Key Artists of Renaissance Florence
Join us Thursday, March 26 at 2 p.m. Eastern/noon Central/11 a.m. Pacific for a FREE virtual tour of the Gallerie degli Uffizi and other major sites of Renaissance Florence. REGISTER HERE. To help you better ennjoy the webinar, we are including brief bios of the artists discussed. Giotto di Bondone […]
Being Open to the Demands of King Lear
by Rosemary Gould, leading And Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things: The Poetry of King Lear at Toronto Pursuits 2020 When I was in graduate school, I had the great privilege of teaching as an assistant to the extraordinary Shakespeare scholar, Arthur Kirsch. When I listened to his lecture […]
Nietzsche, Freud and Derrida: The Radicals’ Appetite for Acceptance
by John Riley, leading Putting the Post in Post-Modernism at Toronto Pursuits 2020 Friedrich Nietzsche was a very, very sick man for the last twenty years of his life. His body racked by the long-term effects of dysentery and diphtheria along with brain illness consistent with syphilis, he produced no […]
Darwin and the Work of Science
by Mark Cwik, leader of our 2020 Toronto Pursuits seminar The Great (R)evolution: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species Upon first reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the great 19th-century biologist Thomas Henry Huxley—later to be known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”—is reported to have told friends, “How extremely stupid […]
The Impressionists’ “Bold Manner of Seeing Things”
By Wendy O’Brien, who is leading Impressionism: From Seeing to Feeling at Toronto Pursuits 2020 Bonne année, mes amis! I’m writing you from Paris where I’ve come to celebrate the holidays and explore the city as I think about the impressionists — their project and their influence. I’m getting ready […]
Nine Symphonies That Changed the World
by Rick Phillips, leader of our 2020 Toronto Pursuits seminar on Beethoven The major anniversaries of the births and deaths of great composers are always lauded and celebrated. They give us a chance to honour and re-evaluate the roles these figures play in our modern world. Remember 1985 and the […]
Reading Some of the World’s Most Familiar Stories with Fresh Eyes
By Mandy Burton, who will be leading In Remembrance of Me: Jesus Before Christianity at Toronto Pursuits 2020 When I started teaching at a major public university after a lifetime of studying and working at smaller schools, I found that I had to adjust my expectations about the rhythms of […]
Where Words Unfreeze: The Terra Incognita of Rabelais
by Denise Ahlquist, leading Seriously Funny: The Fantastical Worlds of François Rabelais “When they were upon the open sea, feasting, singing and holding discreet intercourse in fair discourse…” Imagine you are there, enmeshed in one of the worlds of words created by Rabelais—a world we will bring to life in […]
“Three things extremely hard”
by Gary Schoepfel, leader of the 2020 Toronto Pursuits seminar The Proper Study of Mankind is Man You’ll read it on tattooed bodies. It makes an appearance in the Matrix films. It was a Delphic maxim echoed by Aeschylus, Socrates and Plato. It shows up in political writings, paintings, anatomical […]
From (19th-century) Russia, with Love
by Sean Forester, leader of our September 2019 trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg For many of us, the images we have formed of Russia are rooted in Soviet times: We picture a tyrannical and bureaucratic country full of dreary buildings. Or maybe our images come from Hollywood and its […]