Events Calendar

Did you know that our alumni offer Yale students (and recent alums) life-lessons in team and personal leadership? 

Apply to attend: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SLF2019Mar

• Amazing (alumni) discussion leaders – all Yalies
• Past discussion leaders have included: Rhodes and Marshall Scholars; a rising Russian businessperson; an executive of the World Bank; a retired Army General; Yale Medal winners; movers-and-shakers in financial services; entrepreneurs, not-for-profit and healthcare leaders; trial lawyers…and more
• Small-group problem-solving; networking
• Fine food and venue
• Limited to 50 students plus (first-come, first-served) recent alumni

Questions? Contact stephen.blum@yale.edu

Our alums can’t wait to meet – and help – Yale students!

This is part two of a two-semester course, but either semester may be taken without the other. In the fall, the focus was on Austen's brilliant juvenilia, including Love and Friendship, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey. In the spring, books for study will be Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion. Special attention will be paid to Austen's literary influences and influence, parody and satire in her work, her distinctive narrative voice, morals and manners, her take on the gothic and the sentimental novel, gender conventions and constraints, desire, love, and marriage.

This course will explore some of the most important and influential works of British romanticism with a focus on ideas of innocence and experience. Questions addressed: How do romantic writers variously define innocence: as childhood, unspoiled nature, the ideal, purity, goodness, insight, clarity of vision, blindness, and/or ignorance? How and why is innocence lost? What is lost and what is gained as a result of the transition from innocence to experience? Topics will include: the Romantics' revision of Milton's Paradise Lost, their interest in the psychology and philosophy of memory, their glorification of children and childhood, their reverence for nature, their critique of both rationalism and crude gothic superstition, their emphasis on feeling, sensibility, and pathos, their views on radicalism and revolution. This is a two-semester course, but either semester may be taken without the other. The focus during the first semester was on Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; the second semester will center on Keats and the Shelleys.

What is hard-boiled? What about hard-boiled fiction has made it so popular and so peculiarly American? What do its violence and maverick ethics mean to American culture? This course will examine the hard-boiled, or “noir” crime fiction published in America from 1923 to 1952.

Reading and discussion of this vigorous and restless poem from the fourteenth-century, by William Langland.  Langland was a contemporary of Chaucer’s, also writing in London, but his poem is much different from anything of Chaucer’s: a dream vision in alliterative verse, filled with satire on contemporary institutions, in which the searching, questioning protagonist Will interacts, sometimes very combatively, with a series of allegorical figures who gradually calm and enlighten him, and undo somewhat his distrust of institutional religion, though the poem ends apocalyptically with the church apparently in the grip of greedy hypocrites.  We will use the Norton Critical Edition, which has the Middle English on one side and a translation by Talbot Donaldson, a longtime member of our faculty, on the other. You may simply read the poem in the translation if you like, but I will encourage as much reading in the wonderful poetry of the original as possible, and when I focus in class on a passage, it will be on the Middle English text.  I consider Piers Plowman a great masterpiece that deserves a much wider readership.

The poem is about 7500 lines long, so the reading will be roughly 900 lines a week. 

We will trace the history and development of Astronomy from Antiquity up to the present time, using images, focus concepts and related stories. Our survey of the astronomical "wonders" will also explore the science behind them. Basic scientific knowledge will be acquired in order to understand, appreciate and discuss all the aspects of modern astronomy.

Since its founding in 1790, Washington, DC has served one major function in the public imagination: national politics. Unsurprisingly, this association would extend to representations in cinema. Beginning with silent films, the motion pictures featured heads of state serving the call of duty, usually in dire times.