Chautauqua Lecture Series

The Humanities and Fine Arts Division of Chattanooga State Community College will host its 6th annual Chautauqua Lecture Series beginning Thursday, September 19.

In 1874, people gathered on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in New York State to enjoy speakers, teachers, musicians, and specialists who entertained and educated members of the community, thus catalyzing an adult education movement that subsequently spread throughout rural America. Since 2014, Chattanooga State has hosted its own monthly Chautauqua to unite faculty, students, staff, and the larger Chattanooga community in exploring a wide array of topics within the Humanities. The Humanities and Fine Arts Division invites you to join in this tradition with the announcement of its slate of presentations for the 2019-2020 academic year.

Chattanooga State’s Chautauqua Series will feature the compelling and culturally relevant research of seven Humanities & Fine Arts faculty as well as the series finale with Writers@Work 2019-2020 visiting author Daniel Wallace. Dr. Anna Harrington will kick off the series on September 19 at 2:00 p.m. with a talk entitled “An Insider’s Guide to Downton Abbey: A Behind the Scenes Look at History, Manners, and the Aristocracy of Edwardian England,” which provides an insider’s glimpse into Edwardian country life and aristocracy as portrayed in the hit Masterpiece series Downton Abbey.

The fall semester will offer two additional presentations. On October 17, Assistant Professor Mindy Griffin and Director of the Andrews Writing Center Mollee Shannon will present “Bedlam: Insanity and Asylums in the 19^th Century,” where together they will illuminate this dark corner of history from lobotomies and straitjackets, to confinement and poison. Instructor Jillian Thompson will close out the Fall semester’s installments on November 21 with “The Medieval Monster and the Modern Age,” which examines what makes and dictates a monster, who decides what is monstrous, and when we should be critical of those creating monstrous beings.

The series will resume in the spring semester on February 13, 2020, with Dr. De’Lara Khalili Stephens’ talk entitled “Time Reversed, Souls Severed, and Psyches Split: Exploring Trauma and Redemption in Holocaust Literature and Film,” which discusses how reversing time, dividing the soul, and doubling the psyche are motifs used in Holocaust literature and film—not only to deepen empathy but also to heal and even redeem trauma. On March 19, Dr. Nick Mansito and Dr. Buck Weiss will delve into the importance of superheroes in popular culture and what their stories reveal about ethics, morality, philosophy, and mythology in “The Value of Superheroes.”

The final installment in the 2019-2020 Chautauqua Lecture Series will be held on April 9 in partnership with the Humanities Department’s Writers@Work program. This special event features an interview conducted by Associate Professor Sarah Page with the 2019-2020 Writers@Work visiting author Daniel Wallace about the film adaptation of his celebrated novel Big Fish.