As part of the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar program, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, home of the Zeta Chapter of PBK, will host Diana Taylor, author and New York University professor, on Feb. 18-19. Taylor will give a public lecture, “The Passion of Politics,” starting at 8 p.m. in Cole Cinema of the Campus Center on Monday, Feb. 18. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Taylor is university professor and professor of performance studies and Spanish at NYU, as well as founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. She has edited over a dozen books and is the author of award-winning works, including “Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America”; “Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War'”; and, most recently, “The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas.” Taylor lectures extensively around the world and was also a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005.
Each year, the Visiting Scholar Program hosts distinguished scholars who visit colleges and universities with chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. They spend two days on each campus, meeting informally with students and faculty members, taking part in classroom discussions, and giving public lectures. The purpose of the program is to contribute to the intellectual life of the institution by making possible an exchange of ideas between the Visiting Scholars and the resident faculty and students.
Founded in 1776, Phi Beta Kappa is the nation’s oldest academic honor society, with chapters at 280 institutions and more than half million members throughout the country. Its mission is to champion education in the liberal arts and sciences, to recognize academic excellence, and to foster freedom of thought and expression.