Upcoming Events
April 23, 2026
In-Person event starting at 6:00pm.
This event will be held in-person in the Brandeis University Rapaporte Treasure Hall, located in the Goldfarb/Farber Library, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA 02453. Campus Map Link: https://www.brandeis.edu/about/visiting/map.html?bldgid=0062
Award-winning author Natalie Dykstra will discuss her biography Chasing Beauty, as well as Isabella Stewart Gardner, a complex and singular woman behind one of the most fascinating museums in the nation and the world—a tale of beauty and loss, grit and American self-invention.
Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from Boston’s Fens at the turn of the twentieth century. Its treasures encompassed not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture.
Chasing Beauty illuminates the fascinating ways the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of memoir, dazzling and haunting, created with objects instead of words and displayed per Isabella’s wishes in the exact placements she initially curated.
Born in 1840 to a privileged New York family, Isabella Stewart married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner as she turned twenty. She was misunderstood by Boston’s insular society and suffered the death of her only child, a beloved boy, not yet two years old. But in time this Gilded Age art patron found friendships, glittering and bohemian; awe-inspiring world travels; and collecting beautiful things with a keen eye and competitive pace—all these were balm for loss.
In conversation with Natalie Dykstra will be Cynthia L. Berenson, who serves on the University Board of Trustees, as well as the boards of the Women’s Studies Research Center and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Brandeis University.
We look forward to seeing you.
April 6, 2026
In-Person event starting at 4:00pm.
Annette Liberman Miller, Brandeis BA '58, MFA '76, will discuss her career path and professional choices and how she has balanced life in the public eye with her personal life. She has performed on Broadway, off-Broadway, in television and on film, and has been a leading actor with the Shakespeare & Company repertory theater in Lenox, Massachusetts for more than 25 seasons. She is a member of the Actor's Equity Association and the Screen Actors Guild, and a former member of the board of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. In 2024 she earned a Special Citation for a Lifetime of Defining Performances from the Boston Theater Critics Association.
Annette Liberman Miller won the Elliot Norton Best Actor Award and the Independent Reviewers of New England Best Actor Award for her performance as Golda Meir in Golda's Balcony in 2002. In 2023 and 2024, she reprised her Golda's Balcony performance with Shakespeare & Company, and again at Boston's Emerson Paramount Center. She has been a WSRC Scholar and is a long-time member of the WSRC’s National Board of Advisors.
This event will be held in-person at the Brandeis University Women's Studies Research Center, Epstein Building (brick stairs and aluminum ramp with a purple awning on the right side of the building), 515 South Street (right across from the train tracks), Waltham, MA 02453
Located directly across from the MBTA station, ample parking is available in the front and back of the building.
We look forward to seeing you.
April 23, 2026
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