"The Gates Unbarred"


Book Description

The Gates Unbarred traces the evolution of University Extension at Harvard from the Lyceum movement in Boston to its creation by the newly appointed president A. Lawrence Lowell in 1910. For a century University Extension has provided community access to Harvard, including the opportunity for women and men to earn a degree. In its storied history, University Extension played a pioneering role in American continuing higher education: initiating educational radio courses with Harvard professors in the late 1940s, followed by collegiate television courses for credit in the 1950s, and more recently Harvard College courses available online. In the 1960s a two-year curriculum was prepared for the U.S. nuclear navy ("Polaris University"), and in the early 1970s Extension responded to community needs by reaching out to Cambridge and Roxbury with special applied programs. This history is not only about special programs but also about remarkable people, from the distinguished members of the Harvard faculty who taught evenings in Harvard Yard to the singular students who earned degrees, ranging from the youngest ALB at age eighteen, to the oldest ALB and ALM recipients, both aged eighty-nine--and both records at Harvard University.




Opened Ground


Book Description

As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney's voice is like no other--"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker)--and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney's Nobel Lecture: "Crediting Poetry."




Media U


Book Description

Are homecoming games and freshman composition, Twitter feeds and scholarly monographs really mortal enemies? Media U presents a provocative rethinking of the development of American higher education centered on the insight that universities are media institutions. Tracing over a century of media history and the academy, Mark Garrett Cooper and John Marx argue that the fundamental goal of the American research university has been to cultivate audiences and convince them of its value. Media U shows how universities have appropriated new media technologies to convey their message about higher education, the aims of research, and campus life. The need to create an audience stamps each of the university’s steadily proliferating disciplines, shapes its structure, and determines its division of labor. Cooper and Marx examine how the research university has sought to inform publics and convince them of its value to American society, from the rise of football and Great Books programs in the early twentieth century through a midcentury communications complex linking big science, New Criticism, and design, from the co-option of 1960s student activist media through the early-twenty-first-century reception of MOOCs and the latest promises of technological disruption. The book considers the ways in which universities have used media platforms to reconcile national commitments to equal opportunity with corporate capitalism as well as the vexed relationship of democracy and hierarchy. By exploring how media engagement brought the American university into being and continues to shape academic labor, Media U presents essential questions and resources for reimagining the university and confronting its future.
















Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy XXX


Book Description

This volume of original articles covers diverse aspects of ancient philosophy, including the work of Plato, Aristotle, and the stoics.




Baghdad and Isfahan


Book Description

Renowned as great centres of learning, the cities of Baghdad and Isfahan were at the heart of the Islamic civilization as rich capital cities and centres of intellectual thought. Their distinct cultural voices inspired a unique historical dialogue, which finds new expression in Baghdad and Isfahan, the story of how knowledge was transmitted and transformed within Islamic lands, and then spread across Europe. Capturing the history of Baghdad and Isfahan from 750 to 1750, Elaheh Kheirandish draws on the voices of court astronomers, mathematicians, scientists, mystics, jurists, statesmen and Arabic and Persian translators and scholars to document the extensive and lasting contribution of sciences from Islamic lands to the history of science. Kheirandish bases her narrative on a unique medieval manuscript and other historical sources and the result is more than a thousand-year 'tale of two cities' – it is a city by city, and century by century, look at what it took to change the world. In a feat of travelogue and time travel, this unique book creates parallel stories with modern and historical characters, crossing cities worldwide, and capturing changes through time. Interweaving multiple narratives, histories, and futures, she charts the possible paths – formalized and serendipitous, lost and recovered – by which knowledge itself is translated and transmitted across time and cultures.




Seamus Heaney and Society


Book Description

In the course of Seamus Heaney's career he assumed roles across education, journalism, and broadcasting, as well as poetry. Seamus Heaney and Society presents a comprehensive and dynamic new engagement with one of the most celebrated poets of the modern period, appreciating how his work as a poet was shaped by his work as a teacher, lecturer, critic, and public figure. Seamus Heaney and Society draws on a range of archival material in order to revive the network of associations within which Heaney's work was written, published, and circulated. Mindful of the various spheres of his career, it assesses his achievements and status in Ireland, Britain, and the United States through newspapers, magazines, radio and television programmes, and manuscript drafts of key writings now held in the National Library of Ireland. Through asserting the significance of the cultural, institutional, and historical circumstances of Heaney's writing life it offers a re-examination of the writer in public, the social lives of the work of art, and the questions of obligations and responsibility which Heaney confronted throughout his career. Throughout, Seamus Heaney and Society addresses the nature and singularity of poetry and the ways in which these qualities are asserted, challenged, and sustained in Heaney's work. It demonstrates that despite the cultural standing and the scholarship that already surrounds his writing there is still a great deal to learn about, and to learn from, Seamus Heaney.