Stamford Events

Professor Jerrilynn Dodds to Present “Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Art and Political Identity” on January 29, 2019

ArtworkOn Tuesday, January 29, Professor Jerrilynn Dodds will present "Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Art and Political Identity" for this year's Maria and Ishier Jacobson Lecture. The lecture will be held at the UConn Stamford campus in MPR 108 from 5:30-7:00 pm. Refreshments will be served.

The program is free and open to the public. It is made possible by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life Ishier Jacobson Fund for Judaic & Middle Eastern Studies. If you require an accommodation to participate, please contact Stamford Coordinator for Judaic Studies Professor Roden at frederick.roden@uconn.edu or 203-251-8559.

About the Talk

In the 700 years in which Christians, Muslims and Jews interacted in Islamic Spain, every conceivable kind of interaction occurred: open hostility, resistance, acculturation, and one of the most creative and cooperative levels of interaction known in the Middle Ages. Through art and architecture, this lecture will explore how the confessional and cultural diversity of the Spanish Middle Ages transformed the culture of Medieval Europe.

About the Speaker

Dr. Jerrilynn Dodds holds the Harlequin Adair Dammann Chair in the History of Art at Sarah Lawrence College and lectures/consults at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work centers on transculturation and how art/architecture forms identity. Dodds' books include Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture and Architecture and Ideology of Early Medieval Spain. In 2018 she received the Cross of the Order of Civil Merit from the Government of Spain.

Pride & Prejudice: South Asian LGBTQ Alliance October 24, 2018

Pride and Prejudice

Wed. Oct. 24, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM, UConn Stamford Art Gallery: The UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life will co-sponsor a panel on national coming out month to learn about the Bangladeshi LGBTQ community and celebrate pride with the members of Roopbaan and the voices of the community. 

The program is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Please register to attend at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pride-prejudice-south-asian-lgbtq-alliance-tickets-48723100104

About the Event

On April 25, 2016, Xulhaz Mannan and K Mahbub Rabbi, activists in Dhaka, Bangladesh were murdered by Islamic extremists for advocating LGBT rights as the founders of Roopbaan, the first LGBT magazine in Bangladesh.

Roopbaan has become a platform that strives to advance LGBT rights to love in a country that proclaims their love as illegal and punishable by law.

It is important to address the questions of violence, safety, and identity in the face of discrimination against the South Asian and Muslim LGBT community.

A creative segment will be included for art, poetry, and photography.

This program is co-sponsored by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, Cobs Bread, GLSEN Connecticut, People's United Bank, Sholay Productions, Staples, Stop and Shop, and Triangle Community Center.

Avon Theater Film Screening: Call Me by Your Name October 10, 2018

Call Me by Your Name

Co-presented by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, UConn Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), and Triangle Community Center, Academy Award-winning film Call Me by Your Name will be screened at the Avon Theater in Stamford (272 Bedford Street).   A post-film Q&A  moderated by Dr. Frederick Roden with author André Aciman, whose novel was adapted in creating the screenplay for the film, will follow the screening. The program takes place on Wednesday, October 10, at 7PM.

Tickets: Nonmembers  $13; Members  $8; Students/Seniors $10 

About André Aciman

André Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and, after teaching at Princeton University and Bard College, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He is currently chair of the Ph.D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. He has also taught creative writing at New York University, Cooper Union, and Yeshiva University. In 2009, Aciman was also Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.

Although his specialty is in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, French, and Italian literature, he is especially interested in the theory of the psychological novel (roman d’analyse) across boundaries and eras. In addition to the history of literary theory, he teaches the work of Marcel Proust and the literature of memory and exile.

Aciman is a New York Times bestselling novelist originally from Alexandria, Egypt. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Granta, and in many volumes of The Best American Essays. He has won a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

He is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. His books and essays have been translated in many languages. In addition to Out of Egypt (1995), Aciman has published False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001) and Alibis: Essays on Elswhere (2011), and four novels, Enigma Variations (2017), Harvard Square (2013), Eight White Nights (2010) and Call Me by Your Name (2007), for which he won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). He also edited Letters of Transit (1999) and The Proust Project (2004) and prefaced Monsieur Proust (2003), The Light of New York (2007), Condé Nast Traveler's Room With a View (2010) and Stefan Zweig's Journey to the Past (2010). 

About the Film 

Call Me by Your Name, from Luca Guadagnino, is a sensual and transcendent tale of first love, based on the acclaimed novel by André Aciman. In the summer of 1983, in the north of Italy, Elio Perlman, (Timothée Chalamet) a 17-year-old American spends his days in his family's 17th-century villa lazily transcribing music and flirting with his friend Marzia (Esther Garrel). One day Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old graduate student working on his doctorate arrives as the annual summer intern tasked with helping Elio's father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture. Soon, Elio and Oliver discover a summer that will alter their lives forever.

If you require an accommodation to participate in any of these events, please contact Stamford Coordinator for Judaic Studies Professor Fred Roden at frederick.roden@uconn.edu or 203-251-8559.

Dr. Joy Ladin to Present “The Soul of the Stranger: A Special Lecture for Election Night” Nov. 6, 2018

Please join us at the UConn Stamford Campus Art Gallery on Tuesday, November 6, from 5:30 to 7:00 pm when Dr. Joy Ladin will present "The Soul of the Stranger: A Special Lecture for Election Night." The evening will launch her latest book, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective (Brandeis University Press, 2018).

The program is free and open to the public, and refreshments will be served.

If you require an accommodation to participate, please contact Stamford Coordinator for Judaic Studies Professor Frederick Roden at frederick.roden@uconn.edu or 203-251-8559.

About the Presentation

 

Dr. Ladin's talk will explore how the experiences of transgender people and other “hyper-minorities” – people who are different in ways that set them apart from most members of their communities – can help us understand the difficult relations between God and humanity portrayed in much of the Hebrew Bible. Drawing on her personal experience of being both a hyper-minority – the only openly transgender person at her Orthodox Jewish university – and someone who lived for decades as a middle-class white male, Dr. Ladin will discuss how the ways we relate to those we see as strangers affects the way we relate to the ultimate stranger, God.

About the Speaker

 

Joy Ladin, Gottesman Professor of English at Yeshiva University, is the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. She is the author of National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life: a Jewish Journey Between Genders and nine books of poetry. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, among other honors.

Directions to UConn Stamford

 

The UConn Stamford campus is on Broad Street between Washington Boulevard and Franklin Street; officially 1 University Place, Stamford, CT.

When using GPS, please use the address 1 University Place, Stamford, CT 06901. The nearest parking garages are the Target and Bell Street, garages. Please click here for a map of these parking garages.

 

A Community of Practice of Spiritual Traditions: October 3, 2018

Mindfulness

On Wednesday, October 3,  from 10 am - 2 pm, please join us for brief introductory workshops on Jewish and western spiritual practices as well as yoga and Zen meditation.  Drop in/drop out for a series of 5 short workshops with a lunch/information session at halftime.

These workshops are free and open to the public and take place in the Art Gallery at UConn Stamford (1 University Place, Stamford, CT). 

If you have questions or require an accommodation to participate, please contact Stamford Coordinator for Judaic Studies Professor Roden at frederick.roden@uconn.edu or 203-251-8559.

This event is made possible by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life.

Directions to UConn Stamford

 

The UConn Stamford campus is on Broad Street between Washington Boulevard and Franklin Street; officially 1 University Place, Stamford, CT.

When using GPS, please use the address 1 University Place, Stamford, CT 06901. The nearest parking garages are the Target and Bell Street, garages. Please click here for a map of these parking garages.

Charles Kaiser to Speak at UConn Stamford for Yom Hashoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day Lecture

Charles Kaiser

On Tuesday, April 17, at 5:30 pm, Charles Kaiser, author and journalist, will present "A Model of Resistance: How one French family chose to fight the Nazis during the occupation of Paris" for the Center for Judaic Studies UConn Stamford Yom HaShoah Holocaust Remembrance Day lecture. The lecture takes place in Multipurpose Room 108 at the UConn Stamford Campus (One University Place, Stamford, CT). It is free and open to the public.

About the Presentation

Charles Kaiser will speak about his book, The Cost of Courage, a biography of the Boulloches, a Catholic bourgeois family who fought against the Nazis and paid a tremendous price for their courage. Kaiser has known his subjects all of his life because his uncle lived with the Boulloche sisters for a year, beginning in the fall of 1944, immediately after the liberation of Paris. Since then, the two families have nurtured seven decades of friendship.

About the Speaker

Charles Kaiser is a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and a former press critic for Newsweek. He reviews books regularly for The Guardian. He is associate director of the LGBT Social Science and Public Policy Center at Hunter College. His other books are 1968 In America, The Gay Metropolis, and What it Means to Be a Homosexual, for which he wrote the afterword. The Cost of Courage was published in the US by Other Press and in France last summer by Seuil.

If you require an accommodation to participate, please contact Pamela Weathers at 860-486-2271 or pamela.weathers@uconn.edu.

Filmmaker Roland Tec to Visit Center for Judaic Studies UConn Stamford

Roland TecOn Tuesday, February 6, at 5:30 pm, please join Dr. Joel Blatt and Dr. Fred Roden in conversation with filmmaker Roland Tec, son of Professor Emerita Nechama Tec, as he discusses her Holocaust memoir, Dry Tears, recounts his work on the film adaptation of her resistance classic “Defiance,” and reflects on legacies in families of survivors. The program, "From Generation to Generation," will be held in the Stamford Campus Multi-Purpose Room 108.

Filmmaker and producer Roland Tec is an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program in Playwriting at Hollins University and is a Dramatists Guild Institute faculty member. His film producer credits include Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding and Edward Zwick's Defiance. He wrote, directed, and produced feature films All the Rage and We Pedal Uphill.  Professor Tec has taught at Harvard and Brandeis and was a fellow at the Byrdcliffe Artists Colony and at the MacDowell Colony.

If you require an accommodation to participate, please contact stamfordjudaicstudies@uconn.edu or 203-251-9525.

Directions to UConn Stamford

The UConn Stamford campus is on Broad Street between Washington Boulevard and Franklin Street; officially 1 University Place, Stamford, CT.

When using GPS, please use the address 1 University Place, Stamford, CT 06901. The nearest parking garages are the Target and Bell Street, garages. Please click here for a map of these parking garages.