Junette Reyes/Staff Writer
Leon Botstein, conductor and president of Bard College, will present the next lecture in The Center for the Humanities’s Spring 2013 series, “Exile, the Arts and Patronage.” CHUE and the Exile Studies Program have partnered with the lecture series Exile, the Arts and Patronage of Spring 2013. Botstein’s lecture, “The Exiled Intellectual and the American University,” will be held at 7 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 25 in the Graham Center in Room 243.
Botstein will discuss Bard College’s role as patron of the arts, particularly of exiled artists. Botstein was born in Zurich, Switzerland and is the son of Polish refugees. He is described as a “highly acclaimed conductor and impresario,” in addition to being an educator and writer.
“Bard College itself has been a shelter for exiles, especially academic exiles, intellectual exiles, for decades,” said Dr. Michael P. Gillespie, the director of CHUE. Gillespie said the majority of people who come to the events are exiled in Miami or have direct experience with exiles. “What we are doing together is keeping the discussion of exiles in the forefront of people’s consciousness,” said Gillespie.
This is one direction Gillespie is taking CHUE. “Our aim is to foster conversations on the humanities in South Florida,” said Gillespie. “We are here to talk to people from South Florida, who already have a very great sense of the Humanities, to let them know how we feel about certain issues and to learn from them on other issues.”
CHUE was certified in April 2011 and has featured lectures that touch upon issues such as the importance of the humanities as well as opposing views, the business side of medicine in terms of the complications of healthcare costs, the representations of violence in cinema in terms of its usefulness and whether it is unnecessary or art and the racial tensions and changes in cities.
“What we try to do is have a range of lectures that would appeal to different student constituencies here,” said Gillespie. “It has been really gratifying and very enlightening, very illuminating, to me, to learn as much about different perspectives of the humanities as I have and learn it from people who, without the center, I never would have been in contact with. “In many ways, FIU is a traditional university with a traditional student body but it is also, I think, an extremely important resource for the City of Miami, for Miami Dade County and for South Florida,” said Gillespie.
junette.reyes@fiusm.com
