In Memoriam: Finn Caspersen

All of us at Washington College were greatly saddened to learn of Finn Caspersen's recent death. During the five years I have served at Washington College, I have been reminded almost every day of the enormous impact that support from The Hodson Trust has had on the health of this institution. Everywhere I look, I see buildings that could not have been built, students who could not have studied here, and programs that could not have flourished without Finn Caspersen's help. When Finn and the other members of the Board were on campus in June of 2007, I was proud to show them how the College has improved with The Hodson Trust's support.

To list everything that Finn Caspersen made possible for us would require many pages, but I would like to touch on just a couple of highlights. The Trust contributed to the establishment of three endowed faculty positions: The Hodson Trust Professor of Economics, the Louis L. Goldstein Professor of Public Affairs, and the Joseph H. McLain Professor of Environmental Science. Finn Caspersen and The Hodson Trust assisted us in the construction of three major college facilities: Hodson Hall, the Lelia Hynson Boating Park, and the John S. Toll Science Center. The Trust helped us establish student scholarship endowments (as well as the Hodson Middle Income Loan Fund) including The Hodson Trust Merit Scholarships, The Hodson Trust Minority Scholarships, and The Hodson Star Scholarships. Under Finn Caspersen's leadership, The Hodson Trust invested in numerous signature College programs: the Douglass Cater Society of Junior Fellows, the rowing endowment, and the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

Washington College's first Hodson Trust Star Scholarship recipients gather with Finn Caspersen, Chairman of the Hodson Trust (left to right): Lance Corporal James H. Schelberg, USMC; Finn Caspersen; Corporal Charles P. Grigg, USMC; Wilhelm Gundlach, USA.

In 1999, Finn Caspersen announced that the College could use its annual distribution from The Hodson Trust to match, dollar for dollar, campaign gifts of $100,000 or more to endowment funds. At the conclusion of the Campaign for Washington's College, gifts for scholarship funds, internships, and endowed chairs totaling $11,443,443 were matched by The Hodson Trust, generating almost $23 million in new endowment.

The Hodson Trust Star Scholarship program, inspired by Finn Caspersen and established in 2007 as one of the first such initiatives in the nation, added impetus to the movement that ultimately led to the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill.

It has been almost thirty years since Washington College awarded Finn Caspersen the honorary degree, Doctor of Humanities, on May 17, 1981. That award, the highest we can confer, was in recognition of service already rendered. His service over the past almost three decades has been just as extraordinary. We thank him, and we will miss him greatly.

Baird Tipson, President

Mark Nowak, New Director Of Rose O'Neill Literary House, To Give Reading At Washington College

Chestertown – The public will have the opportunity to meet the new Director of Washington College’s Rose O’Neill Literary House when poet Mark Nowak presents a reading at the Literary House on Tuesday, September 15, at 4:30 p.m. A reception will follow.

Nowak is a genre-blending poet whose work combines language, drama and photography in innovative ways. He comes to Washington College from St. Catherine University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he was Associate Professor of Humanities and taught for 17 years.

Nowak is the author of three books of poetry, including Shut Up Shut Down (with an afterword by Amiri Baraka). Shut Up Shut Down was a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” and a finalist for Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award.

Poet Adrienne Rich has hailed Nowak as “a poet of remarkable gifts,” who “is generating a new poetics of class.”

Described as a “documentary poet” due to his work’s journalistic approaches toward real-world issues, Nowak is most recently the author of Coal Mountain Elementary, a work that relates the mining disaster of Sago, West Virginia, to a variety of mining accidents in China. Howard Zinn characterized this book as a work that “manages, in photos and in words, to portray an entire culture, the culture of the miner and his family, and it is a stunning educational tool.”

Nowak’s work has been widely anthologized. He is one of a dozen poets to be included in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, and his work appears in An Anthology of New (American) Poets, Poets of the Great Plains, and America Loomed Before Us: Contemporary Poetry from the Other USA.

He is the founder and editor of XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, a journal that was launched in 1997. Nowak will be relocatinng the journal with him to Washington College, where student interns will have the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of academic periodical publishing by working with XCP.

Nowak’s teaching experience at St. Catherine University has been supplemented by his work teaching poetry and writing in alternative environments including the Twin Cities Ford Assembly Plant, the United Steelworkers of America, Stillwater Prison, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, and in public school outreach programs in Bowling Green, Minneapolis and Chicago.

“As incoming director of the Literary House, I’m eager to meet everyone in the Washington College community,” Nowak said. “And whatever your relationship to the word – be it as an aspiring graphic novelist, a spoken-word artist, a history student or historian trying to revise your next essay, or someone who just wants to spend a half-hour ‘talking books’ – I hope you’ll make the Rose O’Neill Literary House your destination.”

Admission to Nowak’s reading is free and open to the public.

Award-Winning Novels, Betsy Ross, Daniel Handler (A.K.A. Lemony Snicket) And More: Washington College 2009-2010 Literary Line-Up Announced

Chestertown, MD – From Betsy Ross to activist poetry, from James Joyce to James McBride, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) , a rich and varied literary line-up  graces Washington College’s events calendar in 2009-2010.

The College’s writing-related traditions run deep; between the annual Sophie Kerr Lecture Series and a full slate of offerings from the Rose O’Neill Literary House, the historic Chestertown campus welcomes a bounteous array of literary events with the advent of the school year.

The Sophie Kerr Lecture Series honors the legacy of the late Sophie Kerr, 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.

The Rose O’Neill Literary House is known far and wide as the hub of Washington College’s writing community. For a quarter of a century it has served as the venue for co-curricular activities that bring together students and faculty with visiting writers, scholars, editors and other literary artists; ; the Washington Post dubbed it “the Carnegie Hall of literary readings.”

The 2009-2010 Washington College itinerary of literary events will feature:

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein-Graff Lecture:

“Demystifying the Academic Game: How Schools and Colleges Can Demystify Academic Intellectual Culture for All Students”

Litrenta Lecture Hall, Friday, September 4, 3:30 p.m.

Gerald Graff, prominent literary historian and educator, author of Professing Literature and Beyond the Culture Wars, and the president of the Modern Language Association in 2008, focuses in his recent work, Clueless in Academe, on ways that “schooling obscures the life of the mind” and argues that schools can develop better writers and thinkers among all students, not just the high-achieving few, when teachers share with students the basic rules and moves of the game of academic argumentation that they use themselves.

Putting his argument into practice, Graff co-wrote in 2006 with his wife, Cathy Birkenstein, a textbook for teaching writing, “They Say/I Say”: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. The book is widely used in schools and colleges and continues Graff’s longstanding efforts to revitalize American education. Graff and Birkenstein both teach at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Poetry Reading by Mark Nowak

Rose O’Neill Literary House, Tuesday, September 15, 4:30 p.m.

Mark Nowak, the new Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, is a documentary poet, social critic, and labor activist; his writings include Shut Up Shut Down, a New York Times “Editor’s Choice.” Nowak’s recently published book on coal mining disasters in the United States and China, Coal Mountain Elementary, was hailed by Howard Zinn as a “a stunning educational tool.”

Nowak’s unique work in bringing innovative aesthetics and working-class communities into dialogue has resulted in a dynamic array of projects and publications. His poetry, similarly, has engaged central issues of work, family and community. He is one of a dozen poets to have been included in the seminal anthology American Poets in the 21^st Century: The New Poetics.

A reception will follow Nowak’s reading, affording the opportunity for the public to meet the Literary House’s new Director.

Marla Miller Lecture:

“Betsy Ross: The Life Behind the Legend”

Litrenta Lecture Hall, Wednesday, September 16, 7:30 p.m.

Marla Miller, the 2009-10 Patrick Henry Writing Fellow, is an Associate Professor and Director of the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts. Her book The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution  won the 2006 Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award. Related articles have appeared in The New England Quarterly, The William and Mary Quarterly and other publications. Miller’s primary research interest is women’s work in pre-industrial America. During her year’s residency in Chestertown, she will continue working on a forthcoming biography of that most misunderstood early American craftswoman, Betsy Ross.

The Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship, provided by Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and supported by The Rose O’Neill Literary House, offers a yearlong residency to authors doing innovative work on America’s founding era and its legacy.

Fiction Reading by Mary Gordon

Sophie Kerr Room, Thursday, September 17, 4:30 p.m.

Mary Gordon is the author of several bestselling novels as well as short stories, memoirs, essays and criticism. She is known for her investigations of Catholic family life, Catholic spirituality, thwarted love, moral struggle, personal sacrifice, female identity and family pain.

Gordon is often praised for her deep insights, lyrical writing, and what Los Angeles Times critic Ellen Akins called “her delicate rendering of the drama of consciousness.” Recent books by Gordon include the biography Joan of Arc, the essay collection Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity, the novel Spending: A Utopian Divertimento, and the bestselling memoir of her secretive, tormented father, The Shadow Man. Gordon’s latest novel, Pearl, is the the story of a single mother who sets out to prevent her daughter from killing herself in a hunger strike in Dublin.

“Demystifying Book Publishing: A Publishing talk with Irina Reyn”

Rose O’Neill Literary House, Thursday, September 24, 4:30 p.m.

Author Irina Reyn, the 2009 Mary Wood Fellow at Washington College, worked in book publishing for several years. Her presentation will take the audience on a practical journey through the process of getting the written word from laptop or notebook and onto the bookstore shelves.

Reading by Irina Reyn and Washington College Students

Casey Academic Center Forum, Saturday, September 26, 1:30 p.m.

Irina Reyn’s first novel, What Happened to Anna K., a bold reimagining of Anna Karenina in modern New York, was named one of the best books of 2008 by The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly, and is described by Philip Lopate as a “witty, psychologically astute and immensely pleasurable novel.”

Reyn is editor of Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State and has published widely in One Story, Post Road, Tin House, Los Angeles Times, Town & Country Travel, The Forward, Nextbook, Ballyhoo Stories, San Francisco Chronicle, The Moscow Times and in several anthologies.

Born in Moscow, Reyn currently divides her time between Brooklyn and Pittsburgh, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. A booksigning will follow her September 26 reading.

Initiated in 2007, the Mary Wood Fellowship is extended bi-annually to an emerging female writer. It is made possible by the continued support of author Mary Wood.

Maxine Susman Reading: “Wartime Address”

Rose O’Neill Literary House, Tuesday, September 29, 5 p.m.

 “Wartime Address” is a poem sequence based on the memoir of Jean Wetzel. It tells of her flight from Paris during World War II. Dr. Maxine Susman is Professor of English at

Caldwell College where she teaches poetry, literature and writing across the curriculum. Her poems have appeared in several dozen journals and anthologies, including Paterson Literary Review, Colere, Ekphrasis, Earth’s Daughters, The Dogwood Journal, The Chesapeake Reader, Blueline, and forthcoming in Alehouse and Poet Lore. Her two other books of poetry are Gogama (2006) and Familiar (Fall 2009). She belongs to the performance group Cool Women.

Fiction Reading by Jeff Talarigo

Sophie Kerr Room, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 p.m.

Jeff Talarigo is the author of the award winning novel The Pearl Diver, which won the 2005 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Foundation Award and was named a 2005 Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. His second novel, The Ginseng Hunter, noted as one of the “Best Books of 2008” by NPR and an American Library Association’s “Notable Books for 2009,” was released in paperback in April 2009. Talarigo currently lives in Boston, where he is working on a novel about 20^th-century Gaza as seen through the eyes of a Palestinian woman.

Andrew Gibson Lecture:

“‘His Journey Westward’: Joyce’s The Dead, Irish History and Modernity”

Rose O’Neill Literary House, Monday, October 12, 4:30 p.m.

Dr. Andrew Gibson is Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal

Holloway, University of London, and a permanent advisory editor of the James Joyce

Quarterly. He also is a member of the editorial board of Limit(e) Beckett, the new Anglo-

French journal in Beckett scholarship. His published works include James Joyce: A Critical Life, Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative and numerous other books.

Fiction Reading by Dan Chaon

Sophie Kerr Room, Tuesday, October 13, 4:30 p.m.

Born and raised in Nebraska, Dan Chaon is the author of the short-story collections Fitting Ends and Other Stories and Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. It was listed as one of the ten best books of 2001 by the American Library Association, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Las Vegas Mercury, and Entertainment Weekly and was also cited by Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as one of the Notable Books of the year.

Chaon’s stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize annual anthologies, as well as such noteworthy literary journals as TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, MSS, Story, Helicon, Mid-American Review and elsewhere. His first novel, You Remind Me of Me, was released in 2004 and praised by Publishers Weekly for its “elegant prose, haunting plot and knockout literary excellence.”

Chaon’s latest novel, Await Your Reply, has recently been published by Ballantine Books. A book that weaves in elements of the supernatural, it was hailed by the New York Times as “a strange, stunning new novel…. Mr. Chaon succeeds in both creating suspense and making it pay off, but Await Your Reply also does something even better. …Mr. Chaon manages to bridge the gap between literary and pulp fiction with a clever, insinuating book equally satisfying to fans of either genre.”

Chaon currently teaches creative writing at Oberlin College, where he holds the position of Houck Associate Professor in the Humanities.

“Song Yet Sung: A Reading by James McBride”

Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts, Thursday, October 29, 4:30 p.m.

Best-selling author and musician James McBride has written for the Washington Post, People, the Boston Globe, Essence, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times. He is the author of The Color of Water and Miracle at St. Anna. In his new book, Song Yet Sung, McBride follows a group of slaves as they escape to freedom through the swamps of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Song Yet Sung was chosen by the Maryland Humanities Council to represent the One Maryland One Book program for 2009, and was chosen by Washington College for its First-Year Book program. The First-Year Book program gives new students a common experience over the summer and introduces them to Washington College’s tradition of bringing great writers to campus.

Poetry reading with Taije Silverman

Rose O’Neill Literary House, Wednesday, November 11, 4:30 p.m.

Taije Silverman’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, Five Points, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner and other journals. The recipient of the 2005–2007 Emory University Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as residencies from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, she is now Assistant Visiting Professor at Ursinus College, outside of Philadelphia.

Silverman’s first collection of poems, Houses Are Fields, was published by LSU Press in 2009, and selected as the debut book in the Sea Cliff Series. Thrice nominated for the Pushchart Prize, she has received the Anais Nin Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Fiction reading by Debra Spark

Sophie Kerr Room, Thursday, November 12, 4:30 p.m.

Debra Spark is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint and The Ghost of Bridgetown and editor of the anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America’s New Young Writers. Her thoughts on the craft of writing have been collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. Her short fiction, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in Esquire, Ploughshares, Epoch, Agni, Gingko Tree Review, narrativemagazine.com, The New York Times, New England Travel and Life, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a Pushcart Prize and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares Award for Best First Book.

Spark currently teaches at Colby College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her latest novel, Good for the Jews, is being published this fall by University of Michigan Press.

Poetry reading by Leslie Harrison

Rose O’Neill Literary House, Thursday, November 19, 4:30 p.m.

Leslie Harrison’s Displacement was the 2008 Katherine Nason Bakeless winner in poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. It was published by Mariner Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in July of 2009. She has poems and prose published in Poetry, Southwest Review, The New Republic, Barn Owl Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She holds graduate degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine where she completed her MFA in 2006. She has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

David Orvis Lecture: “Shakespeare’s Queer Marriages”

Sophie Kerr Room, Miller Library, Wednesday, March 3, 2010, 4:30 p.m.

David L. Orvis, a 2002 graduate of Washington College, earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Arizona. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Faculty Affiliate in Women’s Studies at Appalachian State University. He is working on his first book, tentatively titled Performing Queer Marriage on the Early Modern Stage, as well as co-editing a collection of essays on Psalms in the Early Modern World.

Fiction Reading by Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket

Decker Theatre, Friday, March 26, 2010, 4 p.m.

The jewel in the crown of the Sophie Kerr Series each year is Sophie Kerr Weekend, and the keynote event of Sophie Kerr Weekend 2010 will be a much-anticipated reading by bestselling author Daniel Handler. His intricate and witty writing style has won him millions of fans both young and old. He is the author of the novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth and, most recently, Adverbs. Under the pen name Lemony Snicket, he has written the wildly popular children’s books known collectively as A Series of Unfortunate Events, which have sold more than 53 million copies and were the basis of a film starring Jim Carrey.

Handler also has worked intermittently in film and music, most recently in collaboration with composer Nathaniel Stookey on a piece commissioned and recorded by the San Francisco Symphony. The prolific author’s current projects include a fourth novel for adults, a picture book in collaboration with Maira Kalman, and the script for the long-awaited second Lemony Snicket movie.

Eric Mallin Lecture:

“‘In spite of my own nature’: King Lear and the Perverse”

Sophie Kerr Room, Miller Library, Monday, April 12, 2010, 4:30 p.m.

Eric S. Mallin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England and Godless Shakespeare, as well as numerous articles and reviews. His lecture on King Lear is part of a book in progress called Perverse: The Hidden History of the Normal.

Michael Drout Lecture:

“Whole Worlds Out of Single Words: Tolkien and Language”

Litrenta Lecture Hall, Thursday, April 15, 2010, 4:30 p.m.

The Prentice Professor and Chair of the English Department at Wheaton College, Michael Drout is a specialist in Anglo-Saxon Literature and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He is the editor of Beowulf and the Critics, a collection of Tolkien’s scholarly work, as well as the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia and the scholarly journal Tolkien Studies. Drout is also the author of How Tradition Works, a study of 10^th-century Anglo-Saxon poetics, and he has lately dedicated himself to producing oral performances of the entire Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus in podcast form.

Washington College/PEN World Voices Fellow in International Letters

Spring 2010, date TBA

Each spring, an international writer visits Washington College for a residency and series of lectures on his or her work before heading to the PEN American Center’s

World Voices Festival in New York City. Past Fellows include French graphic novelist Emmanuel Guibert and Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah.

XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics

Spring 2010 Readings, dates TBA

Nearly 15 years ago, new Literary House Director Mark Nowak created XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, a journal that brought together writers in social documentary from a variety of fields—anthropology, poetry, performance studies, theater and history. XCP has since published writings from emerging young writers in these and other fields as well as established scholars and artists such as Lila Abu-Lughod, Amiri Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, and Adrienne Rich. In addition to bringing XCP to Washington College, Nowak will inaugurate a series of readings in spring 2010 by regular contributors to the journal. Please check the Rose O’Neill Literary House website for complete details on these events.

Throughout the fall and spring, the Rose O’Neill Literary House will host periodic community meetings; for more information on these and all other Literary House events, call 410/778-7899 or visit lithouse.washcoll.edu.

Admission to all Sophie Kerr Lecture Series events is free and open to the public. For more information, call 410/778-7879.

At Last, The Real Betsy Ross: 'The Life Behind The Legend' Presented At Washington College

Update: Marla Miller will be signing copies of her new book at a reception in her honor on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 4:30-6:30 p.m. at the Custom House, 101 S. Water Street, Chestertown, Maryland. For more information please call (410) 810-7161.

Chestertown – Marla R. Miller, newly arrived in Chestertown for a year’s residence as Washington College’s 2009-2010 Patrick Henry Writing Fellow, will unwrap the mysteries surrounding the life of the craftswoman Elizabeth Griscom Ross – better known to the world as Betsy Ross – on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, at 7:30 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall.

Americans love Betsy Ross. In the pantheon of Revolutionary heroes and heroines, she stands proudly at George Washington’s side, offering up her 13-star flag. A quarter of a million people visit her Philadelphia home every year. She has her own Pez head. But this popular fame has not won Ross much scholarly attention.

Despite her iconic status, there has never been any in-depth study of her life – nearly all the books on her have been fictional accounts or children’s books, partly because authors have thought there was not enough surviving information. Some have even assumed she was a wholly mythological figure.

But Miller, perhaps the first historian to suspect that there’s actually more – not less – to Ross than the legend, has unearthed new sources that shed light on a very real woman and her world.

The Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship, provided by Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and supported by the Rose O’Neill Literary House, offers a yearlong residency to authors doing innovative work on America’s founding era and its legacy.

During her sojourn as a visiting scholar at Washington College, Miller will continue working on what promises to be the most groundbreaking book ever on Betsy Ross. The book, which is under contract to be published by Henry Holt, looks not just at Ross’s long and eventful life (she outlived three husbands), but also the behind-the-scenes roles that women artisans played in the American Revolution, and how ordinary working-class people experienced the war.

Whether or not Ross sewed the first American flag, she was an ambitious and successful entrepreneur who provided banners, ensigns, standards and other military supplies to the American forces from the Revolutionary era through the War of 1812.

In addition to the book, Miller is helping to organize an exhibition at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, based on her research and set to open in the fall of 2010.

She also hopes to write two children’s books on Ross, one a biography and the other a fictional account based on the life of an African American child in her household.

Miller, Associate Professor and Director of the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts, is a previous recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Winterthur Museum. It was her scholarly work on other colonial seamstresses that inspired Miller to write a book on Ross, one that would appeal to the general public as well as historians. Her first book, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), received rave reviews. The historian Gloria Main called it “remarkably close to perfect,” and the Journal of American History lauded it for “reshaping our understanding of women’s place in the developing Atlantic world.”

Launched by the Starr Center in 2008, the Patrick Henry Fellowship aims to encourage reflection on the links between American history and contemporary culture, and to foster the literary art of historical writing. It is co-sponsored by the Rose O’Neill Literary House, Washington College's center for literature and the creative arts. The fellowship’s funding is permanently endowed as part of a $2.5 million challenge grant package that the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded through its nationwide “We the People” initiative.

As part of the fellowship, Miller will live in a restored 1735 house in the heart of Chestertown's colonial historic district, and will teach a course at Washington College in the spring.

Miller’s September 16 lecture, “Betsy Ross: The Life Behind the Legend,” offers a unique opportunity to peek inside the process of researching a major work of history. A book signing and reception will follow; admission is free and open to the public. Litrenta Lecture Hall is located in the John S. Toll Science Center.

About the C.V. Starr Center

The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience explores our nation’s history – and particularly the legacy of its Founding era – in innovative ways. Through educational programs, scholarship, and public outreach, and especially by supporting and fostering the art of written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between past and present, and between the academic world and the public at large. From its base in the circa-1746 Custom House along Chestertown’s colonial waterfront, the Center also serves as a portal onto a world of opportunities for Washington College students. Its guiding principle is that now more than ever, a wider understanding of our shared past is fundamental to the continuing success of America’s democratic experiment. For more information on the Center and on the Patrick Henry Fellowships, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

Albee's 'Zoo Story' Staged at Washington College

View photos from the dress rehearsal of "Zoo Story"

CHESTERTOWN – September 2009 marks the 50^th anniversary of a classic work of the modern American theater – Edward Albee’s “Zoo Story.” It was the first hit play by one of America’s great playwrights, and in honor of its semicentennial, the Washington College Department of Drama will present “Zoo Story” as the inaugural production in the newly renovated and expanded Gibson Center for the Arts.

Directed by Dale Daigle, Chair of the Drama Department, “Zoo Story” will be staged at Tawes Theatre in Gibson on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, September 1-3, at 6 p.m.

The Washington College production of “Zoo Story” features students Corey Holland and Benjamin Alejandro Seger Sol de Seingalt. The stage manager is Emily Pelland, with sound supervised by Ed Hoegg.

Admission is free and open to the public.

Washington College Concert Series Moves To New Gibson Center For The Arts

Brentano String Quartet Part Of Gala Opening Weekend

Chestertown – The 58^th season of the Washington College Concert Series is moving to a new venue: the renovated and expanded Gibson Center for the Arts.

The Concert Series opener, a performance by the internationally acclaimed Brentano String Quartet, will be presented in the Hotchkiss Recital Hall at Gibson on Sunday, October 4, at 3 p.m., as part of the arts center’s gala opening weekend festivities.

Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim.

“Passionate, uninhibited and spellbinding,” raves the London Independent; the New York Times extols its “luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism.” The Philadelphia Inquirer praises its “seemingly infallible instincts for finding the center of gravity in every phrase and musical gesture,” and the Times of London opines, “the Brentanos are a magnificent string quartet... This was wonderful, selfless music-making.”

Within a few years of its formation, the quartet garnered the first Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In 1996 the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center invited the group to be the inaugural members of Chamber Music Society Two, a program which was to become a coveted distinction for chamber groups and individuals.

The quartet had its first European tour in 1997, and was honored in the U.K. with the Royal Philharmonic Award for Most Outstanding Debut. That debut recital was at London’s Wigmore Hall, and the quartet has continued its warm relationship with Wigmore, appearing there regularly and serving as the hall’s Quartet-in-residence in the 2000-01 season.

In recent seasons the Brentano String Quartet has traveled widely, appearing all over the United States and Canada, in Europe, Japan and Australia.

It has performed in the world’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in Vienna; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; and the Sydney Opera House.

The 2009-2010 Washington College Concert Series will continue with performances by lutist Richard Stone in the Hotchkiss Recital Hall on November 1, the Gemini Piano Trio in Gibson’s grand new Decker Theatre on January 23, and, also in Decker, the Lyric Brass Quintet on February 27 and pianist Inna Faliks on March 28.

Season tickets are available for $50 per person in advance or at the box office on performance nights. Single admission tickets, available at the box office on performance nights, are $15 for adults, $5 for youth 18 and under. For more information, call 410/778-7839.

'Demystifying The Academic Game' At Washington College

CHESTERTOWN – Gerald Graff, one of America’s most influential commentators on education, will present  “Demystifying the Academic Game: How Schools and Colleges Can Demystify Academic Intellectual Culture for All Students,” at Washington College’s Litrenta Lecture Hall on Friday, September 4, at 3:30 p.m.

Co-presenting the lecture will be Dr. Graff’s wife, the noted author/educator Cathy Birkenstein-Graff.

Prior to the public lecture at 3:30, the pair will present “The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing,” a student workshop and discussion in the College’s Writing Center at 10:30 a.m.; and “They Say/I Say,” a faculty workshop in the Rose O’Neill Literary House from noon to 1:30 p.m.

Professor of English and Education at the University of Chicago, Gerald Graff has gained renown not only as a historian and theorist, but also through his impact on the classroom practice of teachers.  His 1987 book Professing Literature: An Institutional History is widely regarded as a definitive work.

Graff coined the term “teach the controversy” in his college courses in the 1980s and later set the idea in print in his 1993 book Beyond The Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. Graff’s thesis was that college instructors should teach the conflicts around academic issues so that students may understand how knowledge becomes established and eventually accepted.

Since the publication of Clueless in Academe in 2003, Graff’s work has focused particularly on “How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind” (the book’s subtitle), and how schools and colleges can demystify academic intellectual culture for all students, not just the high-achieving few.

This book helped inspire a basic writing textbook, “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (2006), co-written by Graff and Cathy Birkenstein-Graff. The book has set records for sales in colleges and high schools.

The Graffs have given lectures and workshops at many schools and colleges, and Graff’s work has been the topic of three special sessions at Modern Language Association (MLA) conferences.  In 2008, Graff was elected President of the MLA.

Sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee and the Dean of the College, “Demystifying the Academic Game” will be followed by a reception (presented by Phi Beta Kappa) in the McLain Atrium at 4:30 p.m. Litrenta Lecture Hall and the McLain Atrium are located in the John S. Toll Science Center. Admission is free and  open to the public.