University Calendar

The Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences welcomes you to attend a “Faculty Scholarship Spolight,” featuring College of Humanities and Social Sciences faculty Bob Cray (Department of History), Lucy McDiarmid (Department of English), and Tiger Roholt (Department of Philosophy and Religion).

This fall Bob Cray has seen publication of Lovewell's Fight: War, Death, and Memory in New England (University of Massachusetts), which Prof. Cray offers might be summarized as, "How a failed military operation in early America became New England's Alamo." More expansively, Steven C. Eames of Mt. Ida College writes, “Cray not only provides a description of the fight itself, but uses it as a springboard to explore how the story of such incidents was transmitted to the population, how New Englanders viewed death and the disposal of bodies, how the government of Massachusetts cared for the wounded and widows, and how subsequent generations interpreted, or chose to forget, this small engagement so long ago."

Lucy McDiarmid has seen publication of Poets and the Peacock Dinner, the Literary History of a Meal (Oxford), which centers on one dinner: on January 18, 1914, seven male poets gathered to eat a peacock. W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the celebrities of the group, led four lesser-known poets to the Sussex manor house of the man they were honouring, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Nicholas Grene of Trinity College writes of Poets and the Peacock Dinner: “With her extraordinary flair for imaginative scholarship, [McDiarmid] illuminates the origins and precedents for the peacock dinner, the offstage role of Lady Gregory, Yeats's close friend and Blunt's former lover, in organising this all-male gathering, the rivalries and alliances in those invited and excluded, and its long-term significance in terms of the genealogies of poetic modernism.

Tiger Roholt has seen publication of Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance (Bloomsbury), in which he argues that grooves, forged in music’s rhythmic nuances, are not graspable through the intellect nor through mere listening; rather, grooves are disclosed through our bodily engagement with music. Garry Hagberg of Bard College writes of Groove: “Tiger C. Roholt's energetic new study of a neglected but undeniably central aspect of rhythm represents a major step forward in understanding how and why music moves us as it does….Roholt describes the 'motor-intentional' process that actualizes the implicit groove of a song, giving us a new appreciation of the embodied character of this kind of aesthetic experience.”

All faculty, students and friends of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences are invited to enjoy these scholars’ talks on their topics, followed by Q & A.