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Off-Campus Events

Boston Public Library

Lowell Lecture: Rick Steves
Thursday, December 3, 2009, 6 – 8pm
Rick Steves advocates smart, independent travel. As host of the public television series, Rick Steves' Europe, and author of 22 European travel books, he encourages Americans to dive deep into Europe and become "temporary locals." His readers discover not just great cities, but cozy "back door" villages away from the tourist trampled routes. He helps American travelers connect more intimately with Europeans, often for a fraction of what mainstream tourists pay. This talk is part of the BPL's Lowell Lecture series, generously sponsored by the Lowell Institute.
A book sale and author signing will follow the lecture.

CONNOLLY BRANCH LIBRARY
433 Centre St., Jamaica Plain--Telephone 617-522-1960
Club de Lectura -- Saturdays at 12:30 p.m

JAMAICA PLAIN BRANCH LIBRARY
12 Sedgwick St. -- Telephone 617-524-2053
Spanish Study group -- Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. Participants should be able to read a Spanish-language newspaper.

DUDLEY LITERACY CENTER
65 Warren St., Roxbury -- Telephone 617-859-2446
Spanish Beginner 1 -- Fridays, at 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. Learn Spanish through conversation and grammar, led by Fernando Bernava. Call to sign up.
Spanish Beginner 2 -- Fridays at noon. Learn Spanish through conversation and grammar, led by Fernando Bernava. Call to sign up.

Boston University

An Evening with Phillip Lopate
Friday, Nov 6, 2009 at 7:00pm
The much-honored and much-published New York novelist ("The Rug Merchant"), poet, memoirist, essayist ("Portrait of My Body"), professor, film critic, and cinema historian ("American Movie Critics: an Anthology"), will lecture on “Changing One’s Mind About a Film.” The lecture will be illustrated by a showing of Claude Sautet’s 1992 French classic "Un Couer en Hiver" (A Heart in Winter), about a beautiful violinist in love both with Ravel and her husband’s best friend.
College of Communication, 640 Commonwealth Avenue (COM B-05)

Murder in the Name of Honor
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009 at 4:30pm
Feminist and human rights defender, Jordanian Rana Husseini is a leading international investigative journalist, whose reporting has put violence against women on the public agenda around the world. The recipient of numerous awards for bravery in journalism, she is a regular speaker at major international events, including having spoken at the World Organization Against Torture at the 57th Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.
Husseini will discuss her recent book, "Murder in the Name of Honor," which chronicles the many cases of so-called honor killings that she has uncovered during years of international investigative reporting. Grounded in years of extensive research from dozens of countries, where so-called honor killings have been reoported including Pakistan, Jordan, Sweden, the US and the UK, she will describe what is being done in specific locations and what still needs to be done on a social, political and economic level to get attention to this issue. She will delve into the very complicated issue of these crimes occurring in migrant communities across Europe and North America and explains the links between so-called honor crimes and other forms of discrimination occurring against women worldwide.
Copies of "Murder in the Name of Honor" will be available for purchase following the talk.
Speaker(s): Rana Husseini, author, "Murder in the Name of Honor"
The Castle, 225 Bay State Road

Paul Rusesabagina, Real-Life Hero, Hotel Rwanda, and Distinguished Poet Sonia Sanchez
Wednesday, Nov 11, 2009 at 6:00pm until 8:30pm
Paul Rusesabagina, the famed real life hero whose story is documented in the movie "Hotel Rwanda" with Don Cheadle, will give the Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Lecture. Rusesabagina will also be installed as a Martin Luther King, Jr. Fellow. Distinguished poet Sonia Sanchez will give a reading of her work and will also be named as a Coretta Scott King Fellow.
A round table discussion of experts will discuss the lasting influence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Humanities and our society. Moderated by Boston University’s Prof. Gene Jarrett, the panel will feature King family members Prof. Christine King Farris and Prof. Angela Farris Watkins. The roundtable will also include Prof. Clayborne Carson, Prof. Walter Fluker, Prof. Isabel Wilkerson and Boston University’s Dean of the School of Education Hardin Coleman.
The event celebrates the launching of the electronic finding aid for the Martin Luther King, Jr. collection.
Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Ave.

Matthew Bailey: "Algunas reflexiones sobre la promoción de la leyenda cidiana desde la Historia Roderici hasta nuestros días"
5:15pm on Friday, November 13th 2009
Location: CAS 200

Intimate Encounters: Mexican Modernism and the Female Nude
Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009 at 5:30pm
Please join the Graduate Student Art History Association (GSAHA) of Boston University for the Guest Scholar Lecture Series. The Guest Lecture lasts approximately one hour and is followed by a brief Q&A session and a reception.
Adriana Zavala is an Associate Professor of Art History at Tufts University.
Speaker(s): Adriana Zavala, Tufts University
725 Commonwealth Avenue (CAS 200)

Beauty and Social Justice
Elaine Scarry
Thursday, February 11, 2010
5pm
Photonics Center Rm 206, 8 St. Mary St.

Boston College

Lectura Dantis: Paradiso 7
Monday, November 23, 2009 | 7:30 p.m
Devlin 101
Lectura Dantis, a public reading of Dante's Divine Comedy, presents Paradiso IV with Prof. Myriam Ruthenberg, Florida Atlantic University. Bilingual texts of the canto will be distributed at the door. The presentation of the text is in English, and the reading in Italian.

Memory and Its Strength: The Martyrs of El Salvador - A Discussion between Jon Sobrino, S.J. and Noam Chomsky, moderated by J. Donald Monan
Monday, November 30, 2009 | 4:30 p.m.
Robsham Theater Arts Center
Noam Chomsky, Jon Sobrino, S.J. and J. Donald Monan, S.J. will reconsider from each of their perspectives the assassination of the six Jesuit priests and their two staff members at the University of Central America (UCA) on the 20th anniversary of their martyrdom.

Lectura Dantis: Paradiso 8
Monday, January 25, 2010 | 7:30 p.m.
Devlin 101
Lectura Dantis, a public reading of Dante's Divine Comedy, presents Paradiso 8 with Prof. Laurie Shepard, Boston College. Bilingual texts of the canto will be distributed at the door. The presentation of the text is in English, and the reading in Italian.

Harvard University

Jonathan Lear on "Irony and Identity"
November 4-6
Lowell Lecture Hall
Thompson Room, Barker Center

Women and Culture in the Early Modern World (Humanities Center Seminar)(Barker 133)
Nov 5, 2009
5:30p - 7:30p
Description Patricia Crouch (Framingham State College). "Making Fragments Whole: Generic Experimentation in Lucy Hutchinson’s Elegies and Life Writings"

Prints and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Humanities Center Seminar)(Barker 133)
Nov 10, 2009
5:00p - 7:00p
Description Jasper van Putten (Harvard University) and Miranda Mollendorf (Harvard University). Discussion of research on mapping and anatomical illustration for Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge exhibition catalogue

Visual Representation, Transmission, and Translation (Humanities Center Seminar)(Barker 133)
Nov 12, 2009
5:00p - 7:00p
Description Hollis Clayson (Northwestern University). "Episodes from the Visual Culture of Paris in the Era of Thomas Edison"

Hispanic Cultures (Humanities Center Seminar)(Barker 114)
Nov 16, 2009
6:00p - 8:00p
Description "Una conversación con Sergio Ramírez y Julio Ortega." intervienen Alba Aragón, Eugenio Lanzas y Humberto Delgado

Politics, Literature, and the Arts (Humanities Center Seminar)(Barker 133)
Nov 17, 2009
6:00p - 8:00p
Description Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford University). (Statistical Sublime: Mayakovsky and Marinetti)

France and the World (Humanities Center Seminar)(Barker 133)
Nov 23, 2009
5:00p - 7:00p
Description Michael Kelly (Harvard University). "Poésie Langue Étrangère: Unhoused Poetic Subjects in the Extrême Contemporain"

Lauro de Bosis Lectures on Italian Renaissance Art(Barker 133)
Dec 3, 2009
6:00p - 8:00p
Description Elizabeth Cropper (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, D.C.). “Bolognese Tradition or Florentine Rebirth?: Malvasia's History of Art”

Harvard Film Archive

November 13 - November 16
Tsai Ming-liang Then and Now

This selective retrospective unites three rarely screened works by Tsai Ming-liang (b. 1957), one of the most celebrated artists working in contemporary Asian cinema. Tsai’s first two features, Rebels of the Neon God and Vive l’Amour, and the little seen recent work, The Wayward Cloud are all shaped by Tsai’s fascination with modern urban alienation and sexual frustration. They also share their magnetic lead actor, Lee Kang-sheng who, much like Monica Vitti for Antonioni - the director to whom Tsai is frequently compared - acts as both emblem of the alienated city-dweller and as erotic figure, an object of ambiguous identification and desire. Tsai discovered the actor just as he turned from television to cinema, and Lee has acted as the filmmaker’s muse and creative partner ever since, with Tsai even attributing the slow, meditative rhythms of his films to Lee’s deliberate movements and ability to vividly embody a painful loneliness and listlessness melancholy.
While Rebels of the Neon God, Vive l’Amour and The Wayward Cloud often point, despairingly, to the ubiquity of alienation and the seeming inescapability of loneliness, they also possess a tender and comic side. For their depictions of lonely, drifting lives also carefully trace the ephemeral, unpredictable networks of abandoned and in-between spaces, those almost invisible trajectories and small rituals that somehow bind people together. The comic and deeply, achingly human side of Tsai’s always almost tragic vision gives it a lightness and grace that hovers somewhere between the delirious spatial confusions of Tati and the rich melancholia alternately explored by Buster Keaton and Chantal Akerman.

The French Library Alliance Française of Boston  

Art Exhibit: Paris Façades
Watercolors by Carol Gillott. This event is presented in English and French.
Starts 3 Nov 2009 and continues until 28 Nov 2009

French Secularization, Put To the Test and Redefined
Conference by Danièle Hervieu-Léger. This event is presented in English.
Tuesday, 17 Nov 2009 — 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

MIT

Seminar with Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Wayne Marshall (MIT FL&L).
What can we learn about contemporary culture from watching dayglo-clad teenagers dancing geekily in front of their computers in such disparate sites as Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, and Mexico City? How has the embrace of “new media” by so-called “digital natives” facilitated the formation of transnational, digital publics? More important, what are the local effects of such practices, and why do they seem to generate such hostile responses and anxiety about the future?
Wayne Marshall is an ethnomusicologist, blogger, DJ, and, beginning this year, a Mellon Fellow in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT. His research focuses on the production and circulation of popular music, especially across the Americas and in the wider world, and the role that digital technologies are playing in the formation of new notions of community, selfhood, and nationhood.
Date: Tuesday November 10, 2009
Time: 5:15 PM
Location: 14E-310

International Folk Dancing
Time: 8:00p–11:00p
Location: Student Ctr 2nd floor (Sala or Lobdell)
Teaching and beginner dances from 8:00 to 9:00 pm. A mixture of all skill levels from 9:00 to 11:00.
Our repertoire includes circle and couple dances from Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Greece, and others) and around the world (Israel, France, Russia, Germany, China, Sweden, South Africa, even England and the US).
No experience necessary! Beginners are always welcome.
Web site: http://mit.edu/fdc
Open to: the general public
This event occurs on Sundays through April 4, 2010, except October 25, 2009, October 18, 2009 and November 15, 2009.
For more information, contact:
MIT Folk Dance Club
fdc-request [at] mit [dot] edu

MFA

Cafe and Cabaret: Toulouse-Lautrec's Paris
Saturday, November 21, 2009 - Sunday, August 8, 2010

The Annual Boston African Film Festival
The 2010 Boston African Film Festival screens from February 6 to 15.

Feature Films:
Feb 6 & 8: A grandfather falls prey to the illegal immigration trap in Paris Selon Moussa, by Cheik Doukouré
Feb 6 & 8: Shoot the Messenger, by Ngozi Onwurah, is a challenging shout-out on the subject of black self-image.
Feb 7 & 15: Heartlines by Angus Gibson, a thief is offered a chance for redemption.
Feb 7 & 14: Kinshasa Palace, by José Laplain, is an engrossing study of the African diaspora.
Feb 13 & 15: Awaiting for Men, by Katy Léna N'diaye, three women express themselves through painting.
Feb 13, 14 & 15: A rousing story of a woman's courage in the face of patriarchal injustice in Delwende, by S. Piere Yameogo.

TOURS IN FRENCH
Every Wednesday, 11:15 am Introduction to Museum Collections
Every fourth Wednesday, 6:30 pm Introduction to Museum Collections
Every third Saturday, 2 pm Introduction to Museum Collections

Boston Artists Ensemble

85 Hillside Avenue
Newton, MA 02465

Sunday, November 22, 2009, 2:30 pm
Tatiana Dimitriades, Zina Schiff, violins; Rebecca Gitter, viola; Jonathan Miller, cello
Beethoven          String Trio in E-flat, Opus 3
Wolf                    Italian Serenade in G for String Quartet
Dvorak               String Quartet in F, “American,” Opus 96

Sunday, February 7, 2010, 2:30 pm
Bayla Keyes, Tatiana Dimitriades, violins; Edward Gazouleas, viola; Jonathan Miller, cello
Kodaly                 Duo for Violin and Cello, Opus 7
Schubert             G major Quartet, D.887
mystery piece     Guess the composer and win a pair of tickets!

Sunday, March 14, 2010, 2:30 pm
Alexander Velinzon, Sharan Leventhal, violins; Beth Guterman, viola; Wendy Warner, Jonathan Miller, celli
Boccherini            Quintet in E minor, Opus 20, No. 4
Glazounov           String Quintet in A, Opus 39
Schubert              Quintet in C (with two cellos) Opus 163

Sunday, April 11, 2010, 2:30 pm
Julianne Lee, Sharan Leventhal, violins; Beth Guterman, viola; Jonathan Miller, cello; Randall Hodgkinson, piano
Fauré                   Piano Quintet No. 1, Opus 89
Brahms                Piano Quintet in F minor, Opus 34

Citi Performing Arts Center Wang Theatre
270 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02116
(617) 482-9393
Cost: $34.00 - $195.00
Friday, November 6 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, November 8 at 3 pm
Wednesday, November 11 at 7:30 pm
Friday, November 13 at 7;30 pm
Sunday, November 15 at 3 pm
Tuesday, November 17 at 7:30 pm
Music by Georges Bizet.
Sung in French with French dialogue and projected English translation.
Carmen and Don José crash into each other with a passion that's as much about will as it is about desire. At its premiere, Bizet's opera shocked and thrilled audiences. The thrill's still there in this new, highly theatrical Boston Lyric Opera production.

Idomeneo, re di Creta
Citi Performing Arts Center Wang Theatre
270 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02116
(617) 482-9393
April 23rd at 7:30pm
April 25th at 3:00pm
April 28th at 7:30pm
April 30th at 7:30pm
May 2nd at 3:00pm
May 4th at 7:30pm
Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
New Boston Lyric Opera production based on scenery and costumes owned by Glimmerglass Opera. Sung in Italian with projected English translation.
Idomeneo, King of Crete, makes a promise to Neptune, God of the Sea. When the king realizes the terrible price it will exact, vows and hearts are broken. Longing pours into arias and ensembles as only Mozart writes them.