Spring 2023 guest speakers
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January 25th, 2023 | 6:00pm | East building Room 1025| Richard Frances Dr. Richard J. Frances is a New York-based psychiatrist specialising in addiction/substance abuse, anxiety disorders, mood disorders and psychopharmacology. Previously a clinical professor of Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine and an adjunct professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Dr. Frances received his medical degree from the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and has been in practice for over 50 years. He is the founding president of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. Dr. Frances also holds the position of Emeritus President and Medical Director of Silver Hill Hospital. *Photo |
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February 8th, 2023 |Online/Zoom | Iris Smyles Iris Smyles is an American novelist, essayist, and columnist. Smyles is the author of the novels Iris Has Free Time (which Forbes called “an instant classic… a smart, funny, wise, and sometimes heartbreaking book about a slowly fizzling love affair with youth,”), Dating Tips for the Unemployed (a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor), and, most recently, Droll Tales. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, Paris Review Daily, BOMB, The Baffler, and Best American Travel Writing among other publications, and she has written columns for Splice Today and The East Hampton Star. Email Twcce@hunter.cuny.edu to attend *Photo |
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March 22nd 2023 | Virtual on Zoom | Frederic Tuten Frederic Tuten grew up in the Bronx. He has written about art, literature and film in ArtForum, The New York Times, Vogue; was an actor in an Alain Resnais movie; taught with Paul Bowles in Morocco; co-wrote the cult-classic Possession, and along the way, earned three Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry award, a PhD in American literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and founded the Creative Writing department at City College.He is the author of five novels (The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; Tintin in the New World; Tallien: A Brief Romance; Van Gogh’s Bad Café; The Green Hour), a memoir (My Young Life), two books of short stories; Self Portraits: Fictions and The Bar at Twilight; and on On a Terrace in Tangier, a book of drawings and stories. *Photo
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April 2023 | TBD | TBD| Daphne Merkin Daphne Merkin is an American novelist, essayist and literary critic. Graduate of Barnard and Columbia, Merkin began as a book and movie critic for a variety of magazines including Commentary. Her forays into biography became well-known for their verity while her personal essays offered a glimpse into the complexities of subjects like depression and growing up rich. Her latest novel, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love came out in July 2020. *Photo |
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May 24th, 2023 | TBD | TBD| Karen Lefrak Karen LeFrak launched her career as a composer around the same time she began introducing children to the worlds of music, dance, and dogs in her four highly-acclaimed children’s books published by Bloomsbury, Random House, and Crown Books – Jake the Philharmonic Dog, Jake the Ballet Dog, Best in Show, and Sleepover at the Museum.
Karen’s music has been streamed over 20 million times since her first recording release in March 2021. Her music has been heard live at such leading venues as NYC’s Lincoln Center, the fabled Mariinsky Theatre, Festival Napa Valley, and the White House – at an International Women’s Day Luncheon. Her compositions have been commissioned and performed worldwide, including by the New York Philharmonic; Beijing Music Festival; American Ballet Theatre; the Mariinsky, Joffrey, and San Francisco Ballets; and the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, among many others.
In 2022/23 she celebrates a performance of the multimedia Sleepover at the Museum with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. and the world premiere of her Summer Piano Concerto and a movement of her guitar concerto with the Miami Symphony Orchestra, among other performances. *Photo by David Burnett |
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September 20th, 2023 | TBD | TBD| Sabrina Gonzalez Paterski Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is a Cuban-American physicist, who completed her undergraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is currently pursuing her Ph.D degree in high energy physics at Harvard University, under Andrew Strominger. She was given academic freedom when in 2014 her and her colleagues discovered the “spin memory effect”, which may be able to detect/verify the net of effects of gravitational waves. Under that academic freedom, Gonzalez Pasterski also published her findings of the Pasterski-Strominger-Zhiboedov Triangle in Electromagnetic Memory in a 2015 individual paper. Stephen Hawking later cited her paper in 2016, while George Takei recognized her work on social media. *Photo |