Ping Faculty Symposia Archives
March 28, 2014: Screen Adaptations: Hamlet. Led by Professor Samuel Crowl
Professor Crowl is the author of six books on various aspects of Shakespeare in Performance including: Shakespeare Observed, Shakespeare at the Cineplex, and Shakespeare and Film. He has lectured at the Folger ShakespeareLibrary, The New Globe Theatre in London, The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, The columbia University Shakespeare Seminar and at colleges and universities in the United States, Europe and Africa.
October 26, 2012: George Kennan: An American Life. Led by Professor John Lewis Gaddis
Professor Gaddis is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography, George Kennan, An American Life (Penguin 2011). He is currently the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale. From 1969-97 he taught at Ohio University where he founded and directed the Contemporary History Institute.
April 20, 2012: Asylum on the Hill: An Experiment in Moral Treatment of Mental Illness
In a foreward by Samuel T. Gladding, he writes, "Asylum on the Hill is the story of a great American experiment in psychiatry, a revolution in care for those with mental illness, as seen through the example of the Athens Lunatic Asylum.... Ziff’s fresh presentation of America’s nineteenth-century asylum movement shows how the Athens Lunatic Asylum accommodated political, economic, community, family, and individual needs and left an architectural legacy that has been uniquely renovated and repurposed."
The symposium was on Friday, April 20 at 5:00 PM in The Ridges Building 21. It was led by Dr. Katherine Ziff, who is a scholar of psychiatric history and asylums, a public school mental health counselor and an artist.
February 22, 2008: Dr. Donald N. Levine: "The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America."
Dr. Levine, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and dean of the College at Chicago from 1982-1987, is the author of Powers of the Mind, The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America (U of Chicago P, 2006).
February 2, 2007: Dr. Lee T. Pearcy: "Is the liberal arts education in danger of becoming an irrelevant curiosity?
Dr. Pearcy is the author of The Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America (Baylor UP, 2005). He has taught a several institutions of higher education.
February 10, 2006: Dr. George Marsden: A discussion of Dr. Marsden's prize-winning book Jonathan Edwards, a Life (Yale UP, 2003)
Dr. Marsden teaches at the University of Notre Dame, where he is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History. His book was awarded the Bancroft Prize for best books in American history (2004), the Merle Curtis Award for the best book in American intellectual history (2004) and the Annibel Jenkins Prize for the best book-length biography of a late 17th- or early 18th-century subject (2002-2004).
February 25, 2005: Dr. Maria Rosa Menocal: "Culture and Tolerance Among Muslims, Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain"
Dr. Menocal teaches at Yale University where she is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center. She is the author of Ornament of the World, How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown, 2002) and Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Duke UP, 1994).
January 24, 2003: Dr. Atul Gawande, M.D. A discussion of his book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
Dr. Gawande, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, is a surgeon and a staff write on medicine and science for The New Yorker. His writing has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000.
October 17, 2003: Dr. Diana L. Eck Discussion of her book A New Religious America: How a 'Christian Country' Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation (Harper, 2001)
Dr. Eck is professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard University. Also the author of Darsen, Seeing the Divine Image in India (Columbia UP, 1998), she was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 1998 for her work dealing with The Pluralism Project, an investigation of America's religious diversity.
January 25, 2002: Dr. Nicholas D. Smith: "Plato's Apology and Crito"
Dr. Smith is the James F. Miller Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College. He is the coauthor with Thomas Brickhouse of Socartes on Trial (Princeton UP, 1989) and Plato's Socrates (Oxford UP, 1994).
January 28, 2000: Dr. John Gaddis: "Writing Biographies"
Dr. Gaddis, a former Ohio University professor, is now a professor at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford UP, 2002)