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Study group led by IOP Fellow Rose Styron, poet, journalist and human rights activist

Tuesdays
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Room L166

In conversation with each other and our guest speakers we will explore the impact of words and images — books and essays, art, and music — on the personal journeys that lead us to effective action in helping change society for the better.  We will try to deal with a few of the many important issues of our day, such as civil rights, human rights, education, international diplomacy and foreign policy, justice and war, the citizen fights against tyranny, from national and international perspectives.  With the anointing of Obama, inspiring writer and speaker, confessed reader, we are confirmed in our assessment of the importance of words, but also (this recent exhilarating and moving inaugural week) of how graphic art and music and film stir us to confident action.

In 1968, as a poet who had also published translations of 20th century Russian poetry and worked on local congressional and recent presidential campaigns, I was invited with my husband (whose book on Nat Turner’s rebellion was a best-seller) to an Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Moscow and Tashkent.  Other participants (Russian, Palestian, Egyption, eg.) shared shocking tales of gulags and exile.  This led me to join Amnesty International’s first  group in the USA.  Amnesty’s 1970’s campaign for the Abolition of Torture made me a journalist.  The Chile of Pinochet’s coup was my first mission.  The extraordinary dissidents I encountered around the world — quite a few of whom emerged from political prisons to become the leading statesmen and writers of their transitional societies – have kept me connected to the ever-evolving human rights movement.  The movement that began with rescuing prisoners of conscience has expanded to now include civil, environmental, women’s and children’s rights and more. 

Each session will be shaped, to a large degree by our guest speaker who will share with us his or her experiences and be ready for student discussion.

Session I – February 17th
Guest: Peter Matthiessen, novelist, naturalist, adventurer, Zen Buddhist Master, writer for the environment, defender of Native Americans and minority laborers, winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction.  The Snow Leopard, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Shorebirds of America, The Tree Where Man Was Born are a few of his many books.  It will be interesting to provoke his reflections, perhaps starting with the Paris Review and the CIA, and discover what’s next on his agenda.


Session II - The Evolution of Race Relations in the American South and South Africa – February 24th
Guest: Charlayne Hunter-Gault, writer, broadcast and print journalist, head of CNN for Africa, advocate for girls education.  In my Place, The New News from Africa.  We will examine ways in which public attitudes and legislations have progressed to alter our worlds this past half-century.  We might begin by asking her about her childhood, her risky decision to become the point-girl in the desegregation of the University of Georgia, her experience at the New Yorker and on the “McNeil-Lehrer Show” and what new perspectives living and traveling Africa for a decade and covering Obama this year for various media have brought her.

Session III – How the poetic imagination, and poetry and its performance, have been used to enhance reason and passion on issues from war to global warming– March 3
Guest: Jorie Graham Pulitzer Prize poet, Boylston Professor of Poetry at Harvard.  Both her youth in Italy and current residence in France make her an effective voice for European/US political perceptions and relations.  She will discuss the ways in which lyric imagination can work to actively assist political awakenings in the crises of climate change, scarcity and sustainability that is in effect necessary for species survival.  She believes that changes in consciousness require art and that great poems have a subtle trickle-down effect on our awareness, spurring us to action.

Session IV – How music and musicians have electrified audiences young and old to act on behalf of human rights


Session V -  How the celebrity created by our great interest in film can be used to marshal political action – March 17th
Guest: Mia Farrow, star of many films including Rosemary’s Baby and the Great Gatsby, author of the memoir Things Fall Away she is currently using her fame to highlight grim statistics of disease, hunger, death, and massacre in Sudan, and traveling frequently to Chad, Angola, China, and other troubled societies — interviewing, speaking out, and filming as she goes.  Her front-page article in the Wall Street Journal caused Steven Spielberg to withdraw as a top American liaison to the Olympics, and China to send an envoy to Darfur.  Her appearance and speech before legislative authorities in Boston last year resulted in Massachusetts divesting from the Sudan.  She is currently in Darfur filming the elders who have survived decades of of violent conflict.

Mia is also an official ambassador for UNICEF as her son Ronan Farrow, who travels with her often and writes effective OP-ED pieces.  He has been invited to join us as a guest.


Session VI – How life as an educator can effect social and political consciousness – April 7th
Guest: Frank McCourt prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes, ‘Tis, and, Teacher Man.  His 30 years of teaching at Stuyvesant high school in New York City followed by the best-selling book and film, Angela’s Ashes, has made him a hero, especially to immigrants and students.  He became an internationally respected poverty activist when he went to Haiti with the relief organization Concern, and publicized the intolerable conditions there.  His media-covered breakfast fundraiser for hungry kids in 2001 indicates his endless ingenuity and compassion, as does his consistently humorous impromptu speech-making in Washington and venues across the continent.

Session VII – The intersection of art, education, and diplomacy via the United Nations – April 14th
Guest: William Luers, President of the United Nations Association, former President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Ambassador to Venezuela, and Foreign Service Officer in Moscow, is designer/organizer of the annual Global Classroom at the UN.  His events promoting landmine clearance and other UN priorities are spearheaded by artists such as Paul McCartney.  This conversation might reflect on how a student from the Midwest decides to join the Navy, the Foreign Service or Bill & Wendy Luers roles in promoting Art in Embassies and becoming quiet liaisons between our official outpost in Prague and playwright Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution, before he became President of the Czech Republic.  A potential focus on the recent impasse he was been trying to break between our government and Iran’s might provoke good discussion.

Session VIII – The influence of writers on national and international politics – April 21st
Guest:  Carlos Fuentes, one of the Spanish speaking world’s most prominent and most honored authors of fiction and nonfiction, cultural analysis, political journalism, and television surveys of its civilization, is a Mexican who grew up in Washington and Latin America. He has publicly supported or been antagonistic to an array of Mexican presidents, even occasionally taking on US attitudes toward these Presidents, or to world issues in general. For years, he and other outspoken writers were denied entry to the USA.  He is a sought-after speaker and teacher, this spring a visiting professor at Brown.  The discussion which he will lead will probably be wide-ranging on the subject of what books or art have influenced him and other intellectuals to write, political leaders to read.  He has said that Latin American writers are fashioning chapters of one big novel.  His colleagues Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Jorge Luis Borges have had much more public stature and political influence than North American writers could ever have hoped for.