Choreographer, Director and Metzger-Conway Fellow

The Man Behind the Thrones

Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.

Patterson will talk about his career in the entertainment business and the challenges he confronts as he works intimately with famous performers, making them look their best, while attempting to remain fairly anonymous himself.

About the Speaker
Vincent Paterson is a world-renowned director and choreographer whose career spans just about every genre of the entertainment industry including film, theatre, Broadway, concert tours, opera, music videos, television and commercials.

“What I try to do with my work is to fill the audience with an energy that alters their being in a positive way. The work is the stone thrown into the pond. The ripples emanate from the audience. If the audience is affected even infinitesimally in a positive way, they might make something positive happen in the next five minutes, or tomorrow, or next week. That action will vibrate into the ether and the better the world will be.”

Vincent directed the critically acclaimed opera Manon with soprano Anna Netrebko and conducted by Placido Domingo. His direction of Anna Netrebko: The Woman, The Voice received a nomination for “Best Television Arts Read more

Art Historian, co-editor of the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné

Andy Warhol: Post-Pop or Not?

Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Stern Center, Great Room, 4:00 p.m.

Printz considers Warhol’s work after the 1960s in light of photographs and the works of art recently donated to Dickinson College by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Photographic Legacy Program.

This event is co-sponsored by The Trout Gallery.

Topical Background
Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928, Andy Warhol became one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Known mainly as a leading figure in the Pop Art movement, Warhol is also recognized for his work as an avant-garde film maker, record producer, author, and public figure. By the time of his death in 1987, Warhol coined the popular phrase “15 minutes of fame,” sold his canvas Eight Elvises for $100 million dollars, and was identified by the media as the “Prince of Pop.”

Warhol showed early artistic talent at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, known today as Carnegie Mellon University. He then worked in New York as an illustrator for various magazines including Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Glamour, and The New Yorker. As Warhol became more concerned with turning his Read more

Award-winning science writer; professor of English, University of Memphis

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Thursday, February 18, 2010
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m

Rebecca Skloot discusses her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a story inextricably linked to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles that could determine whether we own the stuff we are made of. A booksigning will follow the presentation.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Biology, Sociology and Psychology

Topical Background
Born in 1920, Henrietta Lacks, a mother of five, was a native of rural southern Virginia whose family grew tobacco. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital and died on October 4, 1951 at the age of thirty-one.

While at Johns Hopkins Hospital, researchers took a biopsy of her tumor without her knowledge or permission. The cells, named “HeLa” for Henrietta Lacks, multiplied outside her body at an unprecedented rate. Because they can potentially divide an unlimited number of times in a laboratory setting, HeLa cells have been described as “immortal”. “If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh Read more

Professor of English, Fordham University

What’s in a Bestselling Crime Novel?

Thursday, February 11, 2010
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

After exploring the origins and complexities of “bestsellers,” Cassuto applies his conclusions to the way crime novels are read and understood in the U.S.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of English and American Studies

Topical Background
The broad genre of “crime fiction” first captured the American imagination in the mid-19th century. Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published in 1841, told of a dark mystery based in Paris. Its protagonist, C. Auguste Duperin, appears to be one of the first characters resembling what would come to be the archetypical crime fiction detective.

Soon after Poe’s works hit the literary world, Britain’s Sir Arthur Conan Doyle turned the detective novel into a phenomenon. The popularity of his Sherlock Holmes anthology transcended the Atlantic and sparked an enormous production of crime and detective novels. Crime fiction quickly became one of America’s favorite literary genres.

New categories of crime fiction are popularized with each generation of crime novelists. “Whodunits,” “hardboiled” fiction, legal thrillers, police mysteries, and spy novels are just a few of the many types of crime Read more