Courses and Lectures
Winter 2025January 15-February 12: Winter Brown Bag Luncheon Lectures Location: Cost: $15 per lecture or purchase a bundle of all 5 for $60. Registration: CLICK HERE to Register Online (or CLICK HERE to download a paper registration form) View the descriptions below! |
Spring Session 2025March 10 – Spring Courses and Brown Bag Luncheon Lectures begin! Registration will begin in February and the online course catalog will be available in January. Printed catalogs can be found at the Lifelong Learning offices, Shepherdstown library, Boonsboro library, Charles Town library, and Four Seasons books in Shepherdstown in late. If you would like to receive a printed catalog (usually in early February for spring), please complete this electronic request form no later than January 1, 2025. |
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DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY: WHY WHAT ELITES SAY AND DO MATTERS
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15
SPEAKER: Michael Rock
LOCATION: Robert C. Byrd Center, Multipurpose Room & Zoom
TIME: 12-1:30 p.m.
COST: $15; Free for SU students and employees
Conventional wisdom and long run data suggest that America’s political economy of democratic capitalism ushered in both freedom (democracy) and prosperity (development). Using an elite centered analytical framework and a focus on annual rates of growth of democracy and development between 1800 and 2018, this lecture argues that outside America’s experience during the Great Exception (1936-1979), democracy and development have been slow to develop because elites were either united, but too ideological, or disunited around democracy and development projects. Said another way, sans the Great Exception during which democracy and development flourished, the state of American democracy and development today would be much worse off than it now is because of what elites said, did or did not do.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Michael Rock is the Samuel and Etta Wexler Professor Emeritus of Economic History at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA. His teaching and research have focused on democracy and development in the developing world (Dictators, Democrats and Development in Southeast Asia, Oxford University Press 2017 and Elite Origins of Democracy and Development in the Muslim World, Routledge with a former student, Routledge 2024). Rock is currently working on a book on Democracy and Development in the US.
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A PEAK AT THE AMERICAN CONSERVATION FILM FESTIVAL 2025
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22
SPEAKER: Lawrence Cumbo, Film maker and ACFF Board Member
LOCATION: Robert C. Byrd Center, Multipurpose Room & Zoom
TIME: 12-1:30 p.m.
COST: $15; Free for SU students and employees
Join the American Conservation Film Festival for a sneak peak of the 2025 film trailers and a conversation with filmmaker Larry Cumbo. Larry will discuss the history of ACFF and the inner workings of the filmmaking industry, as well as some of the contemporary conservation topics in the upcoming films.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Lawrence Cumbo is most widely known for the Emmy nominated film he made for National Geographic, Search for the Afghan Girl. The headline-making story, chronicling the discovery of Afghan refugee, Sharbat Gula, whose photograph first appeared on the cover of the National Geographic magazine in 1985.
In 2000, Cumbo accepted a staff producer position with National Geographic Television and Film. His films for National Geographic have taken him many places around the world, including war-torn Afghanistan, the rim of an active volcano in Guatemala, inside a tornado in Texas, the world’s largest prison in India, and he hiked with two eye surgeons through Maoist Rebel controlled territory in Nepal to the Himalayan Kingdom of Mustang in the Tibetan Plateau for his award-winning film, Miracle Doctors. Other films he made for National Geographic EXPLORER include: Arkansas Anaconda, Through These Eyes, BioBlitz!. Special Forces: On the Frontlines, Mothers Behind Bars and One Wild Ride: Yukon to Yellowstone.
Beginning in 2006, Cumbo served as an Executive Producer for overseas giants Tiger Aspect Productions and Natural History New Zealand LTD. Some series and specials he led during his time abroad include: I Survived, Orangutan Island, Jurassic CSI, Celebrating the American Woman, Dark Days in Monkey City, Ms. Adventure, Rookies, Expedition Antarctica and Tornado Chasers.
In 2010, Cumbo returned to the US and bought the historic Shepherdstown Opera House, creating a multi-use live entertainment venue, where he promoted and produced hundreds of live events each year. Combining his filmmaking career with his entrepreneurship, Cumbo joined forces with the Smithsonian Channel to create Rocking the Opera House: Dr. John.
Today, he lives in the Shenandoah Valley, and continues making documentary films focusing on people and environmental issues so often ignored by mainstream media.
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HOW “SOCIAL MEDIA HERBALISM” CAN ACTUALLY DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29
SPEAKER: Hillary Banachowski
LOCATION: Robert C. Byrd Center, Multipurpose Room & Zoom
TIME: 12-1:30 p.m.
COST: $15; Free for SU students and employees
People are bombarded every day with memes encouraging them to “take this herb for that symptom”, or for the latest wonder herb that supposedly heals Everyone and Every health issue. It’s wonderful that herbs have crossed the threshold from being considered fringe to now being mainstream, however “social media herbalism” falls short in its one size fits all messaging. Let’s talk about some foundational basics to approaching Herbalism so that you can make the best choices for your personal constitution.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Hillary Banachowski is the land steward, community herbalist, herb grower and teacher behind Sacred Roots Herbal Sanctuary in Shepherdstown, WV. She has been immersed in the herbal world for over a decade studying and practicing in the Western, Ayurvedic, and Folk Herbalism traditions. Sacred Roots offers : Live plants, Herbal and garden based classes, an Educational woodland trail for at risk medicinal plants, Full Circle Herb Grower’s School, Public Garden Tours, Seasonal Earth based events that allow you to plug back into the heart of Mother Earth and your wild self, and the Annual Shenandoah Valley Herbal Gathering.
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THE ENDURING LEGACY OF FREDERICK SPENCER OLIVER
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5
SPEAKER: Justin McHenry
LOCATION: Robert C. Byrd Center, Multipurpose Room & Zoom
TIME: 12-1:30 p.m.
COST: $15; Free for SU students and employees
Frederick Spencer Oliver was a 19th century channeler who wrote a book, A Dweller on Two Planets, that went on to become incredibly influential in many different realms and helped to be a foundational text for the modern-day New Age movement. This lecture will focus on his life, the book itself, his bizarre fascination with a murderous sex worker, and the long curious life that A Dweller on Two Planets has had all the way from being a gateway text for Shirley MacLaine to how it is being used to shape the law around AI generated art and text.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Justin McHenry is a writer and historian who graduated from Shepherd University. He is the author of the books, Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place and Raising Philadelphia: The Making of America’s First Great City. His work has been published in Defector, Belt Mag, 100 Days of Appalachia, and various magazines, newspapers, journals, and online publications.
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AMERICA’S GREATEST RECLUSIVE NOVELIST, THOMAS PYNCHON
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12
SPEAKER: Mark Kohut
LOCATION: Robert C. Byrd Center, Multipurpose Room & Zoom
TIME: 12-1:30 p.m.
COST: $15; Free for SU students and employees
Once there were three top American writers who purposely hid from the media machine. Harper Lee. J.D. Salinger. And Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. Pynchon is still working (we hope) as his work coats our minds (if we let it). I will share what is known about his life from a couple of decades on a Pynchon listserv. And some minor publications of mine. Long Island-born, George Santos’s district. Santos, a shape-shifting character who could be in one of Pynchon’s novels. Tom went to Cornell at 16, then into the Navy and came home to graduate from Cornell.
He had stories published as an undergraduate, one a major prize-winner. He had been an engineering major and went to work for Boeing where he started his first novel, V., a PEN/Faulkner winner. In 1973 came his most famous work, Gravity’s Rainbow, an “obscene” novel (laughably) said the Columbia Trustees who withheld the Pulitzer despite it being the unanimous choice of its premier judges.
I will try to show the nature of his talent; his great world-reaching themes, his wit-to-the-max, his feeling for justice, history and all of us caught in it.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Mark Kohut has been a lifelong learner since his first trip to the Ambridge Public Library. His mom took him. He took out The Little Black Ant and never forgot it. Decades later, he got to speak to the famous sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, ant specialist. E.O. told him the book got ants right when he recounted it.
Mark wasn’t born yesterday but this year it often feels like it.