Speaker - Michael J. Birkner, Gettysburg College

This lecture is about journalists based in Australia practicing their craft in 1942, when the prospect of a Japanese invasion was impending. How did professional standards compare with daily practice? Most information came from official sources, and draft articles had to run the gantlet of military censors. What were the trade-offs for reporters, including self-censorship? How well did the journalists manage to inform their readers back home?

Michael J. Birkner is Professor of History at Gettysburg College, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author or editor of fourteen books and many articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American political history, including three edited volumes on Pennsylvania’s only president, James Buchanan, and three books on Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 2003 and 2006 he served as a member of the history jury for the Pulitzer Prize, chairing the jury in 2006.

Speaker - Gwyn Daniel OXFORD

In many of his plays, Shakespeare deals with profound political questions that have continuing relevance for the contemporary world. His tragedies often have a family drama at their heart. They include conflicts between personal and family loyalties, on the one hand, and on the other the demands of realpolitik. In Macbeth and Coriolanus, his themes include the violent seizure of power, dilemmas of political representation, and the perspectives of ordinary citizens on leaders and their personalities.

Gwyn Daniel is a family therapist and clinical supervisor in the National Health Service at the Tavistock Clinic, London, and the co-founder of the Oxford Family Institute. She is the co-author of Gender and Family Therapy (1994). Her most recent book is Family Dramas: Intimacy, Power and Systems in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Routledge, 2018).

Speaker - Sandra Mayer

Oscar Wilde once described Benjamin Disraeli’s life as ‘the most brilliant of paradoxes’. It served as a model for someone who, as an Irishman and aspiring literary celebrity, shared Disraeli’s outsider status, his Byronic dandyism, his mastery of the quotable epigram, and his quest for fame in the British establishment. This lecture will look at the performances in which Wilde and Disraeli catered to the desires of an increasingly pervasive Victorian celebrity culture.

Sandra Mayer is the Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Vienna and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford. She is the author of Oscar Wilde in Vienna: Pleasing and Teasing the Audience (2018). She is now working on a book that will explore literary celebrity and politics from the nineteenth century to the present.

Speaker - Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa

Since 1981, conservators who work in libraries and archives to preserve cultural records have been educated typically in three-to four-year graduate programs. Before 1981 in the U.S., however, no higher education opportunities existed—neither undergraduate nor graduate—targeted to the field of library and archives conservation. Why was this case? Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa locates the beginnings of the modern field of library and archives conservation during the early Cold War period, positing that its path from apprentice training to the academy was shaped by a maelstrom of forces in the U.S. that counterbalanced a scientific and technological agenda with the construction of the nation’s cultural identity. The seminar discussion will raise issues of the cultural identity of American libraries.

Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa is Associate Director for Preservation and Conservation at the Harry Ransom Center. She has been a practitioner and educator in the preservation field for 35 years. In 2016, Ellen was awarded the American Library Association’s Paul Banks and Carolyn Harris Preservation Award for her contributions to the field. She holds the PhD in American studies and an MLIS from UT Austin, and received an Endorsement of Specialization in Administration of Preservation Programs from Columbia University’s School of Library Service. Her book, Mooring a Field: Paul N. Banks and the Education of Library Conservators (The Legacy Press), will be released in late October.

Speaker - Wayne A. Rebhorn

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night has long been associated with the festive aspects of carnival, especially in its rejection of authority and the exploration of gender confusion in its main, romantic plot. But ‘carnival’ as used by Shakespeare also meant a time of grotesque liberation and indulgence. The carnivalesque can be disturbing as well as exhilarating. While rejection of authority finally yields to a return to the norms of ordinary social life, Twelfth Night preserves the disruptiveness of carnival to the very end.

Wayne A. Rebhorn holds the Vacek Chair in English. He has given talks at Yale, Princeton, and Chicago, has lectured in France, Italy, and Germany, and has won fellowships from the ACLS and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1990, his Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli’s Confidence Men won the Marraro Prize of the Modern Language Association. His translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron won the PEN Center USA’s 2014 Prize for Literary Translation.

Speaker - Stephen Sonnenberg

While a student at Princeton in the late 1950s and early 1960s Stephen Sonnenberg was influenced by the ideas of the literary critic and poet R. P. Blackmur, and read C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). He will explain Snow's influence on his thinking throughout his life, as reflected in his memoir now in its third draft, which looks closely at doctor-patient exchanges. A physician and humanities scholar, Sonnenberg will further discuss how his thinking on health care has evolved and how he structures his conversation with patients. The lecture will include an explanation of how medical psychoanalysts traditionally made clinical decisions.

Stephen Sonnenberg, M.D., was educated at Princeton University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he earned his medical degree in 1965. He is now Professor of Psychiatry, Population Health, and Medical Education at the Dell Medical School, as well as Professor of Instruction at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work and a Fellow of the Trice Professorship in the Plan II Honors Program. Like C. P. Snow, he tries to bridge the two cultures of science and the humanities.

Speaker - Sam Baker

Often described as the inventor of the historical novel, the Scottish author Walter Scott (1771-1832) was also a poet, lawyer, pioneering editor, and popular historian. This talk will explore the theme of stewardship in Scott's fiction—with particular reference to his best remembered work, Ivanhoe, and one of his least remembered, The Fair Maid of Perth—and will connect that theme with the historiography of feudalism that Scott discovered in the writings of early modern antiquaries. Scott turns out to have been fascinated by the idea that aristocrats abandon at their peril their responsibilities as stewards for the people. What if the ultimate story of failed stewardship told by Scott is the story of a storied royal dynasty—the Stuarts themselves? Samuel Baker has been teaching in the English Department at UT Austin since 2001. He has published a book, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture (Virginia, 2010), and essays on eighteenth and nineteenth century authors including Ann Radcliffe, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. His current interests include media studies, gothic antiquarianism, and, of course, the poetry and fiction of Walter Scott.

Speaker - Dean Robert King

This occasion celebrates the end of the five-year process, sponsored by Randy Diehl and the College of Liberal Arts, that resulted in 150 Highly Recommended Books. The other committee members for the project were Robert Abzug (Rapoport Chair of Jewish Studies), Roger Louis (Kerr Professor of English History and Culture), Al Martinich (Vaughan Centennial Professor in Philosophy), Elizabeth Richmond-Garza (Director of Comparative Literature), and Steven Weinberg (Welch Chair in Physics). The thoroughly illustrated book assesses the authors of the works selected for inclusion as well as the books themselves. Copies will be distributed at the meeting.

Speaker - David Edwards (GOVERNMENT)

David Edwards has been a dedicated reader of American and British newspapers and opinion magazines since the 1950s. In fact, he still subscribes to more than one hundred print editions of newspapers, magazines, and journals. He will talk about how fake news has evolved into the versions of it that increasingly pervade politics today. And he will answer the question, what are some possible ways of understanding and coping with the challenge to democracy posed by fake news?

Having taught government courses at UT for fifty years, David Edwards three years ago became Professor Emeritus. He has written books on international relations (Creating a New World Politics and Arms Control in International Politics) as well as American politics (The American Political Experience). He has served as a consultant to the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Industrial Management Center, and the Danforth Foundation. He has written for the Washington Post, the Nation, and La Quinzaine Littéraire.

Speakers - Bill Brands (HISTORY) Bat Sparrow (GOVERNMENT) Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa (HARRY RANSOM CENTER)

Bill Brands and Bat Sparrow will discuss the difference between writing history and biography, and between writing the life of a living person and that of someone dead, perhaps long ago dead, as well as the attitudes of biographers toward their subjects. And what of reviews that criticize a book seemingly other than the one the author thought he or she had written? Brands and Sparrow will also comment on their experiences of working with archival sources and the perils as well as benefits of interviews. Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa will comment on the dilemmas she has encountered writing professional biography. How does the historian determine where to draw the line between the personal and the professional?