Events Calendar

Join the Schemel Forum on SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17th

UNIVERSITY FOR A DAY 2016
Brennan Hall, Room 228 Pearn Auditorium 8:45 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
$25 pp / Free to The University of Scranton Staff, Faculty & Students
Free to Schemel Forum Members

• Registration & Morning Coffee: 8:45 to 9:15 a.m., Pearn Lobby
• Lunch: Brennan Hall, Room 509
• Reception: Pearn Lobby

Damon Runyon’s Broadway Carnival
Remembered today primarily as the author of the stories that became the musical Guys and Dolls, Damon Runyon used his newspaper columns to characterize gangsters, night
club performers and rogue politicians as a new kind of New York elite. Then, through his short stories, he helped establish a new vocabulary for imagining the post-immigrant experience. The talk will serve as an introduction to this nearly forgotten author.

Joseph E. Kraus, Ph.D., Professor of English, The University of Scranton

The Harlem Renaissance: A Cultural, Social and Artistic Explosion
James Weldon Johnson, author, lawyer and civil rights activist, referred to it as a “flowering of Negro literature,” but it included other art forms as well and it resonated way beyond the borders of Harlem--to other American cities, to the Caribbean and to Paris. This talk will explore the depth and breadth of this remarkable period which spanned the 1920s and whose impact is with us today.

Sonia Sanchez, - poet, activist, scholar - was the Laura Carnell Professor of English and
Women’s Studies at Temple University

Do Leaders Make History? Reflections on the American Presidency
“Men make their own history,” Karl Marx famously said, “but they do not make it as they
please.” Was he right? How should we think about the role of the individual in human
affairs versus that of deeper impersonal forces? This talk explores this profound question
anew in the context of contemporary American and world history, taking into account the
agency of human action a and the degree to which even the most powerful leaders are
constricted by time, space and conditions, and by what went before.

Frederic Logevall, Ph.D., Professor of History, Harvard University

Contradiction and Pragmatism: President Jefferson’s Foreign Policy and Politics in the Early American Republic
President Jefferson’s policies and philosophy are often portrayed as riven with
contradictions: he was the author of the Declaration of Independence and a slave-holder;
a proponent of limited government who doubled the size of the country. For all of the
seeming contradictions this talk, through an examination of his foreign policy, will argue
that Jefferson might best be viewed as a pragmatist in dealing with the realities of American politics and foreign relations in the earliest years of our nation.

David Dzurec, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, University of Scranton

RSVP requested to emily.brees@scranton.edu or online.