Community Calendar for St. John's College, Santa Fe, Nov/Dec 2014

COMMUNITY

CALENDAR ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE NOV/DEC 2014 SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

VOL. 6.14

EARLY GRADUATE INSTITUTE STUDENTS PARTICIPATING IN A SEMINAR CLASS.

In this Issue: Lectures Graduate Institute Event Concerts Theatre & Performance November Community Seminars

Celebrate with St. John’s College

The Graduate Institute “The Graduate Institute first opened its doors on the Santa Fe campus in 1967 as the Teachers Institute in Liberal Education. There were 33 students in the class, 27 associated with the teaching profession.

The following year the name was changed to the Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, to more accurately reflect its availability to all who could benefit from a St. John's graduate experience."

—The St. John’s Reporter, 1979

Please visit www.sjc.edu regularly for updated information on the 50th anniversary.

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GI Class,1973: The initial classes in the Graduate Institute included several public school teachers.

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DEAN’S LECTURES

Lectures are free and open to the public and are followed by a question-and-answer period.

Galileo’s Hermeticism Classics and History: Historical and Literary Contexts in the Reading of Sanskrit Texts Friday, November 7, 3:15 p.m.

Great Hall, Peterson Student Center Patrick Olivelle, University of Texas, Department of Asian Studies Rohrbach Memorial Lecturer

Professor Olivelle will address three interrelated issues. First, how a classic is created: the historical contexts that create classics; the role historical memory plays in this process; and the fate of “forgotten” classics—forgotten by the tradition and thus ignored by modern scholarship. Second, the need to attend to the historical—political, religious, economic—contexts that gave birth to the text that came to be designated as a classic. Third, the role of translations in reading classics. Can there be translations that permit total access to the original? If not, what do we lose in translation? Two elements of originals, especially of poetry, are structure and sound—elements that can never be captured in translations. Professor Olivelle will present examples of such poetic structures and “beauty of sound” that are essential ingredients of Sanskrit poetry.

Patrick Olivelle was the chair of the Department of Asian Studies, from 1994 until 2007, and is currently the Mossiker Chair Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and was elected president of the American Oriental Society in 2005. His books have won awards from the American Academy of Religion and the Association of Asian Studies. In 2011 he was awarded the Career Research Excellence Award of the University of Texas at Austin. He has published over 25 books and over 50 scholarly articles. His recent books include King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India (Oxford 2013) and Reimagining Asoka (Oxford 2012).

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Nighttime Walks with Proust Friday, November 14, 7:30 p.m.

Great Hall, Peterson Student Center Patricia Locke, St. John’s College, Annapolis Part of The Carol J. Worrell Annual Lecture Series on Literature

This lecture is a close reading of a short passage from the first volume of Proust’s novel, In Search of Lost Time. We will walk familiar paths by moonlight to discover how our spatial experience changes at night. How do the alterations affect us? How woven together are we with the world around us?

In this paragraph, the narrator recalls after-dinner walks with his parents that stand as a counter-example to the indoor bedtime trauma he remembers so vividly of early childhood. Locke will compare these moonlit events with a passage from the last volume of the novel—when the narrator is a young man walking alone at night in Paris—as a way of marking change in time as well as space. Ultimately, our question is how a small moment in a long novel might act as a key to being at home in the world. Can we say, on the basis of the significant differences in lived spatiality between day and night, that the “obscure country” of the human is also sought and found in analogously distinct ways?

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The Meaning of Rome Friday, November 21, 7:30 p.m.

Great Hall, Peterson Student Center Michael Grenke, St. John’s College, Annapolis Part of The Carol J. Worrell Annual Lecture Series on Literature

In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Britain stops paying tribute to Rome and attempts to become its own independent nation. The power of Rome opposes this attempt and invades. A young British lover exchanges vows (and manacles of love) with his new wife, as each proclaims exclusive ownership of the other. A sly Roman disputes the validity of any such claims of marital exclusivity and unassailable virtue. This Roman sets about to prove his claim and disrupts the marriage to a point that approaches the tragedy of Othello. The lecture will consider Cymbeline as a sustained rumination on what possibilities of exclusive ownership are available to human beings and what would have to be true about reason, passion, and the world in order for human beings properly to found their claims to possess things that belong to them alone.

The “Turnings” of the Soul: The Five Mathematical Studies in Plato’s Republic VII Friday, December 5, 7:30 p.m.

Great Hall, Peterson Student Center Mitch Miller, Vassar College, Department of Philosophy

In Book VII of the Republic, Plato has Socrates introduce the study of five mathematical disciplines as the pivotal phase in the “turning of the soul” from “what becomes” to “what is” and to “what is the brightest of what is,” namely, “the Good” (518c). We will ask: what is this “turning,” and how is it that these five

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studies, in this particular sequence, have the power to occasion it? As we will try to bring to view, there are in fact several interrelated turns that the five studies occasion, and the way they function together in guiding thought from the sensible to the intelligible yields seminal questions about the relations between sense-perceptible things and forms.

Mitchell Miller was the Dexter Ferry Professor in Philosophy at Vassar College until 2013; he is now emeritus. He has published two books on Plato, Plato’s Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul (Princeton 1986, Penn State ppk 1991) and The Philosopher in Plato’s Statesman (Martinus Nijhoff 1980, reissued with “Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato’s Statesman,” Parmenides Publishing 2004), and a number of essays on Plato. He has also published studies of Hesiod, Parmenides, and Hegel. He has recently been at work on the Philebus, the “so-called unwritten teachings” of Plato, and—as the Platonic provocation for this inquiry—the notion of “the longer way” (Republic 435c-d and 504b-e) to the dialectical study of the Good and a more “precise grasp” of the city, the soul, and the cosmos that, he argues, Plato projects as the yield of the “longer way.”

Did Euclid Understand Fractions? Do We Understand Euclid?

Friday, December 12, 3:15 p.m.

Great Hall, Peterson Student Center David Pengelley, New Mexico State University, Department of Mathematical Sciences

What does it really mean for two fractions to be equal? How can one legitimately detect their equality? Euclid’s Book VII is at the heart of this issue, but has been sorely misunderstood. We will explore a conundrum in Euclid on prime divisibility and fractions, discover a flaw, and aim to fix it in the spirit of Euclid.

David Pengelley is professor emeritus at New Mexico State University. His research is in algebraic topology and history of mathematics. He develops the pedagogies of teaching with student projects and with primary historical sources, and created a graduate course on the role of history in teaching mathematics. He relies on student reading, writing, and mathematical preparation before class to enable active student work to replace lecture. He has received the Mathematical Association of America’s Haimo teaching award.

EXPERIENCE THE LIBERAL ARTS:

A Free Graduate Institute Event to Learn About the Liberal Arts Master’s Program Saturday, November 8, 2014 1-4:30 p.m.

St. John’s College, Levan Hall Admission is free David Carl, director of the Graduate Institute, and

St. John’s tutor Lise Van Boxel will lead a discussion

on short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. This event is an opportunity for prospective students to partici-

pate in a St. John’s College seminar and experience the great rewards of dialogue as learning.

Space is limited. Please RSVP

by November 5 to Susan Olmsted at santafe.gradadmissions@sjc.edu or 505-984-6083.

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LUNCHTIME CONCERT PETER PESIC IN CONCERT Wednesday, December 3 12:10–1:15 p.m.

Great Hall, Peterson Student Center

Peter Pesic, piano. Debussy: Préludes 1–6 (Book II); Chopin: Impromptu, op. 29; Scherzo, op. 20.

Admission is free.

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DEATHTRAP Saturday, November 22, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, November 23, at 3 p.m.

Great Hall, Peterson Student Center

Ira Levin wrote this Tony-nominated play-within-a-play in 1978, and it holds the record for the longest-running comedy thriller on Broadway. At St. John’s, Deathtrap is being presented by Chrysostomos, the student theater group.

Admission is free.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Great Hall, Peterson Student Center Friday, December 12–Sunday, December 14

This Oscar Wilde classic, first performed on February 14, 1895, at the St. James’s Theatre in London and now presented by members of Chrysostomos, the student theater group, is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play’s major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways. Friday and Saturday show-time is 7:30 p.m.; the Sunday matinee is at 2 p.m.

Admission is free.

VERA & WEI BAI’S PERSONAL CALLIGRAPHY EXHIBITION Wednesday, November 12, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, November 16, at 3 p.m.

Great Hall, Peterson Student Center

Vera is a Solo Artistic Story Telling (SAST) project that brings together piano, guitar, acting, ballet, and flamenco dance as a musical play, presented by St. John’s student Wei Bai. She writes the story, composes the music, directs the play, and performs by herself. After the show, there is a small personal calligraphy exhibition of Wei Bai for project Vera. As a young Chinese calligrapher, Wei Bai has displayed her works in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan.

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ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE COMMUNITY SEMINARS Community Seminars are special opportunities for community members to read and discuss seminal works in the same unique manner as our students. Seminars are discussion-based and small in size in order to ensure spir- St. John’s College President, Mike Peters ited dialogue. There are topics to pique every interest, and for many participants the discussion-based learning model is an entirely new experience.

SHAKESPEARE: THE HISTORY PLAYS Friday, November 14, 4-6 p.m., Shakespeare’s Richard II Saturday, November 15, 10 a.m.-Noon, Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I Cost: $125 for Friday and Saturday sessions.

Teachers receive half off the seminar price.

Juniors and seniors in high school attend free.

St. John’s College President Mike Peters and tutor Lise van Boxel will lead two series of Community Seminars covering Shakespeare’s English History plays. In the fall, Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1 will comprise a two-seminar series. In the spring semester, Henry IV, Part 2 and Henry V will comprise a second two-seminar series. Shakespeare’s second tetralogy plays covering “The War of the Roses” offer remarkable insight into the overlapping intricacies of the political and the personal with action ranging from the courts to the battlefields to the flea-bitten inns of London. High politics, shrewd statecraft, low comedy, and memorable characters all find keen expression in these plays.

Community members can sign-up for one or both series. The texts are available for purchase at the St. John’s College Bookstore. Full-time teachers with proof of current employment can enroll in a Community Seminar at a 50-percent discount. Community Seminars are free to 11th and 12th grade high school students (limited spaces available).

The second series will be held on Friday, February 13, 4-6pm, and on Saturday, February 14, 10-noon. The February Seminars will be on Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II and King Henry V.

Please call 505-984-6118 or email Yoshi Gruber to register for any of the seminars, or go to http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/santa-fe/communityseminar-series/.

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www.sjc.edu

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