Shared Departures: Italy in Focus

Join us for a co-sponsored Travel Talk, featuring faculty from Tufts University, Harvard University, and Brown University.

We invite you to our virtual classroom where you’ll have the opportunity to explore, learn, and meet new friends from the comfort of your home. In the spirit of travel, let’s head to Italy.

Please note, your confirmation email will come from Harvard Alumni Travels. Space is limited and on a first come, first serve basis!

This lecture will be recorded and livestreamed to YouTube.

Speaker Info:

Lewis Edgers,

Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University

Lewis Edgers is Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University. A professional engineer and Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Professor Edgers is especially interested in the relationship between people and their environment. His most recent research has focused on green energy within a context of global climate change, energy sustainability and infrastructure resilience. On Italy departures he uses examples by Brunelleschi, Galileo and Leonardo Da Vinci to examine the relationship between art, science and engineering from classical times through the Italian renaissance. Prof. Edgers also addresses the challenges of flooding and ground subsidence in Venice.

Sue Weaver Schopf,

Distinguished Service Lecturer in Extension at Harvard University

Sue Weaver Schopf is Distinguished Service Lecturer in Extension at Harvard University. She recently retired from the position of Associate Dean and Director of the Master of Liberal Arts Program at the Harvard Extension School, where she also served for nearly 30 years as research advisor in the humanities. A recipient of multiple fellowships and teaching awards, Schopf teaches writing-intensive literature courses on topics as far ranging as English romantic poetry, Victorian poetry, nonfictional prose, modern poetry, literary criticism and theory, Western drama, Milton and Paradise Lost, Irish literature, Orientalism in British literature and visual culture.

Massimo Riva,

Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University

Educated in Italy (M.A. University of Florence, 1981) and the United States (PHD, Rutgers University, 1986), he has published on a wide range of topics, from Boccaccio's Decameron to national identity in modern Italian culture and the future of literature in the digital age. His digital monograph, Italian Shadows. A Curious History of Virtual Reality, part of the Brown Digital Publications initiative, is forthcoming with Stanford U.P. In 2015, he was nominated Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence and honored with the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for his contribution to the dissemination of Italian culture in North America. Among his awards, three major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Society, in support of various digital projects included in the Virtual Humanities Lab that he directs.