Lebanon Valley College Announces Colloquium Speakers and Events

ANNVILLE, PA (01/31/2017) (readMedia)-- Lebanon Valley College continues its 2016–2017 Colloquium Series with a variety of guest lecturers visiting campus to share their work related to Memory, the theme of this year's Colloquium.

The Colloquium resumes for spring semester Thursday, Feb. 2 with a lecture by Dr. Jason Hill, assistant professor in art history at the University of Delaware. In his discussion "Mary Ellen Mark: After LIFE," Hill will speak on the current exhibition Mary Ellen Mark: Tiny– Streetwise Revisited at the Suzanne H. Arnold Art Gallery, which focuses on homelessness and troubled youth in the United States. Hill will explain the dynamics of history and memory, as exemplified in Mark's images, by using the photographer's photobooks and other personal materials.

Dr. Christopher Tabone will follow Hill Thursday, Feb. 9 with a lecture entitled "Small Brains, Big Potential: Studies of Learning and Memory in the Fruit Fly," which explores the origins of the fruit fly as a model for studying learning and memory. Tabone works as a neuroscientist and senior programmer analyst for the Drosophilia genome database, Flybase, at Harvard University, where he has focused on understanding learned behavior in the fruit fly and mapping circuits of sensory input into the fly brain.

The Colloquium Series will return to the arts with a presentation Tuesday, February 21 by the Core Ensemble. "Of Ebony Embers: Vignettes of the Harlem Renaissance" celebrates the lives of the great African-American poets, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Claude McKay as seen through the eyes of the great muralist and painter Aaron Douglas. The text is by Akin Babatunde, and the musical score includes works by jazz giants Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Billy Strayhorn, Thelonius Monk, and Charles Mingus as well as concert music by Jeffrey Mumford and George Walker.

That same week, Baltimore-based gospel singer, activist, and educator Lea Gilmore will be in residence on the LVC campus. Gilmore will offer a range of workshops to students on topics that will include African-American music, history and culture, civil rights, and using music to heal racial and cultural divides. Her residency will conclude with a concert on Friday, Feb. 24 at 7:30 p.m., in which she will be joined by LVC's Concert Choir and College Choir.

In conjunction with the College's poets and writers series, the Colloquium will feature "Blood Memory: Reading the Body, Writing the Dance" from author Renée E. D'Aoust Wednesday, March 1. D'Aoust draws on the scholarly distinctions between blood memory, body memory, and singular memory to examine their intersections when creating written works.

On Thursday, March 16, the Colloquium Series will feature one of Lebanon Valley College's own scholars, Dr. Gabriela McEvoy, Associate Professor of Spanish. Her talk, "What will you find today?", presents her work on European immigration to Latin America in works of fiction and non-fiction, which is part of an upcoming manuscript entitled Aventureros irlandeses haciendo Peru.

Dr. H. Peter Steeves, professor and director of the Humanities Center at DePaul University, will perform "The Zombie Apocalypse and You: Memory, Mourning, Nostalgia, Consumption" Thursday, March 23 as the keynote address for the "Examined Life" Undergraduate Conference in the Liberal Arts at Lebanon Valley College. Steeves, whose primary areas of research include phenomenology, ethics, social-political philosophy, and philosophy of science, combines lecture, performance, dance and music as key features of his philosophical presentations.

Sophie Egan, a program director at The Culinary Institute of America, is a food and health writer who will visit Thursday, March 30 to share her work Devoured: From Chicken Wings to Kale Smoothies-How What We Eat Defines Who We Are. Devoured examines the American food psyche and the connections between the values that define the national character-such as work, freedom, and progress-and the nation's eating habits. Eagan combines insights from the fields of psychology, anthropology, food science, and behavioral economics, as well as daily life, to examine American culture and food.

All Colloquium events are free and open to the public. Visit www.lvc.edu/colloquium for additional details on the series.

About Lebanon Valley College

Lebanon Valley College is a private, coeducational college founded in 1866 and dedicated to the liberal arts. The College offers 40 undergraduate majors plus self-designed majors and a range of minors, concentrations, and pre-professional options, as well as graduate degree programs in athletic training, business administration, music education, physical therapy, science in STEM education, and speech-language pathology.

The College has 1,608 full-time undergraduate students and 108 full-time faculty. Students can choose from more than 90 clubs and organizations, and 12 study abroad programs. LVC awards generous academic scholarships to those whose high school records demonstrate a commitment to challenge and achievement.