Professors Set to Teach Schemel Forum Courses

The University of Scranton’s Schemel Forum will offer three stimulating evening courses as part of its fall programming.

Taught by University faculty members, the courses will be presented in six weekly sessions from 6 to 7:15 p.m. in the Weinberg Memorial Library. The courses are free for University students, faculty, staff and Schemel Forum members. For non-members, the fee is $75 per individual and $125 per couple.

Billie Tadros, Ph.D., assistant professor of English and theatre, will present “Crossing the Line(s): Reading and Writing Contemporary Poetry” on Monday evenings Sept. 19 and 26 and Oct. 3, 17, 24 and 31.

During the sessions, Tadros will help students develop a vocabulary for the shared practice of close-reading forms of poetry, from the traditional (e.g., the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, the pantoum) to the newer forms invented by living poets (e.g., the Golden Shovel, the duplex, the pecha kucha).

Participants will be invited (though not required) to write their own poems, and there will be time for sharing and discussion during each course meeting.

“I aim to provide participants with the confidence and the vocabulary to read and to talk about contemporary poems,” Tadros said. “I’ll invite participants to experiment with poetry themselves and to consider what poetry can do for them in their own lives as readers and writers. In a 1994 interview, award-winning poet Adrienne Rich described poetry as ‘a portable art,’ saying that ‘it travels.’ In my course, I hope to provide participants with something portable, both something they can carry with them and something to help carry them forward.”

Roy Domenico, Ph.D., professor of history, will present “What is Fascism?” on Wednesday evenings Sept. 21 and 28 and Oct. 5, 12, 19 and 26.

For decades, historians have struggled to define fascism – has the word become so unwieldy that it has lost its meaning, or does it still convey something that informs us about our world? With those questions in mind, Domenico will use the course to examine fascism, or something that resembles it, starting with its French and Italian roots and its Nazi variations, and concluding with the global populist and mass-surveillance phenomena.

“Has there ever been a clear definition of fascism?” Domenico said. “We'll explore the various angles of fascism, something that went away in 1945 ... or not?”

Stephen Whittaker, Ph.D., professor in the University’s Department of English and Theatre, will present “How a Masterpiece of Medieval Irish Art Bridged the Classical & Christian Worlds” on Tuesday evenings Oct. 4, 11, 18 and 25 and Nov. 1 and 8.

In this look at the origins and legacy of the Monogram Page of “The Book of Kells,” commonly known as “the chief relic of the Western world,” Whittaker will examine how an Irish treasure from the year 800 unified science, religion and art.

“During the golden age of classical Greece, Plato articulated a unity of scientific, theological and artistic perspectives. This coherence of ways of thinking about human experience lay obscured for a millennium, but it surfaced again in the Chi Rho page of ‘The Book of Kells,’” Whittaker said. “This medieval Irish masterpiece embodies and transmits to us a vision of the deep unity of sacred, natural and artistic modes of human experience.”

To register for the courses, contact Kym Fetsko at 570-941-7816 or kym.fetsko@scranton.edu. Or, to pay online, visit: www.scranton.edu/schemelforum. For more information on Schemel Forum programs and memberships, contact Sondra Myers, Schemel Forum director, at 570-941-4089 or sondra.myers@scranton.edu.

Additional Schemel Forum events scheduled for the fall semester include luncheon seminars collaborative events and a bus trip. Myers talks about the fall programming in an interview with Erika Funke for WVIA. The full schedule events can be found on the Schemel Forum’s webpage.