Wednesday University, a program of Seattle Arts & Lectures and the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities provides Puget Sound residents with an intellectually stimulating and fun way to continue their education in the arts and humanities. Each year, the Wednesday University offers three courses taught by distinguished professors at the University of Washington. These courses, which meet on Wednesday evenings in the Henry Art Gallery Auditorium, are open to anyone—from high school students to senior citizens. Past courses have included Early Modern Art, Greek Myth, Silent Film, and Race in the American West, among others, and are taught by professors at the University of Washington known for both their scholarship and their teaching ability.

Autumn 2006
Nature, History, and Nation
How have human actions transformed the natural environments of North America? How have those environments, at once natural and man-made, influenced American history? What can landscape painting, nature writing, and the national park system tell us about our imaginative understandings of the non-human world? This course will uncover the ways in which human and natural history are fundamentally intertwined. Lectures will integrate the history of U.S. politics and culture with the history of forests, agriculture, rivers, animals, and air. We will consider the environmental and social impacts of nineteenth-century industrial expansion; the history of environmental conservation and the social conflicts those efforts created; the development of modern industrial agriculture, from the Dust Bowl crisis to current controversies over genetically modified crops; and the atomic fallout crisis of the 1950s and the subsequent rise of modern environmentalism.

Linda Nash is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Washington, specializing in U.S. environmental and cultural history. Her book Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge examines how Americans have understood the relationship between local environments and disease. She also has degrees and fieldwork experience in civil engineering and environmental science.
Wednesdays, 10/11, 10/25, 11/8, 11/29, and 12/13

Winter 2007
The Fool in the Frame: American Film Comedy
As Aristophanes and Shakespeare knew well, the clown is a fool and the fool is the wisest of us all. Laughter sometimes hurts because comedy's dramaturgical forms invite us to question cultural, political, and aesthetic norms, to experience anew habitual patterns of behavior and meaning. This course looks at the cultural questions "framed" by American film comedy since the early twentieth century when Charlie Chaplin emerged as America's first international film star. The profoundly humorous approach to twentieth-century culture we find in Chaplin's duck-walking Little Tramp, Depression-era screwball antics, and witty conundrums posed in the films of Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, and Joel Cohen far surpasses a bit of clowning around. We will spend the winter laughing out loud while asking why--from aesthetic, political and historical perspectives--the rare vision of these cinematic clowns brings us just as close to tears.

Jennifer M. Bean is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. She is co-editor of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema and author of The Play in the Machine: Slapstick, Seriality and Cinematic Modernity. Bean serves in the leadership of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies and the Thanhouser Company Film Preservation enterprise.
Wednesdays, 1/17, 1/31, 2/14, 2/28, and 3/14

Spring 2007
Sacred Cities of Asia
Visually resplendent and architecturally captivating, sacred cities of Asia are rich in political, religious, and cultural history. Their spaces, iconography, and uses open windows into ways of thinking, believing, and feeling quite distinct from everyday Western life. This course will explore the architecture and cultures of five World Heritage sites from South to East Asia. In India, we will visit the holy Hindu city of Varanasi, where the spectacle of life, from birth to death, is ritually enacted on the banks of the River Ganges, and Madurai, the Tamil temple town whose annual rite witnesses the wedding of the goddess Meenakshi to Shiva. Three cities to the east ally temporal empires with divine powers. We will enter the Cambodian palace-temple of Angkor Wat, built to legitimize divine kings; tour the Forbidden City of Beijing, consecrating the Chinese emperor as the Son of Heaven; and visit Kyoto, the Japanese imperial capital arrayed in palaces, temples, and shrines.

Vikramaditya ("Vikram") Prakash is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. He teaches non-Western architecture, modernism, and culture theory as well as studio classes. He is author of Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India and co-authored A Global History of Architecture.
Wednesdays, 4/4, 4/18, 5/2, 5/16, and 5/30

For information about previous courses in the Wednesday University Series, please visit our season archives.