A lookover by a booklover. Say that four times fast!
I’m happy to announce that such an overview is exactly what will be happening at San Diego State University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in November 2010, when I teach a mini course entitled “Forgotten Females.”
I first learned about the Osher Institute when I was asked by author and PBS host Kathi Diamant to give a talk to the SDSU Osher book club, who read THE FOUR SEASONS a few months back. I had so much fun with this lively and well informed group (of course it helped that they really liked the book!) that when the director of the institute, Rebecca Lawrence, asked me if I would like to join their faculty, I jumped at the opportunity.
I’ve spent so much time teaching and writing about women who have not received appropriate and sufficient attention for their accomplishments that I have a backlog of things I’d really like to talk about. I came up with a four-part class, now listed in the calendar section of this website, that will focus on music and science, as well as two historical eras, the ancient and medieval worlds. There are female political and military leaders as well as mathematicians, physicists, poets and scholars whose names and accomplishments have been by and large pushed to the margins of history, but even the women who stuck to traditional roles often played a larger role in the economic success and social stability of their cultures than has been acknowledged.
Interested? Check out the SDSU Osher website and sign up! And if you don’t live in the area, check out the Extended Studies department at a local university. Chances are there’s an Osher Institute there too.
In the San Diego area there is also an Osher Institute at UCSD, and if you check my calendar you will see I am giving a talk there this fall as well.
Osher’s purpose is to promote lifelong learning, and the only rule to be a member is that you must be at least fifty-five years old. You are supposed to be retired or semi-retired, but when I bemoaned that this would make me ineligible (if you count my writing I have two full-time jobs!), I was told that basically, no one asks.
Take a look at Osher. I bet, like me, you’ll want to sign up for just about everything.