Friday Forum

Friday Forums Spring 2024

All Friday Forums will be held in CUB260, except the March 22 Friday Forum, which will be held in the Lyceum. Lunch will be available on a first come, first served basis.

January 26, 2024

Curricular and Co-Curricular Collaborations for Student Experiential Learning: A Panel Discussion

    Faculty:

  • Jamie O’Brien
  • Salma Monani
  • Chris Fee
  • Henning Wrage
  • Divonna Stebick

    Administrators:

  • Tracie Potts
  • Josh Wagner
  • Marc Goldman
  • Andy Hughes
  • Jeff Rioux
  • Paul Miller

At this Friday forum, colleagues will share examples of collaborations between faculty and the Center for Career Engagement, Center for Public Service, Eisenhower Institute, Innovation and Creativity Lab and Garthwait Leadership Center which enhance student learning in the classroom. For faculty, learn how to add new dimensions and perspectives to your courses by partnering with Gettysburg College’s centers of experiential learning programs. We are eager to work with faculty to design, introduce, and implement new experiences that allow students to practice what you teach. Examples include: Infuse community-based research into assignments. Create a forum to connect your curriculum to careers. Apply economics, writing skills, or science to help a local organization develop new products and clients. Learn Spanish or German on an outdoor adventure. Engage your class in a life-like simulation with a diplomat or business leader as a final group project. Plan an international trip to the region you.


February 9, 2024

Board of Trustees; No Friday Forum


February 23, 2024

Ben Luley

Digging Up the Non-Romans of the Roman Empire: Archaeological Excavations at Lattara, France

This talk provides an overview of the results of the archaeological excavations I have conducted since 2017 with both Gettysburg College students and French students at the archaeological site of Lattara (modern Lattes) in Mediterranean France. I have been collaborating with my French colleague, Gaël Piquès to excavate the Roman-era port of the ancient settlement of Lattara. The settlement was occupied by indigenous Celtic-speakers from approximately 500 BCE to 200 CE. Looking beyond the monuments and opulent lifestyles of the elites of the Roman Empire, our specific project seeks to understand the lives of non-Romans who were forcibly incorporated into the Roman Empire and how their lifeways were impacted by the Roman conquest. (note: I selected two dates as per the instructions of the survey but I could be flexible and really do any of the dates).


March 8, 2024

Ryan Kerney

Celebrating 30 years of Advancing Science at Gettysburg College

Advancing Science is a free lending library of scientific equipment and expertise that serves six counties in Southeastern Pennsylvania. We support a wide network of K-12 teachers through professional development and classroom visits. Our program was founded in 1994 and has served over 750,000 student contacts over the past 30 years. Last academic year alone we served 104 teachers in 39 schools and 6,487 students. We are currently working closely with three districts in Adams County on the "Partnership for Adams County Environmental Literacy" (PACE) program, which is developing lesson plans and an environmental literacy plan that are customized our region. This talk will give an overview of the program and its impacts on serving classrooms in our area.


March 22, 2024

Ian Isherwood

Remembering America’s Wars (and remembering how to start a book project)

During the 2022-2023 academic year, Ian Isherwood served at the Harold K. Johnson Chair of Military History at the U.S. Army War College. During that year, he taught veterans of Global War on Terror, while starting a new book project entitled Remembering America’s Wars. In this Friday Faculty Lunch, Isherwood will discuss what it was like to teach in Professional Military Education and how that teaching influenced the direction of his scholarship. He will discuss his new project, Remembering America’s Wars: The Culture and Politics of Commemoration, and the trials of starting a new book.


April 5, 2024

Kerry Wallach

Book talk: "Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit"

Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888–1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this biography recovers Szalit’s life and presents a stunning collection of her art.


April 19, 2024

Chris D’Addario

Urban Aesthetics: City Writing in Elizabethan London, Donne's Lyric Poetry

This talk explores the intimate link between writing and place. It does so by examining some of the most famous love poems in the English language, John Donne's lyrics, situating these poems not in the poet's heart but amidst the urban culture in which Donne was so immersed throughout his writing life. I argue that these poems are as much about the spatial realities of urban everyday life as they are about desire. In analyzing these poems through such localized and quotidian contexts, I encourage a reconsideration of how we write our stories of artistic influence and draw our cultural boundaries.


May 3, 2024

Bob Iuliano

Reflections on the 21St Century Ivory Tower

American higher education has long been understood to enjoy a degree of independence from society as a whole. That independence reflected a belief that a healthy democracy benefitted by affording higher education a robust degree of academic freedom. That proposition is increasingly under stress, as we witness governors, legislatures, and the courts reject academic independence and expertise. Through the prism of Supreme Court decisions race-conscious admissions, with a particular focus on last year’s decision in the Harvard case, we’ll chart the devolution of academic independence, reflect on potential causes, and offer some thoughts about the path ahead.