Warren’s keynote address, which
will be given March 22 at 4 p.m. in the Morgan Room in Poling Hall,
is titled “A Hidden Life in French.”
The Metcalf Professor of the Humanities
at Boston University, Warren is an internationally recognized poet,
translator and teacher, and her poetry was published in the November 2004
issue of New Yorker. Known for her spontaneous classroom performances in
which she can easily quote from an obscure poem in Italian or French,
supply a supple English translation and then use it as an example to
illuminate a discussion point, Warren was honored at BU’s 2004
commencement with a Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Recently elected a member of the
prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters, Warren has won the
national Discovery Award in poetry, the Lamont Prize from the Academy of
American Poets and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry. She is the author
of four poetry collections, which have been praised for their dense verse,
rich imagery and often intensely personal subject matter.
On March 21 at 7:30 p.m. in the lower
level classrooms at the Huff Athletic Center, Victor Martinez, a Ph.D.
candidate in archaeology at the University of Illinois, will speak on
“Mesoamerican Idols: Searching for Gods and Monsters in Middle America.”
Sponsored by the Western Illinois Society of the Archaeological Institute
of America (AIA) and the MC Classics Department, the lecture will examine
some pre-Classical monuments along the Gulf Coast and review some of the
problems with integrating text and myth.
Mesoamerica will also be the subject of
the second International Luncheon of the spring semester, which will
presented by assistant professor of modern foreign languages Leisa
Kauffmann on March 23 at noon in the Whiteman-McMillan Highlander Room in
the Stockdale Center.
During the summer of 2004, Kauffmann
traveled in Mexico and the Southwest with a group of scholars, visiting
architectural ruins of ancient cities as part of a National Endowment for
the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute entitled “Mesoamerica and the
Southwest: A New History for an Ancient Land.” As part of the prestigious
NEH fellowship, site visits were augmented with lectures by prominent
scholars.
Kauffmann will recount some of her
experiences on the road and share what she learned about the different
cultures in a talk entitled “Mesoamerica’s Classic Heritage and the Road
to Aztlan.”
A buffet lunch, featuring international
foods, is available. A meal ticket may be purchased for $5 at the
Stockdale Center’s Scan Plus office. Lunch reservations must be made in
advance by contacting professor Sue Holm at 309-457-2150 or
susan@monm.edu.
