Guest Lectures, 2009-10

For additional talks, see Distinguished Faculty Lectures

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Sarah Garland

Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein and the Language of the Kitchen

Thursday, Sept. 10, 12:30-1:50 pm

CHAT, Gladfelter 10th Floor, Temple University

This talk looks at the way that the writings of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas use food as part of a poetics of intimacy, examining how the currents that run between Stein’s Tender Buttons  (1914) and Toklas’s involved, expensive and often highly impractical recipes in the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954) might be read as a meditation on wider and more complex patterns of war-time desire.

Sarah Garland is Lecturer in the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, U.K.

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Nelson Lichtenstein

Can Wal-Mart Change Its Spots?: What the History of America's Largest Company Tells Us About its Obama-Era Future

Thursday, Sept. 24, 4:00 pm
CHAT, Gladfelter 10th Floor, Temple University

Wal-Mart roared out the rural South to the change the face of American capitalism. Deploying computer-age technology, Reagan-era politics, and Protestant evangelicalism, Sam Walton's discount chain became a byword for cheap goods and low-paid workers. But the era of regulatory laissez-faire, at home and abroad, may now be coming to an end, which puts the Wal-Mart business model in peril and opens the door to the transformation of the entire retail/service sector.

Nelson Lichtenstein is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Sponsored by CHAT, History Dept., American Studies, and CENFAD