Previous Lectures

The Anarchy: India Between Empires

William Dalrymple was the speaker for the Cockefair Spring 2016 program on April 5th. Dalrymple, Scottish historian and writer, has a broad range of interests, including the history and art of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East, the Muslim world, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jains and early Eastern Christianity.

A well-respected broadcaster and critic, Dalrymple’s publications have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński and the Wolfson Prizes. His travel books, histories and essays have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Dalrymple has had visiting appointments to the faculties at both Princeton and Brown. His writing appears in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the New Statesman, Time magazine, the New Statesman and The New Yorker. The BBC television and radio stations have broadcast several of his series on Indian history.

The topic of his presentation on April 5th was about the transformation of the East India Company and the lessons its brutal reign over India should serve for the present.

Cockefair Lecture Final 3

Access the slides Professor Gerald Wyckoff used in the course, “Knowing the Past to Know the Future” (PDF).

“Six Musical Masterpieces That Made America”

The Cockefair Chair Speakers Committee invited Dr. Anna Harwell Celenza to present the fall lecture on Nov. 19, 2015. Celenza discussed and played portions of the six musical masterpieces that changed American attitudes, and ultimately, American history.

As Professor Celenza demonstrated, music has the power to change culture. She highlighted the music that transformed America: a drinking song that came to symbolize American patriotism; a concert work that altered Americans’ concept of “music;” an orchestral suite and ballad that stirred the flames of the Civil Rights movement; a musical that inadvertently fed negative Hispanic stereotypes; and a pop album that influenced American foreign policy. Thanks to technology, music is always with us, permeating our lives through radio, smart phones, TV commercials, movie scores, elevators and shopping malls. So we tend to think of music as nothing more than a background for our lives. Music really belongs at the forefront.

Celenza is the Thomas E. Caestecker Professor of Music at Georgetown University and the author of several scholarly books, including Music as Cultural Mission: Explorations of Jesuit Practices in Italy and North America (2014) and Hans Christian Andersen and Music: The Nightingale Revealed (2005). Her work has also appeared in The Hopkins Review, Musical Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Music, Notes, The Cambridge Companion to Liszt (2005), Franz Liszt and His World (2006) and The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington (2014).

Celenza also has authored a series of award-winning children’s books with Charlesbridge Publishing: The Farewell Symphony (2000), Pictures at an Exhibition (2003), The Heroic Symphony (2004), Bach’s Goldberg Variations (2005), Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (2006), Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite (2011), Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (2012), Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre (2013) and a 14-part syndicated series on Louis Armstrong for the NC Press Foundation.

She has been featured on nationally syndicated radio and TV programs, including NPR’s “Todd Mundt Show”, BBC’s “Music Matters” and “Proms Broadcasts,” and C-Span’s “Book-TV.” Before coming to Georgetown, Celenza was a writer and guest commentator for Michigan Public Radio and NPR’s “Performance Today.”

Russia, the Romanovs and the Coming of the Great War

Robert Massie, widely regarded as the foremost expert on the Russian royal family with more than 6 million books sold worldwide, spoke on the influences of the Romanovs on the Great War. 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of World War One.

Massie earned a Pulitzer Prize for his biography Peter the Great. From 1959–1962, Massie was on the staff of Newsweek where he was a book reviewer, foreign news writer and U.N. bureau chief. His writing also has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Saturday Review, Life and other publications. Over the years, he has been an historical adviser to, and has made frequent appearances on, a number of national television programs and documentaries.

Unexpected Power of Friendship: Carlin Flora, Aug. 20

Author Carlin Flora discussed “The Unexpected Power of Friendship” at the Cockefair Chair luncheon on August 20, 2013.

Based on her book, Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are, Flora described how friends influence us in almost every way. James H. Fowler, author of Connected, writes that Friendfluence “shines with authenticity and is a must-read for anyone who wants to know more about our ancient desire to connect.” Flora uses her background and knowledge of science, psychology and philosophy to illustrate why we should carefully cultivate our friendships in the same way we nurture other relationships.

Flora was on the staff of Psychology Today magazine for eight years, most recently as Features Editor. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Columbia University School of Journalism and has written for Discover, Glamour, Women’s Health, and Men’s Health, among others. She has appeared on The Today Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and 20/20. Ms. Flora is a frequent contributor to Time Magazine and Psychology Today, and has appeared on Katie Couric and the Today Show. Ms. Flora lives in New York.

Jeffrey Toobin, author and legal analyst

The Cockefair Lecture presented “The U.S. Supreme Court and the Major Issues of our Time: An Evening with Jeffrey Toobin” on April 11, 2012.

A high-profile senior analyst for CNN and staff writer for The New Yorker, Toobin is one of the country’s most esteemed experts on politics, media and the law. With unparalleled journalistic skill, Toobin has provided analysis on some of the most provocative and important events of our time. His Supreme Court history, The Nine, is regarded as the authoritative inside account of modern-day justices and their decisions.

David Owen

David Owen, a Kansas City native, returned November 8, 2012 to talk about environmental woes highlighted in his new book, The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse. Owen is a prolific author and journalist whose quirky views on golf, do-it-yourself home remodeling, fatherhood and American education have won him a large audience. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Golf Digest and Esquire.

Miss Manners will take your questions

Judith Martin (Miss Manners) was the Cockefair summer luncheon speaker on Thursday, August 9, 2012 at Mission Hills Country Club. Her columns, managed by local syndicator Andrews McMeel, are carried by more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad.

PBS host urges world travel

With the fervor of a televangelist and the charisma to match, Rick Steves urged his full-house audience to go out and meet the world’s people face to face.

“Ninety-six percent of the world’s people live elsewhere,” said Steves, the noted travel writer and PBS host, “and they would love to meet you. Open up your mind, be accepting, put aside your opinions and your cultural bias, and you will have incredible experiences.”

Steves, whose public television program, “Rick Steves’ Europe” began its 6th season in October, gave a Carolyn Benton Cockefair lecture Sunday, March 11, 2012 at Unity on the Plaza. The topic of his presentation was “Travel as a Political Act.”

Writer-In-Residence Jim Shepard

Author of six novels and four story collections, Jim Shepard’s work has appeared in Best American Short Stories and in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic and McSweeney’s. He has been a National Book Award finalist and winner of The Story prize.

Shepard conducted a master class with MFA fiction students Sunday, Feb. 26, 2012.

The next evening, he was interviewed by host Angela Elam for New Letters on the Air, followed by a public reading.

Retired diplomat speaks about drones, foreign policy

Retired diplomat and U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright deliverd the talk “Striking Out Abroad: Drones and the Risks of U.S. Foreign Policy” on Monday, Feb. 20. 2012.

Ann Wright spent 29 years in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of colonel before retiring, and then served 16 years in the State Department where she worked in embassies in Nicaragua, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Somalia and elsewhere. In 1997 she received a State Department Award for Heroism for her work evacuating civilians from the civil war in Sierra Leone. She served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Sierra Leone as well as in Afghanistan, an embassy she helped reopen following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Two years later, she resigned from the State Department to protest the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq. She has worked with anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan and was arrested for blocking the entrance at New York Air Guard’s Hancock Field to urge the grounding of drones flown from there for assassinations and bombing runs in central Asia. She is a co-author of the book Dissent: Voices of Conscience.

Does American Culture Have A Future? – Teachout Lecture

The Cockefair Chair Board presented Terry Teachout, former music critic for the Kansas City Star who now writes for the Wall Street Journal. Teachout answered the question “Does American Culture Have A Future?” on October 3, 2011.

Cockefair Annual Lecture August 18

Julián Zugazagoitia, Director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, delivered the Carolyn Benton Cockefair August lecture. Zugazagoitia’s talk took place Thursday, August 18, 2011 at a luncheon at Mission Hills Country Club. He addressed the new Nelson-Atkins, the future of the arts in Kansas City and the collaborative role they must play.

Cockefair Spring Lecture: Power of Social Networks

James Fowler, author of Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and How They Shape our Lives, gave the Cockefair Chair Spring Lecture on Thursday, April 7, 2011.

Writer in Residence Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes, author and winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry, came to UMKC as part of the Writers-in-Residence series, sponsored by the Cockefair Chair committee through arrangements with the Department of English. Since his first poetry collection was published in 1999, Hayes has been widely recognized for his work and has been published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fence, The Kenyon Review and the Harvard Review. A graduate of Coker College and the University of Pittsburgh writing program, Hayes teaches creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University.

While on campus, Hayes offered a master class on Sunday, March 6, 2011.

Engaging the Muslim World

Dr. Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan and a Middle East and South Asia expert, presented “Engaging the Muslim World” on November 15, 2010. In his talk, Dr. Cole put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. Cole has written about Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Iraq, the politics of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Iranian domestic struggles in foreign affairs. His commentary has been heard on PBS’s Lehrer News Hour, the ABC Nightly News, Nightline, the Today Show, Charlie Rose, Anderson Cooper 360, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and many others.

Dinners on the Titanic: A Window Into History

The annual Cockefair luncheon took place on Wednesday, August 11, 2010. It featured culinary historian Andrea Broomfield presenting “The Night the Good Ship Went Down: Three Fateful Dinners Served Aboard the Titanic and What They Tell Us About Class, Power and Nationalism on the Eve of the First World War.”
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