2019 Theme – Community Engagement: Impacts on Communities, Scholars, and Students
Tuesday, August 20, 2019 | Weisberg Applied Engineering Complex (WAEC)
CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST
8:00 am – 8:30 am, WAEC 1203
PLENARY ADDRESS
8:30 am – 9:15 am, WAEC 1203
Presented by Laura Michele Diener
Professor, Department of History
2019 Reynolds Outstanding Teacher Award Winner
Setting the World on Fire: How Medieval Social Justice Can Inspire a Community-Engaged Classroom
Students sign up for medieval history classes because they are fascinated by knights, castles, queens, and Vikings, and who can blame them? With their improbable hygiene, their inexplicable medicine, and their epic battles, medieval people can provide more gruesome delights to modern audiences than a Game of Thrones episode. But any medieval course will emphasize connection as well as alienation. Just like us, medieval people faced an array of large-scale challenges–the wages of war, the ravages of plague, and the incomprehensible inequities of society, and just like us, they aspired to find solutions. In this talk, I discuss how today’s college students can discover blueprints for activism through study of the Middle Ages, considering how figures such as Catherine of Siena and Francis of Assisi provide examples of creative compassion for the marginalized. In doing so, they frequently flouted social conventions and alienated their families, but they also forged new paths in advocacy and individuality. Students come to class seeking dragons, but I hope they also leave inspired, energized, and poised to set the world on fire.
SESSIONS OVERVIEW
9:30 am – 10:45 am: Session 1 Options
11:00 am – 12:15 pm: Session 2 Options
12:15 pm – 1:30 pm: Lunch (on your own) – Map to nearby restaurants, WAEC is on the corner of 3rd Avenue & 17th Street
1:30 pm – 3:30 pm: Session 3 Options
3:45 pm – 5:00 pm: Session 4 Options
The chart below provides an overview of all conference sessions. For optimum use of this chart, please view on a desktop or laptop. Hover over the “Title” to see the full presentation title and over Abstract to see the full abstract, or double click on the card to view detail information for that session.
Abstracts can also be viewed by clicking on links provided within the registration form.