Wasch Center Seminars

AWAREness

In this, our 15th year of offering stimulating courses for lifelong learners, we discern signs of community renewal and recovery—despite the shadow of a global health crisis that still hangs over us. In the period to come we must  confront new crises, ones that threaten America’s democracy and the well-being of the planet. We hope you share our belief that our ability to meet these challenges depends on a clear-eyed view of history, critical analysis of the present, and a determination not to yield to resignation and passivity, whatever the future may bring.

Our fall 2023 offerings—under the theme of AWAREness—present a variety of ways to honor that commitment. Three courses look at the situation of the arts in turbulent times, from Baroque art in Northern Europe, to the arts under siege during authoritarian regimes from the 1930s to 1980s and pop art in America’s transitional mid-century era. Another course suggests new perspectives on a complex American icon, Mark Twain. A writing course guides its participants toward discovering, through non-fiction, their creative capacities. Environmental awareness will be sharpened in a course devoted to multifaceted study of birds, while another course will advocate for gardening ecologically rather than imposing arbitrary order on nature. Still other courses will explore buried memories and cultures through excavation of the history of slavery in Connecticut, the languages and monuments of local indigenous communities, and the stories of a local entrepreneur in China and the lives encapsulated in the mausoleums and  Colonial houses of the Connecticut Valley.

Please join us for a semester that will broaden horizons and deepen our collective awareness of where we are coming from, where we find ourselves, and how we can shape the future for the benefit of life on earth.

With warm wishes,

Krishna Winston & Richard J. Friswell

Wasch Seminars Co-directors