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.... Presentations on West European topics included: “Ring Around the Rosy: The Plague of Athens Was No Child’s Play,” by Richard Hoffman, professor of History at San Francisco State University; “Dances of Death: from the Black Death to 1721,” by Jo N. Hays, professor of History at Loyola University Chicago; and “Plague and Pleasure in Boccaccio’s Decameron ,” by Steven Botterill, professor of Italian Studies at UCB. A highlight in the week’s program was provided by UC Berkeley Scandinavian Studies Professor Linda Rugg, who delivered a presentation entitled “Illness as Metaphor: The Presence of the Plague and Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.” In this well-received talk Professor Rugg explored connections between Bergman's use of medieval plague images, cancer in the present day, and the work of Susan Sontag, and in so doing raised challenging and broadly applicable questions about the ways diverse societies and cultures define disease.
Educator Working Groups
The Working Group Series is a program of weekend seminars held for over 200 educators and librarians from over 45 distinct districts. This year IES engaged two of its outreach constituencies in dialogue, by funding teacher working groups held in conjunction with programs delivered by Humanities West (HW). Humanities West is a San Francisco-based organization serving both the general public and educators throughout the year with thematic events combining expert lectures on history, art, and literature, with musical performance and panel discussions. HW’s first program this academic year was a two-day event held in October 2007 titled “Voltaire and the French Enlightenment.” The program explored the ideas and cultural impact of French Enlightenment essayist, deist, and philosopher François-Marie Arouet (pen-name Voltaire). Presenters included Keith Baker, J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in Humanities and Director of the France-Stanford Center of Stanford University, on “Ideas of the French Enlightenment”; Maria Cheremeteff , chair of the Art History Department at City College of San Francisco, on “Art of the French Enlightenment”; David Bodanis, lecturer at Oxford University, on his award-winning book Passionate Minds, the story of Voltaire and his Mistress, Emile du Chatelet, and their Joint Intellectual Projects ); Carla Hesse, professor History at UC Berkeley ) on “Voltaire and his Ideas”; Kip Cranna , musical administrator at The San Francisco Opera, on “Composers of the Enlightenment”; and musician David Morris performing the works of Rameau on a viola da gamba. During the two-hour lunch break on the second day, UC Berkeley Ph.D. Candidate Robert Nelson of the Department of French Studies led an animated critical discussion with fifteen participating teachers on the topics covered in the program.
In May 2008 IES repeated this collaborative project between ORIAS and Humanities West at an HW event titled “ Athens in its Golden Age: The Time of Pericles.” This program focused on the diverse accomplishments of the citizens of Athens in the fifth century BC, in the face of political turmoil at home and constant threats from abroad. UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Erich Gruen moderated Friday and Saturday’s panels and also delivered a talk entitled “ Greece and Persia: A Clash of Cultures?” on the second day. Additional presentations included a keynote speech entitled “Democracy, Innovation, and Learning” by Josiah Ober, Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University; a lecture and performance titled “Staging the Past, Confronting the Present in Athenian Theater,” presented by Mark Griffith, professor of Classics and Theater, Dance and Performance at UC Berkeley; “The Akropolis of Athens and its Impact,” by Margaret Miles , professor of Art History, Classics, and V isual Studies at UC Irvine; “War is the Father of All: The Politics of War, Empire, and Freedom in Democratic Athens,” by Kurt Raaflaub, professor of Classics and History at Brown University; and a dramatic enactment of Pythagoras’ discovery of philosophy by San Francisco author George Hammond. Timothy Doran, Ph.D. Candidate in UC Berkeley’s Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, moderated the lunchtime teacher working group. IES is especially proud of the fact that our Title VI funds continue to enable Humanities West to offer free tickets to regional educators. This offer has generated enthusiastic response and both teacher and student participation in their programs.
In April 2009 teachers and students from six Bay Area high schools gathered to examine legacies of the Napoleonic era, while attending two days of Humanities West presentations by leading scholars in a program titled Napoleon: European Culture at the Crossroads. The lectures and performances explored history, politics, legal reforms, art, music, and literature during the rise and fall of the mesmerizing Corsican.
The program included presentations by historians Roger Hahn (UCB), Steven Englund (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and American University of Paris); art historians Michael Marrinan (Stanford) and Juan Cole (Michigan); legal historian Laurent Mayali (UCB); Tolstoy scholar Luba Golburt (UCB); and a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Variations by pianist Teresa Yu (San Francisco Conservatory of Music).
At a break-out lunch meeting, the teachers’ working group considered a lesson on Napoleonic portraiture prepared for them by UCB art history graduate student, Camille Matthieu. As Matthieu explained, portraiture “can be seen as a sort of selective history—a '‘greatest hits’ of a man’s life.” Napoleonic portraits are all the more interesting for this because they inherit the problem of representation endemic to the French Revolution: “How does one depict a man when he is more than a man but less than a king: a general, peacemaker, consul, and finally emperor?” The working group lesson and links to other resources can be found on-line here.
World Savvy
IES continues to provide support to World Savvy ( formerly Project SPERA), a San Francisco-based organization that offers a range of services designed to assist teachers integrate global issues into existing curriculum. These include free workshops, access to a curriculum library, a speakers bureau, regular email updates on professional development opportunities and current events, and a consulting program for modifying and creating lesson-plans. World Savvy thus provides materials and perspectives that have not yet been incorporated systematically into th e nation’s schools, and helps young people enter the workforce after high school with a working knowledge of a globalized world. Projects supported by IES this year include the following: 1.) A teacher workshop hosted together with the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on the topic of “Reconstructing Health Care,” which emphasized comparisons between US and European and health care systems. Follow up workshops are being planned to extend this comparison into the rest of the globe. 2.) The International I nterview Project, an annual project developed by a teacher in the consulting program, in which students research a country and then interview people from that country in preparation for a final report. Between August 2007 and April 2008 students interviewed people from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Greece, the UK, and Serbia. 3.) Adding materials on the European Union, transitional democracies, Europe and globalization, and Europe and the environment to World Savvy’s curricula and video lending libraries. 4.) Organizing consulting programs for lesson plans on such diverse topics as Francophone countries around the world; European migration to and colonization of South Africa; religion and immigration in France; French and Spanish culture and history incorp orated into language classes; and the Industrial Revolution viewed through contemporary discussions about science, technology, and global warming.
UC Berkeley History/Social Science Project
With funding from Title VI, IES has also contributed to the UC Berkeley History/Social Science Project, an outreach program for high school educators housed within the Department of History. This project provides regional educators with professional development and improved content knowledge, aligned to the California History-Social Science Framework and Content Standards. IES funds support stipends for teacher facilitators, and the development of outreach materials on topics with European content. One of the project’s main components is a five-day summer institute that provides educators with forty-four professional development hours. Teaching teams from low performing schools have received special encouragement to attend this program. Over the last five years, approximately 11,000 students each year have been taught by teachers, who have attended the summer institute. Participants have reported increased content knowledge, historical understanding, and improved ability to implement academic literacy strategies. This year’s institute is titled “Through the Lens of Culture: Integrating Cultural History in the Classroom.” It aimed to strengthen teacher content knowledge and the integration of cultural history into history-social science curriculums by exploring the uses of unconventional forms of historical evidence such as music, art, architecture, film, and literature. The conference included a field trip to San Francisco museums and other Bay Area cultural history venues, presentations by UC Berkeley history professors, teacher-led workshops on instructional strategies, and development of teacher lessons. Professor presentations on European topics included Carlos Morena on Ancient Rome and Tom Dandalet (who also serves as the project’s faculty advisor) on Renaissance and Baroque Italy. IES funding also contributed significantly to stipends for teacher facilitators, whose role is to guide the fellows in developing focus questions and writing prompts, and to the development and production of materials supplied to all attending teachers.
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Orhan Pamuk and Marjanne Satrapi at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center
This year IES collaborated with the San Francisco Jewish Community Center , the oldest Jewish center on the West Coast, to provide UC Berkeley students with free and discounted tickets to events in the JCC’s lecture series entitled “Salaam-Shalom.” Designed to establish a dialogue between Islam and Judaism, the series has hosted an impressive cast of intellectuals and artists. In October 2007 our students had the opportunity to hear Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk speak about Turkish-European relations and the clash of secularism with Islamic law. In April 2008, IES provided discounted tickets to a lecture by graphic novelist Marjanne Satrapi, whose popular autobiographical novel and film Persepolis chronicles the life of a young Iranian girl in Vienna. Both opportunities garnered overwhelming responses from our student community, and we will be working to expand this collaboration in coming years.
IES faculty and staff continue to be active in public outreach by speaking about their respective disciplines to public constituencies. In December 2007, Associate Director Beverly Crawford delivered two lectures sponsored by the World Affairs Council (WAC) to 100 members of WAC’s Santa Rosabranch and to local high school students. Entitled “Euro-Myths and Euro-Realities,” these lectures proposed that European values are spreading across the globe, appearing far more attractive in many respects , than those of America. This because Europe has constructed one of the most successful systems of government for the modern social-welfare state, which for all its flaws has brought unprecedented prosperity and security to Europe’s people and represents the single most successful advance in voluntary international cooperation in modern history. In February 2008 NRC Assistant Director Noga Wizansky traveled to a regional high school to speak to advanced placement European history students. Entitled “Art and Revolutions,” her lecture aimed to introduce both students and teachers to the use of art works as historical documents.
IES also produces this newsletter, “E-News,” which is distributed electronically. IES’ website receives an average of 70,000 hits per month and is updated daily. Also available online, through the California Digital Library, is IES’ extensive Working Paper series, written by UCB and visiting scholars under the institute’s sponsorship.
Throughout the year IES organizes and hosts several events designed to bring together students, faculty, and staff working under the auspices of IES to share their work with each other and our community friends. IES hosts “Tea Time,” an informal gathering of IES colleagues, students, and friends who get together for good conversation and a cup of tea to learn about IES' programs, scholarships, and activities. In the fall, IES holds its biannual reception, “The Fall Festival,” during which the Institute introduces its entering graduate students, the chairs of the Country Programs, new visiting scholars, and IES staff as it formally launches the new academic year.
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