Food for Thought – Virtual Lunch Dates

Hosted by David Yetman and Janos Wilder

David Yetman and Janos Wilder

Join us for a series of six virtual lunch dates with James Beard award winning chef Janos Wilder and David Yetman, host of the PBS travel/adventure series In the Americas and The Desert Speaks. Engaging culinary demonstrations plus presentations by UA faculty on topics that define the Sonoran Desert will provide an unforgettable taste of the Southwest. 

Each session will begin with a cooking demonstration featuring a dish created by Janos to accompany the presentation. Participants will receive a copy of the recipe for each session.

Register for the six-session series ($195) or select individual sessions ($36 per session).

Session 1: Fri, Sept 25, noon – 1:30 pm AZ time
Prehistoric Menus are New Again: Ancestral Desert Foods as a Springboard to Our Future
As global food and seed supply chains are being broken and reconfigured after the pandemic to better assure food security, safety and nutrition, it is probable that our food system will undergo rapid transformation. Ironically, fresh understandings of how prehistoric indigenous diets protected communities from drought, disease and heat loads are now being used as a springboard to design new agricultural systems and diets to adapt to a hotter, drier, more uncertain world. As Mexican ethnobotanist Patricia Colunga has prophesized, “Charting our future may take us back to our ancestral roots.” 
Instructor: Gary Nabhan
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Session 2: Friday, Oct 2, noon – 1:30 pm AZ time
Small Town and the Big Screen: The Early History of Tucson in Cinema
This session will provide an overview of the early days of cinema production and exhibition in Tucson, with clips from silent and sound films and a layout of Tucson’s downtown theatre-scape for both English and Spanish language cinema. We’ll trace representations of space, place, and identity in the first 40 years of Tucson onscreen.
Instructor: Jennifer Jenkins
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Session 3: Friday, Oct 9, noon – 1:30 pm AZ time
Mountains and Saguaros: Why the Plants Love the Hills
The Santa Catalina, Rincón, and Tucson Mountains are home to Arizona’s densest population of saguaro cacti and some of the richest Sonoran Desert habitat anywhere.  The mountains around Tucson–the Santa Catalinas, the Rincons, and the Tucson Mountains are part of the saguaro story, and explain why the Tucson area has an archaeological history going back four thousand years.  How these mountains came to be is part of the story of how our homeland came to be.
Instructor: David Yetman
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Session 4: Friday, Nov 6, Noon – 1:30 pm AZ time
From Translator to Traitor: La Malinche as a Feminist Icon in the Borderlands
La Malinche, Malintzin, was a Nahua young woman, who is often impugned for her role as translator and advisor to Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico in 1519.  History has continued to hold her captive, mythologizing her so much that to be called Malinchista is equivalent to being named a traitor to one’s culture.  Why is this cultural icon disparaged and can a feminist critique help us to understand how that debasement continues to imprint the borderlands?
Instructor: Emma Pèrez
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Session 5: Friday, Oct 23, noon – 1:30 pm AZ time
Cactus-studded Coasts: Reconnecting to the Gulf of California
The Gulf of California is the desert’s sea. Tucked between the Baja California peninsula and the mainland of Mexico, the Gulf is a world of contrasts between cactus studded coasts and a marine realm teaming with life. It is a place of cultural diversity, especially as the homeland of the Comcaac (Seri People), and a zone where remarkable geologic forces have created a landscape mirrored nowhere else. In this lecture Ben Wilder will share what makes the Gulf of California one of the most striking desert regions of the world.
Instructor: Ben Wilder
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Session 6: Friday, Oct 30, noon – 1:30 pm AZ time
Documenting the Dead: Forensics, Mourning, and Testimony along the US-Mexico Border
Since the year 2000, an unprecedented number of people have died while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. While exact numbers for the entire border are unknown, in Arizona alone more than 3,200 cases of human remains have been discovered along migrant trails in the desert during this time period. This talk will discuss the work of forensic experts, activists, families, and others to document these deaths and remember the victims. This local work has been innovative and unique, but also draws inspiration and direction from past movements to name and remember lives lost to violence. In this talk, Dr. Reineke will consider the similarities and differences between historic social movements to remember the dead after atrocity, including the role of forensic science, and the current work done in the borderlands to document and mourn the lives lost.
Instructor: Robin Reineke
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Proceeds from this series will support the work being done by Borderlands Restoration Network to provide medical supplies and greatly needed relief to the Seri indigenous people in Sonora in their struggle with Covid-19.

 

Co-sponsored by the University of Arizona
Southwest Center and the Desert
Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill.

Southwest Center

 


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The High Renaissance in Italy

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rafael and Titian innovated, explored, and transformed visual imagery, elevated the status of the artist, and created visual works that were equally beautiful and powerful. Yet, behind the images of this perfect world lay a world that was anything but. No matter what upheaval was happening in the world, the High Renaissance artists presented an idyllic and perfect world. In six lectures plus one interactive Zoom discussion, learn more about these four artists in their historical, social, and experiential context and their creation of monumental works of art.

Interactive Zoom discussion: Thursday, Nov 12, 10:00am AZ time


Instructor: Kevin Justus

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Writing Through the Pandemic

Ways to Document Difficult Subjects

How do writers tell the stories of life in the time of the pandemic? This workshop will focus on ways to document and explore what we are experiencing, methods for writing about difficult subjects, meanings of isolation and solitude for writers, and strategies for probing complex material and making art in chaotic times. All genres are welcome in this space. Through readings, writing exercises, and discussions, we will create a community for writing our way through the pandemic.

Enrollment Limited


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In Search of the First Americans

Exploring Paleoindian Archaeology in North America

Discover the archaeology of Paleoindians in North America. Paleoindians are the first people in North America, and they entered the region by at least 14,000 years ago. Review the history of Paleoindian research in North America, to develop a foundation for understanding how the discipline has evolved with new methods and discoveries. Explore archaeological discoveries that address the question of when, where, and how people first migrated to North America. Examine at the different Paleoindian chronologies and cultures found in the archaeological record. Students will become familiar with the debates and current research concerning the first Americans and will develop an understanding of the regional variations that develop in the North American archaeological record between 14,000 to 9,000 years ago.

Optional Zoom Orientation: Oct 1, 10:00-10:30am


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Broadway, Up with A Twist!

It’s happy hour with Richard Hanson and you’re invited!

Each week sit back, relax and enjoy a cocktail with the composers of the Great American Songbook: George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Harold Arlen, and Frank Loesser. The way we party may have changed, but the music of the great tunesmiths of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley continue to be our comfort food. “They Can’t Take That Away From Me!” So, get out that cocktail shaker and R.S.V.P to reserve your table at Chez Hanson! In the words of Cole Porter, Broadway, Up with A Twist! will be De-Lovely

Session 1: It’s De-Lovely! Martinis with Cole Porter
Session 2: Blue Skies! Old Fashioneds with Irving Berlin
Session 3: Get Happy! French 75s with Harold Arlen
Session 4: My Funny Valentine! Gimlets w/ Rodgers & Hart
Session 5: Heart & Soul! Daquiris with Frank Loesser
Session 6: ‘S Wonderful! Manhattans with George and Ira Gerswhin


Instructor: Richard T. Hanson

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Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt

The Giants of Romantic Piano Music

Join pianist Alex Tentser for an exploration of the Golden Age of piano literature through the music of Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, and Liszt. In this series combining lectures with sparkling piano performances by the instructor, you’ll learn about the foundation of modern piano technique, the poetic, philosophical and spiritual influences of the composers, the origins of forms such as Impromptus, Preludes, Nocturnes and Ballades and more.


Instructor: Alexander Tentser

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Black Poetry Lives: Contemporary Matters

Charles Alexander

Since early in America’s poetry, black poets have been active and crucial voices in the literary scene. Yet they have also been, for most of the nation’s history, underappreciated, sometimes even unseen. When Gwendolyn Brooks won the first Pulitzer Prize given to a black poet in 1955, it was a kind of culmination of a movement that included Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance poets, and was at a time when some of these poets found a freeer and more appreciative home outside the USA. Since the late 1960s we have seen a consistent renewal and flow of black poetry, influenced by American culture, Afro-Caribbean themes and rhythms, the history of black people in the Americas, and diasporic histories from Africa. In recent years black poetry has both led and chronicled aspects of our moment, fraught in all its difficulty. Black lives certainly matter, and some of the matter they express has taken place in some of the most brilliant and innovative poetry of our time.

The course will combine presentation of recent poetry by black writers, including readings by the poets, and readings of their work; brief lectures; and time for discussion.  Poets we will witness include major prize winners and underground voices, page explorers and vocal performers, poets ranging in age from 30 to 70. They are Claudia Rankine, Will Alexander, Erica Hunt, Tracie Morris, Tyehimba Jess, and giovanni singleton.


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