Renowned Counterinsurgency Expert John Nagl Will Deliver Holstein Ethics Lecture on March 23

CHESTERTOWN, MD—One of the world’s top experts on national security and counterinsurgency, John A. Nagl, will deliver the Holstein Ethics Lecture at Washington College Wednesday afternoon, March 23. The talk, “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife,” will take place at 4:30 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall, Toll Science Center, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue. The title is taken from Nagl’s 2005 book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, a comparison of British and American strategies he first wrote as a dissertation at Oxford University.

Now president of the D.C.-based Center for a New American Security, Nagl spent 20 years as an armor officer in the United States Army, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and earning renown for his mentorship of junior officers. His last military assignment before retiring with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel was at Fort Riley, KS, where he trained the transition teams that embed with Iraqi and Afghan units.

A distinguished 1988 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a Rhodes Scholar, Nagl later taught security studies at West Point and at Georgetown University. In 2007, he co-wrote the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. He has been published or interviewed by numerous national media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, 60 Minutes, NPR, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. For more information on John Nagl and the Center for a New American Security, visit http://www.cnas.org/node/72.

Dr. Nagl’s talk is sponsored by the Holstein Ethics Committee at Washington College, part of an ethics program founded by 1968 alumnus Richard Holstein to encourage students to examine the ethical aspects of their actions.

Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Exiled from America: Harvard Historian To Discuss Revolutionary War Loyalists

CHESTERTOWN, MD—History, as we know, is most often told by the victors. But the vanquished have stories of their own. In a March 23 presentation at Washington College, Harvard University historian Maya Jasanoff will reveal some of these stories, tracing the experiences of Americans loyal to the British crown and their forced exodus at the end of the American Revolution.

Jasanoff's talk, "Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World," will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall, John S. Toll Science Center on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue. Sponsored by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the program is free and open to the public. A book signing will follow the talk.

Released just last month by Alfred A. Knopf, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World has already been lauded far and wide as a masterpiece, upending past assumptions about the aftermath of the American Revolution.

"Losers seldom get to write history, but the American loyalists have at last got their historian with Maya Jasanoff," said historian Joseph J. Ellis, while Sean Wilentz noted that her "stunning reinterpretation … affirms her place as one of the very finest historians of the rising generation." British historian William Dalrymple agreed, calling Jasanoff "not just a very good writer, an indefatigable researcher, and a fine historian," but "also a bit of a genius."

When the British army evacuated the United States in 1783, thousands of American loyalists followed in its wake. Their numbers included wealthy white landowners, Mohawk Indians, and formerly enslaved blacks who had won their freedom aiding the British. Having cast their lot with the losing side, they fanned out from the newly-independent United States, seeking a future elsewhere in the British Empire. Some sailed to Britain itself, others to Canada, the Bahamas and the West Indies; still others journeyed even further, to India and Africa.

"This voyage into exile was a trip into the unknown..." Jasanoff writes. "For them, America seemed less 'an Assylum to the persecuted' than a potential persecutor." Yet wherever they went, Jasanoff argues, the American loyalists carried with them some startlingly "American" ideas. Transmitted around the world, these revolutionary legacies helped to redefine the British Empire.

"As revolutions ripple across the Middle East, we can't help but notice how small our world is," said Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the C.V. Starr Center. "Maya Jasanoff's fascinating book reminds us this isn't a completely new phenomenon. The world was a pretty small place even in 1783."

Maya Jasanoff is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on modern Britain and the British Empire. She has recently held fellowships at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (Knopf, 2005), won the Duff Cooper Prize.

Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Based in the Custom House along the colonial waterfront, the College's C.V. Starr Center fosters the art of written history and explores our nation's past—particularly the legacy of its Founding era—in innovative ways, through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

Catholic University Scholar to Discuss Unholy Marriages of Politics and Religion

CHESTERTOWN—The Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture at Washington College will host a lecture on the dangers of politicized religion on Tuesday, March 8 . Jeffrey Dirk Wilson, a philosophy professor at Catholic University of America, will present “Political Theology: A Clear and Present Danger—Lessons from the Third Reich to the Present” at 7 p.m. in Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Wilson’s lecture will examine how theological concepts often have been wrenched from their religious contexts and invested in political movements, and will talk about the dangerous consequences that followed.

Professor Wilson works in the field of political philosophy and has special expertise in the area of religion and politics. He is an expert on the writings of the controversial pre-World War II German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose work advanced the idea that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” Wilson will highlight the dangers of this approach to state power and how the transcendence of God renders this approach theologically dubious.

Wilson’s talk is free and open to the public.

"Locavore" Literary Festival Brings Writers, Activists To Town to Dish About What We Eat

CHESTERTOWN, MD—The first ever Chestertown Locavore Lit Fest celebrates local food and cooking Friday and Saturday March 25 and 26 with a satisfying smorgasbord of food journalists and writers talking about agriculture, fishing, recipes and the joys of healthy eating. Special guests will include the New York Times best-selling author Paul Greenberg, NPR contributor Bonnie Wolf and a food activist who challenges the wisdom of the vegetarian lifestyle.

The weekend kicks off Friday at 11:30 a.m. at a special lunch and book signing with Lierre Keith, a former vegan and the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability (2009, PM Press). The event will be held in the Hodson Hall Commons dining room at Washington College, where the staff will prepare a meal based on her philosophy of raising and eating grass-fed beef as an alternative to industrially produced animals. Locally sourced, grass-fed beef and local produce will be on the menu ($6.50 per person for general public). In the evening Keith will lecture about the moral, health and environmental issues that surround our food choices, and then join a moderated discussion about her controversial writings. Her talk will begin at 6 p.m. in Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall, on the Washington College campus (300 Washington Avenue) with the reception scheduled for 7 o’clock and the Q&A to follow at 7:30 p.m.

The Vegetarian Myth has been described as part memoir, part nutritional primer, and part political manifesto. In the book, Keith, who spent 20 years as a vegan, reviews the history of agriculture and the damage it has caused the planet and shares her personal journey back to meat. She argues that well-intentioned vegetarians have been led astray by ignorance. A resident of Humbolt County, California, Keith is co-author with Aric McBay and Derrick Jensen of the upcoming Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet, scheduled for May release from Seven Stories Press.

On Saturday, local bookstores host more food-focused writers in a morning packed with culinary talk. It begins at 10 a.m. at the Bookplate (112 S. Cross Street) with a panel of three local food writers: Author Nancy Robson and bloggers Aundra Weissert and Tara Holste. Robson has written freelance articles for 35 years and authored two books: a memoir of her six years on a coastal tug titled Woman in the Wheelhouse, and the award-winning novel Course of the Waterman. A Master Gardener, she writes and edits sections on gardening and food for the Chestertown Spy.

A healthy living enthusiast, Aundra Weissert explores fitness, local food, sustainable living, and wellness in her Fit for Life blog. A 2008 graduate of Washington College, she serves her alma mater as Assistant Director of Admissions and teaches several Zumba fitness classes in town each week. Tara Holste is a passionate environmentalist and an avid supporter of foods grown on the Eastern Shore. Her "Fish in the Water" blog catalogs her quest to find a better way of living through growing, preserving, and loving food.

From 10:45 to 11:30 a.m., at the Bookplate, Lucie Snodgrass, author of Dishing Up Maryland: 150 Recipes From the Alleghenies to the Chesapeake Bay (2010, Storey Publishing), will share what she learned by visiting 50 to 60 farms, vineyards and oyster ranches to present a portrait of the state’s bounty and kitchen expertise.A native of England who has lived throughout Europe, Snodgrass recently worked in the offices of Senator Barbara Mikulski and now lives and works on a 135-acre farm in northeastern Maryland.

The Festival moves down the block to The Compleat Bookseller (High and Cross streets) where NPR Food Commentator Bonny Wolf, author of Talking with My Mouth Full (2006, St. Martin’s Press), will speak from 11:45 to 12:30 a.m. Wolf contributes a monthly food essay to NPR’s award-winning Weekend Edition Sunday and is editor of “Kitchen Window, ” NPR’s weekly Web-only food column. Wolf has worked several decades as a reporter, editor and food critic at newspapers and magazines in New Jersey, Texas and Washington, DC. In the 1990s she wrote and published The Food Pages, a critically acclaimed food newsletter for the District of Columbia.

Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. in the Parish Hall of Emmanuel Church (301 High Street), Paul Greenberg, author of the best-selling Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (2010, The Penguin Press), will talk about how our love of seafood has influenced the history of four species of fish. Greenberg is a lifelong fisherman and an award winning writer whose book explores the history of the fish that dominate our menus—salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna—and examines where each now stands as a species. By examining the forces that get fish to our dinner tables, he shows how we can start to heal the oceans and advocate for a world where healthy and sustainable seafood is the rule rather than the exception. Greenberg’s Four Fish was a New York Times notable book for 2010.

The Locavore Lit Fest weekend is sponsored by the Center for Environment & Society at Washington College, the Washington College Anthropology Club, Chestertown Natural Foods, and Local Eastern Shore Sustainable Organic Network (LESSON). With the exception of the fee for lunch on Friday, all events are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact 410-810-7162 or tholste2@washcoll.edu for more information or visit http://ces.washcoll.edu.

Friday, March 25

11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Signing and lunch with Lierre Keith, Hodson Dining Hall

6:00-7:00 p.m. Lecture, Lierre Keith, author The Vegetarian Myth, Hynson Lounge

7:00-7:30 p.m. Light reception with appetizers and drinks

7:30-8:30 p.m. Discussion and Q&A with Lierre Keith

Saturday, March 26

10:00-10:45 a.m. Get Inspired: Local Authors on Local Foods, Bookplate
10:45-11:30 a.m. Lucie Snodgrass, author Dishing Up Maryland, at the Bookplate.

11:45-12:30 p.m. Bonny Wolf, author Talking with My Mouth Full, Compleat Bookseller.

12:30-2:00 p.m. Lunch break- please visit one of the many restaurants in Chestertown!

2:00-3:00 p.m. Paul Greenberg, author Four Fish, Emmanuel Parish Hall

MIT Professor Examines Impact of iPods, iPads and Facebook on Human Relationships

CHESTERTOWN, MD—In the brave new world of Facebook, “smart phones” and Twitter, where both teens and adults would rather type than talk, are we more in touch but more isolated than ever before?

Psychologist Sherry Turkle, who has researched technology's effects on society for more than three decades, explores this seeming contradiction in her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, released earlier this year by Basic Books. She will share her insights (face-to-face!) in a talk Thursday, March 24 at Washington College.

Sponsored by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the event will begin at 6:30 p.m. with a book signing, followed by a 7 p.m. talk in Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue. (Turkle was originally scheduled to visit Chestertown in early February, but had to postpone her trip because of extreme weather.)

Tagged “an important, controversial new book” by the Boston Globe, Turkle's provocative work has generated a great deal of media buzz, recently winning its author a guest appearance on The Colbert Report. The Guardian (UK) highlighted the book as a “cri de coeur” for putting down the BlackBerry, ignoring Facebook, and shunning Twitter, applauding it for its success in sparking debate about the merits of social networking.

Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also the founder and director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self. Dubbed “the Margaret Mead of digital culture” by an MIT colleague, she has been profiled in the New York Times, Scientific American, and Wired Magazine and has been a featured media commentator for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and NPR.

“Anxiety is part of the new connectivity,” Turkle finds, and these “anxieties migrate, proliferate.” Places like Facebook foster self-expression, but that self is often a fabrication. The same is true in social networking games such as Second Life, where participants create avatars that are better-looking, smarter, and more accomplished than themselves. This constant and intense connectedness often gets in the way of building a more real, face-to-face network of friendships, and may even interference with psychological development. Turkle argues that this generation of teenagers, accustomed to interacting with others through machines, are less empathetic than their predecessors, less mindful of the feelings of those around them.

“Social media has become an ingrained part of most of our lives,” says Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. “But as Sherry Turkle reminds us, it’s not something we should embrace without question.”

The talk and book signing are free and open to the public. Co-sponsors include the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, the Department of Psychology, and two student groups, Psychology Club and Psi Chi, the Washington College chapter of the national psychology honor society. For more on Alone Together, visit http://www.alonetogetherbook.com.

About the Starr Center
Based in the Custom House along Chestertown's colonial waterfront, the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College fosters the art of written history and explores our nation's past – particularly the legacy of its Founding era – in innovative ways, through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

Lecture Examines How Protestant-Catholic Conflicts Impacted Early Exploration in America

CHESTERTOWN—Dr. Andrea Frisch, Director of Graduate Studies in French at the University of Maryland, will lecture Monday, March 21 at 5 p.m. in the Sophie Kerr Room of Miller Library on the Washington College campus. Her talk, entitled "Multicultural Encounters: How European Religious Disputes Shaped Early Modern Images of Amerindians," will explore the role played by religious differences between Catholics and Protestants during the early stages of the exploration of the Americas.

A specialist in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Frisch received her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley. She researched law and literature for the 2004 book The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and recently completed a book about the impact of the civil wars of the sixteenth century on the literature and aesthetics of seventeenth-century France.

Her work has appeared in Representations, Romanic Review, Discourse, Esprit Créateur and Modern Language Quarterly. Frisch has received fellowships from the Newberry Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities and, most recently, from the National Humanities Center.

Sponsored by the College’s Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture, the Department of Modern Languages, and the Department of Art and Art History, the lecture is free and open to the public.

Empty Bowls Dinner Tonight to Help End Hunger

CHESTERTOWN—Washington College joins the international community in the fight against hunger with an Empty Bowls Project dinner to benefit the Kent County Food Pantry on Thursday, March 3 beginning at 5:30 in Hynson Lounge. Local potters, community members, and students joined ceramics professor Marilee Schumann in early February at an open studio “Bowl-a-thon” to make clay bowls for the event. The “Bowl-a-thon” bowls will be used to serve up to 100 guests a meal of soup and bread; at the end of the evening attendees will take home their bowls as a symbol of the “empty bowls” that can be found worldwide.

The Washington College Service Council has in years past held similar bowl-making events and then sold the bowls for donations to the local food pantry. This year, for the first time, student organizers Jesse Schaefer and Leah Sbriscia decided the Service Council would join the Office of Student Development and Chester River Artworks to host a dinner.

Empty Bowls events, first conceived by the non-profit Imagine Render Group’s initiative to improve communities through education and the arts, have been held across the United States and in at least a dozen other countries to raise money and awareness for organizations working to end world hunger.

Tickets are $20 for adults, $10 for students and children. For reservations call 410-778-7752, or e-mail student_affairs@washcoll.edu.