A name known to many, a man known to few. Henri Willis Bendel was celebrated in his lifetime as a tastemaker and merchant but is now a nearly lost figure. His journey from a humble upbringing in late-nineteenth-century Louisiana to the pinnacle of high society was remarkable: Starting with a small hat shop in Greenwich Village in 1896, he eventually redrew the map of fashion retail, turning then-strictly residential Fifty-Seventh Street into “the Rue de la Paix of New York.” He introduced his discerning clients to such influential designers as Schiaparelli, Molyneaux, and Chanel. He outfitted Astors, Vanderbilts, and stars of stage and screen from the sunset of the Gilded Age past the dawn of the Jazz Age. But he also brought a democratization to fashion with accessible offerings and clearance sales. In syndicated newspaper columns he dispensed pithy and impassioned fashion advice to women across the nation who might never set foot in his store.

Winner of the 2024 INDIE award for best biography, Henri Bendel and the Worlds He Fashioned traces his life from his upbringing in a large, tight-knit Jewish family headed by his immigrant stepfather and mother — herself an enterprising merchant — to his early dry goods business, then to the romance that led him to New York and the tragedy that would set in motion his rapid ascent. Bendel was treated as a kindred soul in the Paris salons of haute couture and throughout Europe, where he amassed rare antiques, then built dramatic showplaces back home in which to place them. All the while he stayed loyal to his kin down south and to his chosen family up East, which consisted of blood relatives and two beloved companions whose true place in Henri’s heart required discretion, owing to the constrictions of the time.

The book also recounts the history of Mr. Bendel’s storied store, from its bustles-and-corsets years through the days of furs and flappers, then the tailored chic of the 1930s and ’40s. In more modern times, the legendary president Geraldine Stutz made Bendel’s a cornucopia of cutting-edge designers and innovative merchandising, a lure for the most famous and fashionable women in America. In its long, final era, Leslie Wexner of the Limited expanded the store’s reach and solicited younger clients, emphasizing jewelry, accessories, and dazzle. Those various and sometimes-at-odds incarnations define Bendel’s extraordinary 123-year run under the iconic brown and white stripes first sketched by Henri, who himself said, “A designer, to be successful, must feel the trend of the times.”

About the Speaker

Tim Allis was a senior editor at In Style for twelve years. Prior to that, he was a staff writer at D magazine (Dallas) and People. He has contributed articles to Out, Men’s Health, Time Out New York, Saveur, CNN, and Playbill, among others. A dedicated theatergoer, he periodically dabbles in playwriting. As Henri Bendel did, he calls both Lafayette, Louisiana, and New York City home.

Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. presented a sweeping history of changing critical standards and values in American art across 200 years. Art lovers, perplexed why their favorite artists are no longer on the walls of their local museums, will find an incisive view of why change is constant. All art lovers will find a cautionary lesson about the unpredictable future.

Each generation of experts believes their own taste is the last word, confident in their opinions about the art that was the best of their time.

As Stebbins writes, “People are inclined to view past changes in taste as unique misjudgments that will not happen again… How unthinking, how stupid, they think, not realizing that the pattern has been repeated again and again in the past and will be in the future. We now recognize that the process is a continual one. Each past canon was established for good reason; there are no mistakes, there is only history. Many of the favored artists of any period including our own will drop from favor, something that art dealers never tell their clients, or museum curators their boards.”

Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. was in the center of every development in American art collecting and exhibitions from 1960 well into the 2000s. He is uniquely able to put recent shifts in the canon within the context of a regular, generational shift in taste that tells us much about the value that is placed on art — including who decides what matters and what does not.

Profusely illustrated, fascinating, controversial, deeply informed, Rethinking American Art: Collectors, Critics, and the Changing Canon (David R. Godine, 2025) is for anyone who wants a greater understanding of the forces that shape the world of art.

About the Speaker

Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. is one of the most admired scholars of American art. He is the author of nearly a hundred publications ranging from studies of John Singleton Copley, Washington Allston, and John James Audubon to those devoted to Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer and many aspects of contemporary art and photography. He has served as curator of American art at Yale University, Harvard, and the Museum of Fine Arts, and has taught at those universities and at Boston University. His new book, Rethinking American Art, draws on his lifetime of experiences in the art world, as he describes the way artistic standards are constantly changing, and how scholarly trends mirror the art market. His book also sheds new light on many outstanding collectors, including Maxim Karolik and Alice Walton.

Peter Cormack presented the first comprehensive account of Charles J. Connick, America’s most innovative and influential stained glass artist working in the first half of the twentieth century.

When Charles J. Connick (1875–1945) began his stained glass career in Pittsburgh in the 1890s, America’s fascination with the newly invented “opalescent” windows of Tiffany and La Farge meant that the original traditions of the art form were almost forgotten. Connick made it his life’s mission to reassert the values of the medieval craft, successfully persuading twentieth-century Americans that these could inspire powerfully expressive modern glass as well as thrilling new imagery.

This book presents the dynamic trajectory of Connick’s artistic development. Refuting any notion of Connick as a revivalist, Peter Cormack examines the diverse cultural influences that shaped Connick’s art, including his creative interaction with European stained glass and his friendship with poets such as Robert Frost. Richly illustrated and based on decades of research, it analyzes Connick’s work in the context of the Arts and Crafts and “Modern Gothic” movements in architecture and the applied arts, showcasing stained glass works found throughout some of the most spectacular buildings in the United States, including New York’s St. John the Divine Cathedral and San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. His fruitful collaborations with Ralph Adams Cram, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, Maginnis & Walsh, and other leading architects are also documented in detail.

About the Speaker

Peter Cormack MBE, FSA, is a historian, writer on applied arts, illustrator and occasional designer of stained glass. He was formerly Curator of the William Morris Gallery, London, where he curated many pioneering exhibitions of work by Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement. He has been the American Friends of the V&A Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, to whom he is the Honorary Curatorial Adviser for Kelmscott Manor, Morris’s Oxfordshire home. He is an Honorary Fellow and Vice-President of the British Society of Master Glass Painters. His books include Arts & Crafts Stained Glass (2015) and Charles J. Connick, America’s Visionary Stained Glass Artist (2024), both published by Yale University Press. In 2009, he was appointed a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II “for services to art and heritage.”

Bridges as Structural Art showcases twenty-five bridges designed by Miguel Rosales and his firm Rosales + Partners, Inc, including bridges local to the Boston area such as the Zakim Bridge, the Russell Bridge, the Appleton Bridge, and more.

Rosales + Partners is characterized by a unique combination of architectural sensitivity, engineering knowledge, and communication skills that allows it to create iconic, cost-effective and technically innovative bridges. These transformational bridges have become a source of pride in the areas in which they have been built and tangible expressions of the art of bridge design.

About the Speaker

Miguel Rosales is the president and principal designer of Rosales +, with more than thirty-five years of expertise as a leading architect and designer for major bridges both in the U.S. and abroad. Renowned for his focus on bridge aesthetics and design, he earned a licentiate degree in architecture from Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala in 1985, and completed a master’s degree in architecture studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. He has received grants from the NEA, AIA/AAF, and MIT to research bridge and infrastructure design and is the recipient of numerous national and international bridge design and engineering awards. He is known for his ability to balance technical and aesthetic principles, conceiving cost-effective architectural bridge enhancements and delivering iconic bridges.

This talk is presented in partnership with the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art

This life study shows Constantine Cavafy as a flawed genius who sacrificed love to change the course of world poetry. Seeking to capture the complexities of Cavafy’s life and art, Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis approach the biography thematically.

The book begins in an Alexandria hospital in 1933 where the poet lies dying, surrounded by friends. In rich detail, it chronicles his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty as they leave Egypt and move to Liverpool, London, and Istanbul. As the poet reaches adulthood, the biography centers on his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor of both his poetry and modern life. The authors then examine the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and those individuals in later life whom he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.

Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography also looks closely at Cavafy’s poetry and artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a new poetics, which the world now recognizes as Cavafian. The study ends with the poet’s memorial service, when his literary heir tries to untangle Cavafy’s contradictions and safeguard the legacy of the man who risked everything for a global reputation.

About the Speakers

Peter Jeffreys is an Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston and has written, translated and edited a number of books on Cavafy: Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster; C. P. Cavafy; The Forster-Cavafy Letters: Friends at a Slight Angle; C. P. Cavafy: Selected Prose Works; Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits; and Approaches to Teaching the Works of C.P. Cavafy. He is a member of the International Cavafy Archive Academic Committee at the Onassis Foundation and served as a consultant for the exhibits at the Cavafy House in Alexandria and the Cavafy Archive Space in Athens.

Maria Koundoura is the Associate Provost for academic programs at Emerson College. She also holds the rank of full professor of literature in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing, where she served as department chair for two terms. She is the author of The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities and of Transnational Culture, Transnational Identity: The Politics and Ethics of Global Culture Exchange. Her next book project, for which she has received a Folger Shakespeare Library Summer Research Fellowship, is Desire Lines: Metaphors of the Global City. One of the founding editors of the Stanford Humanities Review, Koundoura was also editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War

Out of nothing but the government’s behest, a few bold men conjured a giant ship-building industry in 1940 and launched the ships that took America to war and to victory.

In 1940, the shadow of war loomed large over American life. President Roosevelt understood that it wasn’t a matter of if the United States would be pulled into battle, but when. He foresaw a “new kind of war,” one that hinged on efforts at home. Long before the attack on Pearl Harbor, German U-boats were relentlessly attacking American vessels, prompting Roosevelt to launch a monumental ship-building campaign. He knew that no matter how much weaponry and how many tanks, planes and trucks America built, the “Arsenal of Democracy” would be useless unless it could be brought in massive volume, and at breakneck speed, to troops fighting overseas.

Launching Liberty tells the remarkable story of how FDR partnered with private businessmen to begin the production of cargo freighters longer than a football field — ships he affectionately dubbed “ugly ducklings.” These colossal Liberty Ships took over six months to build at the start of his $350 million emergency shipbuilding program, far too long. The government turned to Henry Kaiser, the man who had delivered the Boulder Dam ahead of schedule and under budget, but had never built a ship in his life. Kaiser established a network of shipyards from coast to coast and recruited tens of thousands of workers eager to contribute to the war effort. Many, particularly African Americans and women, traveled from some of the most downtrodden, rural parts of the nation to help their country and to find a better life of greater equality.

As German U-boats maintained their pace of attack, Roosevelt and Kaiser initiated a bold, nationwide competition among shipyards to see who could construct ships the fastest. Driven by duty and the thrill of innovation, workers reduced the shipbuilding timeline from months to weeks and then to days. Launching Liberty is a tapestry of voices reflecting the diverse American experience of World War II. From the halls of the White House to the cramped quarters of half-finished cargo ships, we hear from naval architects, welders, nurses, engineers, daycare providers, and mothers balancing family life with the demands of wartime economy. This book uncovers the inspiring, untold stories of those who rose to the challenge during one of America’s most tumultuous times.

About the Speaker

Doug Most, a native of Rhode Island, is a lifelong journalist and author whose career has spanned newspapers, magazines, and universities up and down the East Coast, with stops in Washington, DC, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Boston. He was named Journalist of the Year while at The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey, for his coverage of a tragic story about two teens charged with killing their newborn, a story he turned into a true-crime book titled Always in Our Hearts. After a stint at Boston Magazine, he worked for fifteen years at The Boston Globe, as the Sunday Magazine editor, and deputy managing editor/special projects. His articles have appeared in Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime Writing. His 2014 nonfiction book, The Race Underground, told the story of the birth of subways in America in the late 1800s and was adapted into a PBS/American Experience documentary. The New York Times called the book “a sweeping narrative of late-19th-century intrigue.” He works now as the executive editor and an assistant vice president at Boston University. He holds a BA from George Washington University in political communication.

As the first Black woman to anchor the Boston-area evening news, Liz Walker found herself in an industry that defined the neighborhood of Roxbury largely by violence. But when she became a pastor there, Walker grew close to households marked not only by trauma but by courage — including the family of Cory Johnson, a young father who was murdered. In the wake of their worst nightmare, the family reached out for help.

As Walker’s congregation invited neighbors to gather, they created soft spaces for others’ grief to land. There, in the stories told, the meals shared, the tears shed, and the silences kept, people found a space to receive their sorrow. Out of this ministry grew a grassroots trauma-healing program, one now being replicated across the country.

Through this groundbreaking book, begin to imagine what story-sharing groups might look like in your context. Face the disparity of grief that comes from racism and systemic inequality, and learn to confront legacies of harm. Discover the healing power of listening, as well as the art and skills of accompanying someone in pain. Further, grasp how caregivers, pastors, counselors, and other healers — many with their own wounds — can benefit from soft spaces too.

Marked by history and surrounded by violence and loneliness, we all long for healing. In the tradition of esteemed writers like Bryan Stevenson and Cole Arthur Riley, Walker writes about how community helps us transfigure trauma. There is nothing dramatic about listening to someone’s story or sharing our own. But there is mystery here, and sacredness. No one has to be left alone.

About the Speaker

Liz Walker is the founding director of the CAN WE TALK… network, a nationwide collective of spiritually inspired, community-based, clinically supported programs addressing America’s epidemic of post-traumatic stress and grief through the healing power of sharing personal stories. Since it began in 2014, CAN WE TALK… has been replicated in 18 different sites nationally. A master’s graduate of Harvard Divinity School (’05), Liz Walker has long been actively involved in a healing ministry. In 1998, she helped found the Jane Doe Safety Fund, a multimillion-dollar anti-violence initiative in Massachusetts that continues to work on policy and supports domestic abuse shelters and safe houses around the commonwealth. In 2001, she began a 10-year humanitarian mission in South Sudan, one of Africa’s most troubled countries, and helped build a girls’ school there. In 2015, the US State Department invited her to Belgium to help coach a culturally diverse group of young women in self-empowerment and building cross-cultural relations. In New England, Reverend Liz is still best known as one of the region’s most popular television news anchors, a position she held for 21 years. An icon in the Boston community, she has received numerous honorary academic degrees and professional recognition, including two Emmy awards representing the highest honor of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Considered one of the nation’s most healing voices, Reverend Liz launched her first book, No One Left Alone, based on a simple truth: the wounded heal best together. Reverend Liz’s life, like her book, has been described as “Inspiring, thoughtful, and beautiful… a tender reminder and spacious invitation…” to experience the grace and love in all of us.

Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures

Adventure awaits in this new visual odyssey from Accidentally Wes Anderson (AWA), taking readers on stunning trips to every continent and sharing oddly moving human tales along the way. For lovers of travel, design, and exploration, AWA presents a brand-new collection of real-world places that seem plucked from the films of Wes Anderson, and the stories that bring each location to life. You’ll venture to Antarctica through the treacherous Drake Passage, make a stop in lesser-known Jincumbilly, Australia (where platypuses outnumber people), discover the bridge in Wisconsin that went to nowhere, and drop into the most peculiar umbrella shop in London. But adventure means nothing without someone to tell the tale. You’ll meet the father of American skydiving, who created the officially-sanctioned center of Earth — a California town with a population of two. You’ll visit the “post office at the end of the world” — and meet its mustachioed letter carrier, who runs an anarchist island nation in his free time. And you’ll travel to a town in the Arctic Circle where cats are prohibited, humans may not be buried, and doomsday vaults hold all we need to survive an apocalypse — including the secret recipe for the Oreo cookie.  Authorized by the legendary filmmaker himself, Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures reminds us that the world is ours to explore.

About the Speakers

Wally and Amanda Koval are the unlikely duo that founded Accidentally Wes Anderson (AWA) on Instagram in 2017, growing the community to nearly two million Adventurers worldwide. Their first book, Accidentally Wes Anderson, became a New York Times bestseller published in ten languages, followed by their critically acclaimed second title, Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures. The AWA collection includes a jigsaw puzzle and a book of postcards, alongside their award-winning website and newsletter. Their work has been featured in museums and large-scale exhibitions around the globe. The couple lives with their dog, Dexter, in their hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, where they pinch themselves daily to ensure this extraordinary journey is real.

Matthew Dickey is an artist, urbanist and Streetscape Curator dedicated to connecting people to place. As the Deputy Director for the Boston Preservation Alliance, Matthew aims to elevate the stories of the people that make Boston, Boston, while celebrating the city’s unique architectural heritage. Matthew is an official Accidentally Wes Anderson Ambassador and serves on the Boards of the Shirley-Eustis House Museum and Dorchester Historical Society. His paintings and photographs have been displayed around the world, and he makes regular appearances on the TV Series, Meet Boston with Billy and Jenny.

Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America

For decades, Condé Nast and its glittering magazines defined how to live the good life in America. The brilliant, complicated, striving characters behind Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, Architectural Digest, and many other titles manufactured a vision of luxury and sophistication that shaped consumer habits, cultural trends, intellectual attitudes, and political beliefs the world over. Condé’s billionaire owner Si Newhouse and his stable of star editors, photographers, and writers were the gatekeepers who decided what and who mattered, and they offered those opinions to tens of millions of readers every month. They were the ultimate influencers — before social media changed everything. The magazines crowned celebrities by the dozens, patronized creative talent much as the Medicis had underwritten Renaissance artists, and supercharged opulent events like the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Met Gala, which came to rival any fete that Louis XIV ever hosted at Versailles. The book is full of fresh behind-the-scenes reporting about a plethora of boldface names and sets out to explain how Condé Nast established itself as a de facto American aristocracy, anointing an elite and dictating the culture they presided over. The colorful story of Condé Nast at its zenith and the profound way it influenced how Americans aspired to look, eat, decorate, date, marry, and even think, has never been examined deeply. Empire of the Elite is the first book-length history of an empire whose publications refashioned American notions of prestige, whose editors became celebrities themselves, and whose diminution offers a cautionary tale of class, hubris, and technological change, even as its aesthetic and ethos remain influential to this day.

About the Speakers

Michael M. Grynbaum is a correspondent for The New York Times, where he covers media, politics, and culture. Since joining The New York Times as a staff writer at age twenty-two, he has reported on three presidential campaigns, two New York City mayors, and the 2008 financial crisis. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in history and literature, and lives in Manhattan.

Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. He has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001. His book The Metaphysical Club was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, published in 2021, was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post. In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. He won the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism in 2025.