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Each event in this year’s Speaker Series will focus on different ways to demonstrate the courage to push the boundaries of our comfort zones. The series challenges us to be present, to embrace new experiences and to interaction with one another in meaningful ways.
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Date: Monday, September 14, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Schuster Theatre
Set in pre-Roman Britain, The Tragedy of King Lear depicts the consequences of King Lear's love-test, in which he divides his power and land according to the praise of his three daughters. CAST, established under the patronage of Dame Judi Dench in 1998, is one of the major international theatre tours of the University of Cambridge. It aims to bring the work of Shakespeare to as wide an audience as possible in the eastern United States. Now in its 27th year, Cambridge University’s largest international tour show has been performing to packed houses and critical acclaim since 1998. Each September, some of Cambridge’s most talented actors, directors, designers and technicians travel across the Atlantic to bring a Shakespeare play to colleges, high schools and professional theatres on the East Coast.
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Date: Tuesday, September 22, 6 p.m.
Location: Waldron 219
Catharina Coenen will read from her memoir Unexploded Ordnance. Coenen came to the United States from Germany as a Fulbright Scholar to attend graduate school. She now teaches biology at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. Her essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, The Christian Science Monitor, Best of the Net, and other literary magazines. Catharina is the recipient of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Flash Nonfiction Prize awarded by The Forge, the Appalachian Review’s Denny Plattner Creative Nonfiction Prize, a Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science as Story Fellowship, and Residencies at Hedgebrook and at Millay Arts. Her essay collection, Unexploded Ordnance: What she felt. What they feared. How they survived. What they saw., is a 2025 Foreword Indies Silver Winner, short-listed for the Saroyan Prize, and also was long-listed for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. It explores how the experiences of Catharina's mother, grandmother, and aunt during the bombings of World War II in Germany shaped her life and reverberate in the present.
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Dates: Select dates Tuesday, September 22 – Thursday, November 19
Location: Various locations
Join the Jefferson Educational Society for their 18th year of serving the Erie community with a new Global Summit lineup of groundbreaking researchers, writers and presenters. The JES invites speakers from around the world to speak on a broad range of globally important issues each year as part of our Global Summit Speaker Series.
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Date: Tuesday, October 20, 7 p.m.
Location: Warner Theatre
Simran Jeet Singh, Ph.D., is the executive director of the religion and society program at the Aspen Institute. He is an Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity with Columbia University and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and a Soros Equality Fellow with the Open Society Foundations. In 202, TIME Magazine recognized him as one of 16 people fighting for a more equal America. Simran also authored the award-winning children’s book Fuaja Singh Keeps Going: The True Story of the Oldest person to Ever Run a Marathon.
