The Chappell Great Lives Lecture Series, which begins its 10th season in January, has evolved into the University’s highest-profile community outreach program, bringing hundreds of people to campus weekly during the spring semester for lectures by some of today’s most prominent biographers. Great Lives was modestly inaugurated in 2004 – created more out of necessity than by grand design. The impetus was the need for another course to serve an increasing number of history students without putting an additional burden on departmental faculty. The solution was to create a multidisciplinary, team-taught course that could draw upon the expertise of not only the history department but of other departments as well. The resulting course, “Great Lives: Biographical Approaches to History,” included lectures by faculty from 10 disciplines across the University. Students were immediately attracted to it, as enrollment approached 100. Considering the success of the history department’s … [Read more...]
A Decade of Lectures
The Chappell Great Lives Lecture Series will celebrate its 10th season in 2013 with what promises to be its most interesting lineup ever. Experts will speak on historical and cultural icons from Cleopatra to Marilyn Monroe and Julius Caesar to Winston Churchill. Great Lives will again feature lectures by authors on biographies they have recently published. Among them are: • Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, who accessed diaries and letters and interviewed hundreds of Walter Cronkite’s friends and colleagues to craft a personal portrait of the newsman. • Rasputin: The Untold Story by Joseph Fuhrmann, whose fluent Russian allowed him to interpret previously sealed documents in Moscow and Siberia. • Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson, who drew on primary resources and family interviews to explore the last decades of the life of Ernest Hemingway. The final 2013 lecture will explore the link between great achievement and mental aberration through the lives of a … [Read more...]