American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives

In January 1959, Art Copleston was escorted out of his college accounting class by three police officers. In a motel room, blinds drawn, he sat in front of a state senator and the legal counsel for the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, nicknamed the “Johns Committee.” His crime? Being a suspected homosexual. And the government of Florida would use any tactic at their disposal — legal or not — to get Copleston to admit it. Using a secret trove of primary source documents that have been decoded and de-censored for the first time in history, journalist Robert W. Fieseler unravels the mystery of what actually happened behind the closed doors of an inquisition that held ordinary citizens ransom to its extraordinary powers. The state of Florida would prefer that this history remain buried. But for nearly a decade, the Florida Legislature founded, funded, and supported the Johns Committee — an organization using the cover of communism to viciously attack members of the NAACP and queer professors and students. Spearheaded by Charley Johns, a multi-term politician in a gerrymandered legislature, the Committee was determined to eliminate any threats to the state’s white, conservative regime. Fieseler describes the heartbreaking ramifications for citizens of Florida whose lives were imperiled, profiling marginalized residents with compassion and a determination to bring their devastating experiences to light at last. A propulsive, human-centered drama, with fascinating insight into Florida politics, American Scare is a page-turning reckoning of our racist and homophobic past — and its chilling parallels to today.

About the Speakers
Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist investigating marginalized groups and a scholar excavating forgotten histories. A National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association ‘Journalist of the Year’ and recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, his debut book Tinderbox won seven awards, including the Edgar Award, and his reporting has appeared in Slate, Commonweal, and River Teeth, among others. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Tulane University as a Mellon Fellow. Fieseler’s second queer history book American Scare, a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, publishes in June 2025. A former Athenaeum writer and proud Boston resident, he now lives with his husband on the gayest street in New Orleans.

Michael Bronski has been active in gay liberation as a political organizer, writer, publisher and theorist since 1969. He is the author of numerous award winning books including A Queer History of the United States, You Can Tell Just By Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People and Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics, coauthored with Kay Whitlock. In 2017, he was awarded the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. He is Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University.

We are pleased to invite you to the 2025 Torrence C. Harder Endowed Lecture with Andrea di Robilant on This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World

From the author of the best-selling A Venetian Affair comes the story of an Italian Renaissance book editor who introduced European minds to the wider world through his passion for geography. In the autumn of 1550, a thick volume containing a wealth of geographical information new to Europeans, with startling wood-cut maps of Africa, India and Indonesia, was published in Venice under the title Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). The editor of this remarkable collection of travelogues, journals and classified government reports remained anonymous. Two additional volumes delivered the most accurate information on Asia and the “New World” available at the time. The three volumes together constituted an unparalleled release of geographical data into the public domain. It was, Andrea di Robilant writes, the biggest Wikileak of the Renaissance. In This Earthly Globe, di Robilant brings to life the palace intrigues, editorial wheedling, delicate alliances and vibrant curiosity that resulted in this coup by the editor Giovambattista Ramusio. Learned and self-effacing, he gathered a vast array of both popular and closely guarded narratives, from the journals of Marco Polo (he fact-checked them!) to detailed reports on Northern African cultures from the Muslim scholar and diplomat al-Hasan ibn Mohammad al-Wazzan (later known as Leo Africanus). Diverse voices spill out from these chapters as di Robilant recounts how Ramusio pursued the sources, and how he understood both the darker episodes of “exploration” involving colonial violence and the voyage stories which included accounts of people from African and Asian lands, who had a great deal to share about their cultures. The result is a far-flung and delightful homage to one of the founding fathers of modern geography.

About the Author

Andrea di Robilant was born in Italy and educated in the United States at Columbia University, where he specialized in international affairs. After a career in journalism, he now teaches creative writing at the American University in Rome. He is the author of A Venetian Affair; Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon; Irresistible North: From Venice To Greenland on the Trail of the Zen Brothers; and Chasing the Rose and Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse.

The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland

On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a woman of quiet daring, found herself in a desperate position. From the windows of her beloved Jeu de Paume museum, where she had worked and ultimately spied, she could see the battle to liberate Paris thundering around her. The Jeu de Paume, co-opted by Nazi leadership, was now the Germans’ final line of defense. Would the museum curator be killed before she could tell the truth—a story that would mean nothing less than saving humanity’s cultural inheritance?  Based on troves of previously undiscovered documents, The Art Spy chronicles the brave actions of the key Resistance spy in the heart of the Nazi’s art looting headquarters in the French capital. Valland has, until now, been written out of the annals, despite bearing witness to history’s largest art theft. While Hitler was amassing stolen art for his future Führermuseum, Valland, his undercover adversary, secretly worked to stop him. Valland came face to face with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, passed crucial information to the Resistance network, put herself deliberately in harm’s way to protect the museum and her staff, and faced death during the last hours of Liberation Day. She also single handedly provided information to stop the last train of looted artworks—bearing paintings by Picasso, Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Braque, Degas, Modigliani, and Toulouse-Lautrec—from leaving France. Vivid and atmospheric, The Art Spy moves from the glittering days of pre-War Paris, through the tension-riddled cities of Europe on the eve of war, to the harrowing years of the Nazi occupation of France when brave people such as Valland risked everything to fight monstrous evil.

About the Speakers

Michelle Young is the author of The Art Spy. She is the founder of Untapped New York, an online magazine about New York City’s secrets and hidden places. She is also the author of Secret Brooklyn, Secret New York: An Unusual Guide, Secret New York: Hidden Bars and Restaurants, and Broadway. She is an Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and an instructor at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism. She has bylines in The Guardian, Narratively, The Forward, Business Insider, Hyperallergic, Wilson Quarterly, Food & Wine Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, Curbed, and The Huffington Post. She is also a Lowell Thomas Journalist Award winner. Michelle’s photography has been published by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and The Museum of Modern Art, exhibited at The Museum of the City of New York, and included in numerous books. Michelle was featured on the History Channel production The Engineering That Built the World, Netflix’s Stay Here, Smithsonian Channel’s Searching for Secrets, PBS’ 10 That Changed America, and National Geographic’s Strange Truths.

Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, which won a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and was a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award. Her recent book, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, has received the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing and was supported by a Public Scholars grant from the NEH and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research Fellowship from the Biographers International Organization. She has been an honorary fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 2011 and is an emerita professor of English at Hope College. She lives near Boston.

The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America
Legendary editor Judith Jones, the woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century—including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath—finally gets her due in this “surprising, granular, luminous, and path-breaking biography” (Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem). At Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, twenty-five-year-old Judith Jones spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile and passing on projects—until one day, a book caught her eye. She read it in one sitting, then begged her boss to consider publishing it. A year later, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl became a bestseller. It was the start of a culture-defining career in publishing. During her more than fifty years as an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Jones nurtured the careers of literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike, and helped launch new genres and trends in literature. At the forefront of the cookbook revolution, she published the who’s who of food writing: Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child. Through her tenacious work behind the scenes, Jones helped turn these authors into household names, changing cultural mores and expectations along the way. Judith’s work spanned decades of America’s most dramatic cultural change—from the end of World War II through the civil rights movement and the fight for women’s equality—and the books she published acted as tools of quiet resistance. Now, based on exclusive interviews, never-before-seen personal papers, and years of research, her astonishing career is explored for the first time in this “thorough and humanizing portrait” (Kirkus Reviews).

About the Speakers

Sara B. Franklin is a nationally-bestselling writer and a professor at New York University’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study, where she teaches courses on food, oral history, embodied culture, and non-fiction writing. She has written for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Literary Hub, The Nation, and Travel & Leisure. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sara’s writing and teaching are informed by her training in history, community health, and documentary studies. Before turning to writing and teaching full-time, she worked as an organic vegetable farmer, a restaurant critic, an urban agriculture instructor, a research consultant at the American Museum of Natural History, and a grassroots anti-poverty and sustainable agriculture advocate nationally across the U.S., as well as in South Africa and Brazil. Sara holds a PhD in Food Studies from New York University and a BA in history and community health from Tufts University.

Jessica Carbone is a Boston-based writer, editor, and food historian, and she recently joined America’s Test Kitchen as their managing editor of digital content. She previously worked as a contributing editor of books coverage at SAVEUR, as a member of the food history team at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and as a cookbook editor at Clarkson Potter and Alfred A. Knopf, where she was trained by Judith Jones. She has a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University, and has taught food-focused courses and workshops at Johnson & Wales, Harvard University, and in the Gastronomy program at Boston University.
Jonathan Duval is the Assistant Curator of Architecture & Design at the MIT Museum. Most recently, he curated the exhibition “Drawing After Modernism,” which examines architectural drawings of the 1980s through the lens of collecting. His research focuses on the history of architectural practice and pedagogy, architectural representation and graphics, and the bureaucratic intersections of architecture and technology. In addition to the MIT Museum, Jon has held curatorial positions, internships, and fellowships at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Sir John Soane’s Museum, and the RISD Museum. He studied architectural history at Tufts University and Brown University and is on the Board of Directors of the New England chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. In The Golden Road, William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India’s oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it.

About the Author

William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown, and All Souls, University of Oxford. He writes regularly for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. In 2018, he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. In 2019, his book The Anarchy was chosen by Barack Obama as one of his books of the year. He is also the co-host of the chart-topping (with over half a million downloads a week) podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside of Delhi.

New England Coastal: Homes that Tell a Story

Every homeowner, and every project, brings a special set of circumstances to the design process. It is through truly understanding daily life patterns and movements, a home’s connection to its setting, and a sense of well-being and fulfillment, that we’re able to successfully translate organic ideas into beautifully illustrated stories. In this panel discussion, Mark Hutker, FAIA, Jim Cappuccino, AIA, Thomas McNeill, AIA, and Ryan Alcaidinho of Hutker Architects presented lessons learned as they’ve navigated the challenges and rewards of creating design narratives and addressing client requirements—all while artistically bringing to life a home and sanctuary that their clients fall in love with.

About the Speakers

For more than 35 years, Hutker Architects has been collaborating with families and individuals to create one-of-a- kind homes that are uniquely suited to the particulars of their location and the life patterns of the people who occupy them. Today, Hutker Architects is a team of 70 professionals who share the belief that houses represent the “social atom,” the essential definer of family and cultural heritage. They are passionate about the power of meaningful architecture and committed to harnessing our individual talents toward a common goal: advancing the art of dwelling.

Mark Hutker, FAIA moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 1985, redirecting his design focus to residential architecture. After acquiring Dunn Brady Associates, Mark began growing what is now known as Hutker Architects, creating a vibrant Vineyard office committed to crafting custom homes. Today, the firm continues to flourish with 70 professionals in four offices. Mark has written three books defining the new regional vernacular and narrative homes. His lectures resonate through esteemed institutions such as the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Cincinnati, the Architectural Digest Home Show, The National Custom Builders Council, the AIA, among others, where he ignites critical conversations about architectural practice. Mark’s creative focus lies with the Ontic Initiative, devoted to advancing the art of dwelling through a synthesis of natural, behavioral and physical sciences. The Ontic initiative sponsors research grants exploring the fundamental human needs that underpin meaningful, impactful spaces.

Jim Cappuccino, AIA is a Partner at Hutker Architects, where he has worked since 2005. After spending several years with a prominent western mountain-region residential design firm, Jim brought his talents back east. He was recently inducted into the New England Design Hall of Fame and serves as a leadership cabinet member for the Leaders of Design Council. Jim believes in architecture that celebrates its context while interpreting the regional vernacular with designs both modern and timeless. Often elevating the discourse at Hutker, he fosters a collaborative design environment, models firm standards for client service, and is an active mentor within the firm. Licensed in Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, and Wyoming, he is an active member of the American Institute of Architects and the Boston Society of Architects. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture from Roger Williams University.

Thomas McNeill, AIA is a Partner at Hutker Architects where his passion for creativity and innovation fuels his work. A recipient of the prestigious 2019 “5 under 40” award, Thomas’s designs have been featured by renowned publications such as Architectural Digest, Ocean Home, and Luxe magazines. His forward-thinking approach to architecture focuses on evolving how dwellings interact with and enhance the human experience. Thomas is the co-founder of the Ontic Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to evolving dwellings to promote well-being and positively impact the human body. This initiative reflects his commitment to pushing the boundaries of traditional architecture to improve lives.

Ryan Alcaidinho is a Principal at Hutker Architects, where he has practiced since 2010. He has expertise in high-end residential design and industry experience in both landscape design and luxury retail. Throughout the years, he has served as project designer and project manager for Hutker projects throughout southern New England, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, and New York. Ryan is known to have a keen eye for detail and has an innate ability to analyze visual information quickly. Named as a “5 Under 40” award winner by New England Home magazine in 2023, and a recognized member of “The List” by Modern Luxury Interiors Boston, Ryan has played an integral role in establishing Hutker’s Boston Studio in Beacon Hill, successfully leading the team while growing a reputable presence in the city. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Wentworth Institute of Technology.

Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters

Deborah Parker chronicles the making and empowerment of a female connoisseur, curator, and library director in a world where such positions were held by men. Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was Pierpont Morgan’s personal librarian (1908–1913) and the first Director of the Morgan Library (1924–1948). She was also the daughter of two mixed-race parents and passed for white. In the nearly six hundred letters that Greene sent to art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), Parker identifies Greene’s energetic pursuit of exceptional opportunities, illuminating the artistry and imaginative features of Greene’s writing―her self-invention, her vibrant responses to books and art, and her pathbreaking work as a librarian. As Greene transformed a private library into a magnificent public institution, she also transformed herself: hers was a life both lived and writ large. The skills and strategies required to obtain prized manuscripts in an era when wealthy collectors vied for such rarities were considerable. Belle Greene possessed these abilities in abundance. She acquired these talents on the job and much of the finesse she exercised when on the hunt can be traced to her experiences in Europe. From 1908-1936 Belle Greene made thirteen trips to Europe. This talk will explore the way in which Greene’s friendships with rare book experts in Europe, especially England, helped refine her expertise.

About the Speaker

Deborah Parker is Professor of Italian at the University of Virginia. Her research expertise and teaching focus is on Italian and Mediterranean visual and print cultures in the medieval and early modern eras. Her books include Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance (1992), Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet (2000) and Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing (2011). Her most recent book, Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters (2024) was published this fall by Villa I Tatti -The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Parker co-authored “Belle Greene and Literature,” for the exhibition catalogue for the Morgan Library exhibition, Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy. She has given talks on Belle Greene for Villa I Tatti, the Rare Book School, Book Club of California, Caxton Club, and the Beinecke Library. Notices and podcasts have appeared in Humanities Watch, Fine Books & Collections magazine, and the New Books Network.