crêpes, omelets and cheeses.

Both the film and lecture are free and open to the public. The dinner will be free for students on the meal plan; the cost for faculty/staff is $5.75. The cost for the general public is $7.75.

November 6, 2007

WC's Olsen Presents 'Literature Before the Book'

Chestertown, MD — What was literary culture like before the printing press, and how does it relate to the literary culture of today? Join Corey Olsen, Assistant Professor of English at Washington College, when he presents "Breaking the Silence: Literature Before the Book," at the Rose O'Neill Literary House on Tuesday, November 6, at 11:30 a.m.

Olsen will be talking about what kinds of things (punctuation, for instance) people take for granted today that did not exist in a primarily oral community. Medieval manuscript images will be presented to the audience and Olsen will discuss the transition of literary art from the spoken word to the printed page.

Olsen taught at Temple University, Columbia University and Nyack College before coming to WC in the fall of 2004. He is the treasurer for the WC Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, faculty advisor for Sigma Tau Delta and the Writer's Union, and humanities editor for the Washington College Review.

He is involved in the scholarly recording of medieval texts and is at work on an interactive web project. "The Medieval Reading Experience" will be a web site, based on the Winchester manuscript of Sir Thomas Malory, designed to introduce modern readers to reading medieval texts in their original forms.

Admission to "Breaking the Silence: Literature Before the Book" is free and open to the public.

November 4, 2007

'World's Room' Poet Weiner to Give Reading at Washington College

Chestertown, MD — Award-winning poet Joshua Weiner will read from his works in Washington College's Sophie Kerr Room on Thursday, November 15, at 4:30 p.m.

Weiner is the author of two books, The World's Room and From the Book of Giants. He has won the Whiting Award and the Rome Prize. His poems appear in The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Slate, Threepenny Review and elsewhere. The poetry editor of Tikkun, Weiner is an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Booklist praised Weiner's first poetry collection, The World's Room, for its "immensely readable expressions of youthful joy and moral seriousness," and declared it "a very distinguished debut." Publishers Weekly lauded the combination of "narrative and lyric elements" that "range across subjects and kinds of speech" in Weiner's second collection,From the Book of Giants. "These poems aren't political in any easy way, but have politics, memory and language at their center in a manner that recalls former Poet Laureate Robert Hass's work... Weiner's formal and lyric gifts both soothe and shock in these poems."

Weiner's poetry reading is part of the 2007-2008 Sophie Kerr Lecture Series. The series honors the legacy of its namesake, a writer from Denton, Md., whose generosity has enriched Washington College's literary culture. When she died in 1965, Kerr left the bulk of her estate to Washington College, specifying that one half of the income from her bequest be awarded every year to the senior showing the most "ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor"—the famed Sophie Kerr Prize—and the other half be used to bring visiting writers to campus, to fund scholarships and to help defray the costs of student publications.

Admission to Weiner's reading is free and open to the public. The Sophie Kerr Room is located in Miller Library. For more information, call 410/778-7879.

November 2, 2007

Senatorial Colloquy Continues at Washington College with Sens. Bayh, Lugar

Chestertown, MD — The Senatorial Colloquy on American History and Politics, led by former Senator Birch Bayh (D-Ind., 1963-81) and hosted by Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, continues with a public conversation between Senator Bayh and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN, 1977-present) at Washington College's Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall, on Monday, November 12, at 5 p.m.

Senator Bayh is a senior fellow of the C.V. Starr Center. Throughout a career spanning more than half a century, he won renown as a tireless and effective champion of civil rights and education, and as a highly respected authority on the U.S. Constitution. The only person since the 18th century to write more than one successful amendment to the Constitution, he has been called "a latter-day Founding Father," as well as a master of the art of congressional leadership, often across party lines.

Senator Lugar is the longest serving U.S. Senator in Indiana history, having been first elected in 1976. One of the Senate's most respected voices on foreign policy, he has recently played a pivotal role in that body's ongoing debate on the Iraq War. Senator Lugar is the Ranking Member of the Foreign Relations Committee, which he has also chaired, along with the Agriculture Committee. He was a candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 1996.

Founded in 1782 under the personal patronage of George Washington, Washington College has hosted numerous national leaders throughout its long history—beginning with the institution's namesake himself, who attended the 1784 Commencement.

Later visitors included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and George H.W. Bush. The College's alumni have included several members of the U.S. Senate.

The 2007 Senatorial Colloquy is part of Washington College's celebration of its 225th anniversary year, and it draws inspiration from the institution's founders, who believed that the future of American democracy depended on education, civil discourse, and an informed understanding of history.

Admission to the Colloquy sessions is free and open to the public; admission will be on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information on attending, please call the C.V. Starr Center at

410-810-7161. For more background on the Senatorial Colloquy and the participating Senators, please visit the Center's website at http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

November 2, 2007

Internationally Renowned Multi-Media Artists Hill, Quasha Discuss 'Singular Times' at Washington College

Chestertown, MD — The Washington College Department of Art presents "Singular Times and Other Liminal Realities," a lecture and panel discussion by intramedia artist Gary Hill and artist/poet George Quasha, at Litrenta Lecture Hall on Thursday, November 8, at 7:30 p.m. The presentation was organized by Washington College Assistant Professor of Art and intermedia artist Monika Weiss.

Gary Hill's seminal and internationally celebrated work in various media -- especially video and installation art (with a broad orientation including cybernetics, electronics, sound, language and image) -- has been exhibited at major museums around the world, including solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; the Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona; and the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, among many other distinguished venues.

Hill has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most notably the Leone d'Oro Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1995, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Grant in 1998, and the Kurt Schwitters Award in 2000.

George Quasha is an artist and poet who works across mediums to explore principles in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation and performance.

Quasha's axial stones and axial drawings have been exhibited at the Baumgartner Gallery in Chelsea, New York, the Sought Foundation in Philadelphia, the Cotuit Center for the Arts in Cape Cod, the ZONE Chelsea Center for the Arts in Chelsea, and recently in a solo exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. They are featured in the recently published book Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance (North Atlantic Books: Berkeley, 2006). Last year, Quasha received a Guggenheim Fellowship in film and video.

Quasha also is known for his video-installation work, "Speaking Portraits (in the performative indicative)," in which he has recorded nearly 600 artists, poets and composers in 10 countries and 20 languages describing their views on art. This work has been exhibited at White Box in Chelsea, at the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame, at the Samuel Dorsky Museum, and in several other countries (France, Poland, Switzerland and India). It was recently featured in five public installations as part of the 2007 Kingston, New York, Sculpture Biennial.

Quasha's numerous written works include books of poetry, anthologies and writings on art. He has a new book on his fellow Washington College co-lecturer Gary Hill forthcoming from Ediciones Poligrafa (Barcelona).

Hill and Quasha have enjoyed a 25-year performance collaboration (video/language/sound) that continues to this day and also often includes frequent collaborator Charles Stein.

Litrenta Lecture Hall is located in the John S. Toll Science Center. Admission to "Singular Times and Other Liminal Realities" is free and open to the public.

October 27, 2007

Crime, Comedy Combine as Lonergan's 'Lobby Hero' Staged at Washington College

Chestertown, MD — The Washington College Department of Drama will present Kenneth Lonergan's "Lobby Hero" in Norman James Theatre on Friday and Saturday, November 2 and 3, at 8 p.m.

A senior thesis directed by Liz Flair, "Lobby Hero" is the story of young, hapless security guard Jeff (played by sophomore Travis Brown) and his growing ties to a murder investigation. The comedy has Jeff's supervisor William (played by senior Ben Kozlowski) testifying against his problematic brother, while an attractive new rookie cop (played by sophomore Annabelle Shore) is put on the stand against her seasoned partner Bill (played by Ben Majors).

Jeff's big mouth manages to mire him deeper in the investigation until all four characters are brought together realizing how connected they really are. Truth quickly becomes elusive with personal and social responsibilities being placed into question. Loyalties are strained and the cost of justice is unsure as the audience is left to wonder what will happen next.

Admission to "Lobby Hero" is free, but seating is limited and reservations are required; call 410/778-7835 or e-mail drama_tickets@washcoll.edu.

October 26, 2007

Rose O'Neill Literary House Launches New Series of Community Meetings

Chestertown, MD — Washington College's Rose O'Neill Literary House will hold its first-ever open community meeting on Sunday, October 28, at 6 p.m. All are invited to participate in the cultivation of an active atmosphere of networking, event planning, conversation—and above all, a love for language, stories and the creative life.

While many student, faculty and community groups use the Rose O'Neill Literary House, they rarely have an opportunity to interact. Nor is there any advisory group that shapes policies and programs at the House. The open meetings, which will be held monthly, will help instill a greater sense of interrelatedness among the various users of the facility.

"Anyone with an interest in overseeing, imagining and inhabiting the House is welcome" to Sunday's meeting, said Joshua Wolf Shenk, Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House. "The House itself is a gathering place and resource for anyone interested in creative life and especially those interested in the writing arts."

Writers on campus have a range of interests—from fiction and poetry to editing, journalism, screenwriting and publishing. The community meetings will bring these creative talents together to imagine and oversee the programs of the Rose O'Neill Literary House and to share writing and reading-related resources and opportunities.

Agenda items for the first meeting include the Literary House refurbishment, spring programs, ground rules for booking events, and more.

The contents of each meeting will be shaped largely by participants. "Come to one meeting, come to every meeting," said Shenk. "We want your input on programs, the House and your ideas for the future."

Pizza and soft drinks will be served at the inaugural meeting.

October 25, 2007