John Gennari shared the story of how a small town in New England became a home for jazz, challenging conventional assumptions about the relationship between culture and landscape, art and geography, town and city, and race and place. This is a book about what happened in the 1950s in a barn, an icehouse, and a greenhouse in the verdant Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Against the backdrop of McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the expansion of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, and postwar cultural tourism, two New Yorkers bought part of a sprawling estate in Lenox, where they converted an old barn and other outbuildings into an inn that could host musical performances and seminars. The Berkshire Music Barn went on to host jazz greats like Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, and Billie Holiday, as well as jazz roundtables grounded in folkloric approaches to the music. The Jazz Barn explores the cultural significance of venues like the Berkshire Music Barn and later the Lenox School of Jazz to tell a surprising story about race, culture, and place. John Gennari explores how a predominantly white New England town became a haven for African American musicians, and reveals the Berkshires as an important incubator not just of American literature and classical music but also of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Ornette Coleman’s “new thing.” The Berkshire Music Barn became a crucial space for the mainstreaming of jazz. By the late 1950s, the School of Jazz was an epicenter of the genre’s avant-garde. Richly illustrated with the photographs of Clemens Kalischer among others, The Jazz Barn demonstrates that the locations where jazz is played and heard indelibly shape the music and its meanings.

About the Speaker

John Gennari is Professor of English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont. Gennari’s previous book, Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge (University of Chicago Press, 2017), is a study of Black/Italian cultural intersections in music and vernacular soundscapes, foodways, sports, and other forms of expressive culture. His earlier book, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2006), won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Criticism and the John G. Cawelti Award for Best Book in American Culture Studies.

Arthur Bahr offers a unique study of the only physical manuscript containing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, exploring it as both a material and literary object. In this book, Bahr takes a fresh look at the four poems and twelve illustrations of the so-called “Pearl-Manuscript,” the only surviving medieval copy of two of the best-known Middle English poems: Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript, Bahr explores how the physical manuscript itself enhances our perception of the poetry, drawing on recent technological advances (such as spectroscopic analysis) to show the Pearl-Manuscript to be a more complex piece of material, visual, and textual art than previously understood. By connecting the manuscript’s construction to the intricate language in the texts, Bahr suggests new ways to understand both what poetry is and what poetry can do.

About the Speaker

Arthur Bahr is professor of literature and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His first book, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (University of Chicago Press, 2013), showed how medieval manuscripts were often artfully sequenced and laid out so as to enhance the literary potential of the compilation as a whole. His new book, Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight (University of Chicago Press, 2025), applies those insights to the only surviving copy of four extraordinary Middle English poems: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and (most famously) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Poor boy. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. In repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world of government censorship and religious authoritarianism comes an ambitious cobbler’s son from Canterbury with a daring desire to be known ― and an uncanny ear for Latin poetry. A torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, like Christopher Marlowe, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism. What Marlowe seizes in his rare opportunity for a classical education, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture. His astonishing literary success will, in turn, nourish the talent of a collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare. Dark Renaissance illuminates both Marlowe’s times and the origins and significance of his work ― from his erotic translations of Ovid to his portrayal of unfettered ambition in a triumphant Tamburlaine to Doctor Faustus, his unforgettable masterpiece about making a pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge. Introducing us to Marlowe’s transgressive genius in the form of a thrilling page-turner, Stephen Greenblatt brings a penetrating understanding of the literary work to reveal the inner world of the author, bringing to life a homosexual atheist who was tormented by his own compromises, who refused to toe the party line, and who was murdered just when he had found love. Meanwhile, he explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, gave birth to the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world, including Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

About the Speaker

Stephen Greenblatt, PhD, is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning The Swerve.

Ray Madoff tells us about her revelatory book that lifts the curtain on America’s most consequential public deception: how the rich get richer using tools the government gave them. Amid conflicting narratives about the drivers of wealth and inequality in the United States, one constant hovers in the background: the US tax code. No political force has been more consequential—or more utterly opaque—than the 7,000-page document that details who pays what in American society and government. Most of us have a sense that it’s an unfair system. But does anyone know exactly how it’s unfair? Legal scholar Ray D. Madoff knows. In The Second Estate, she offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of America’s byzantine system of taxation, laying bare not only its capacity to consolidate wealth but also the mechanisms by which it has created two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit. This is not a story of offshore accounts or secret tax havens. In The Second Estate, Madoff shows that the US system itself has, over time, been stripped and reconstituted such that it now offers a series of secret paths, hidden in plain sight, for wealthy people in the know to avoid taxation altogether. Through the strategic avoidance of traditional income, leveraging of investments and debt, and exploitation of rules designed to promote charitable giving, America’s wealthy do more than just pay less than their share; they remove themselves from the tax system entirely. Wealth becomes its own sovereign state, and the living is surprisingly—and maddeningly—cheap.

About the Speaker

Ray D. Madoff is a professor at Boston College Law School and the cofounder and director of the Boston College Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good. She is the author of Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead and lead author of The Practical Guide to Estate Planning. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books, among other outlets.

After the fall of France in June 1940, all that stood between Adolf Hitler and total victory was a narrow stretch of water and the defiance of the British people. Desperate for allies, Winston Churchill did everything he could to bring the United States into the conflict, drive the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany apart, and persuade neutral countries to resist German domination.

By early 1942, after the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the British-Soviet-American alliance was in place. Yet it was an improbable and incongruous coalition, divided by ideology and politics and riven with mistrust and deceit. Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin were partners in the fight to defeat Hitler, but they were also rivals who disagreed on strategy, imperialism, and the future of liberated Europe. Only by looking at their areas of conflict, as well as cooperation, are we able to understand the course of the war and world that developed in its aftermath.

Allies at War is a fast-paced, narrative history, based on material drawn from more than a hundred archives. Using vivid, firsthand accounts and unpublished diaries, Bouverie invites readers into the rooms where the critical decisions were made and goes beyond the confines of the Grand Alliance to examine, among other topics, the doomed Anglo-French partnership and fractious relations with General Charles de Gaulle and the Free French, and interactions with Poland, Greece, Francoist Spain and neutral Ireland, Yugoslavia, and Nationalist China.

Ambitious and compelling, revealing the political drama behind the military events, Allies at War offers a fresh perspective on the Second World War and the origins of the Cold War.

About the Speaker

Tim Bouverie is a British historian and author of the UK bestseller Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World. His first book, Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. A graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, he was the 2021 Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Pulitzer-Prize winner Jon Meacham writes of Allies at War: “Tim Bouverie has done a remarkable thing: He has found a novel and illuminating way to tell the story of World War II, and in so doing has given us an important and timely study of the centrality and complexity of alliances. This is a terrific book.”

John McPhee has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965 and has written more than thirty acclaimed books that began on the magazine’s pages. But few readers know or fully appreciate the true breadth of his writing. Looking for a Story is a complete reader’s guide to McPhee’s vast published work, documenting much rarely seen or connected with McPhee, including remarkable early writing for Time magazine published without his name. In chronicling McPhee’s career where he broke ground applying devices long associated with fiction to the literature of fact, Noel Rubinton gave us insights into McPhee’s techniques, choice of subjects, and research methods, shedding light on how McPhee turns complicated subjects like geology into compelling stories. Beyond detailing more than seventy years of McPhee’s writing, Rubinton recounted McPhee’s half century as a Princeton University writing professor, a little known part of his legacy. McPhee inspired generations of students who wrote hundreds of books of their own, also catalogued here. With an incisive foreword by New Yorker staff writer and former McPhee student Peter Hessler, Looking for a Story also includes extensive annotated listings of articles about McPhee, reviews of his books, and interviews, readings, and speeches. Whether you are already an admirer of McPhee or new to his writings, this book provides an invaluable road map to his rich body of work.

About the Speaker

Noel Rubinton is a journalist whose writing has appeared in leading publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He was a reporter and editor for Newsday for many years. His writing has spanned many fields, including government, politics, culture, transportation, and history. His essay about H.P. Lovecraft and Providence is collected in the New York Times book Footsteps: Literary Pilgrimages Around the World and he wrote the foreword to Repression, Re-invention, & Rugelach: A History of Jews at Colgate. A graduate of Deerfield Academy and Brown University, he has been reading John McPhee’s writing for many decades.

Cullen Murphy is an editor at large at The Atlantic, where for two decades he was managing editor. He has also been an editor at large at Vanity Fair. His books include Just Passing Through: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday (2022), Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe (2017), and Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (2007). For 25 years he wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant.

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