Registration
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Please return your completed registration form
to: Conference Operations and Events
Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA 50112.
Or e-mail your registration information to:
calendar@grinnell.edu
ACES
June 11, 18
Or call 641-269-3178 to register via phone
Adult Community
Exploration Series
The History of Reading
Ed Cohn
Name:
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Name:
June 25
Address:
Phone:
Severe Weather and You
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Jeff Johnson
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Email:
July 9, 16
The Dustbowl
Please check the box(es) next to the classes you
plan to attend.
Mike Guenther
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June 11, 18
The History of Reading
Ed Cohn
July 23, 30
A Time to be Born and a
Time to Die: Aging and
Social Justice
June 25
Severe Weather and You
Jeff Johnson
Karla Erickson
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 July 9, 16
The Dustbowl
Mike Guenther
 July 23, 30
A Time to be Born and a Time to Die:
Aging and Social Justice
Karla Erickson
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ACES
During the summer of 2014, the
Community Education Council, in
conjunction with Grinnell College, will
offer four courses on various subjects to
adults in the community. The classes will
be held on Wednesday mornings from 10
to 11:30 a.m. in the Caulkins Room in
the Drake Community Library, 930 Park
Street. Refreshments will be served. Each
course consists of two sessions.
Adult Community Exploration Series
Thanks to the ACES Committee of the Community
Education Council for their diligent work in
putting the 2014 program together.
George Britton
Joanne Bunge
George Drake
Art Heimann
Jim Kottmeier
Classes are free. Please register so instructors
can anticipate class size by e-mailing
calendar@grinnell.edu, returning the attached
form, or by calling Conference Operations and
Events at Grinnell College, 641-269-3178.
Sponsored by:
Community Education Council and
June 11, 18
The History of Reading
Ed Cohn
Ever since the invention of writing 6,000 years ago,
the issue of reading has sparked emotional debates
about the nature of knowledge, culture, and identity.
Plato famously worried that the rise of reading would
“implant forgetfulness in [people’s] souls” by
threatening the art of memory; early modern scholars
complained that the rise of the printing press had led
to an explosion of information that made much of the
world’s knowledge inaccessible; in the present day,
critics worry that children spend too much time
reading Harry Potter and not enough time reading the
classics of English literature. In this class, we will
investigate the long and complicated history of
reading by looking at a series of key moments in
world history. How did the transition from an oral
culture to a literate culture change people’s
consciousness and worldview? Did the rise of the
printing press lead to an age of reason and
enlightenment, or to a period of religious intolerance
and sectarian warfare? How did 19th-century British
workers respond when they first encountered the
classics of world literature? What can we learn about
American life by tracing changes in the bestseller
lists? And what does the history of reading tell us
about the future of books? These are just a few of the
questions we will pursue as we investigate the
evolving role of books and reading in the history of
world culture.
Ed Cohn, Assistant Professor of History, completed
his Ph.D. in Russian history at the University of
Chicago. A 1999 graduate of Swarthmore College, he
worked for a year as a journalist before entering
graduate school and specializes in the social and
political history of the Soviet Union in the decades
after World War II.
Professor Cohn's publications include the article "Sex
and the Married Communist: Family Troubles, Marital
Infidelity, and Party Discipline in the Postwar USSR,
1945-1964." He is now working on two main research
projects. First, he is revising his doctoral dissertation
on expulsion and censure in the USSR's postwar
Communist Party for publication as a monograph.
Second, he is beginning a new project on the efforts of
the KGB to fight political dissent in the Baltic states
through the use of preemptive warnings between 1953
and 1991.
June 25
Severe Weather and You
Jeff Johnson
Our severe weather safety talk describes the several
severe weather threats which impact Iowa and the
recommended safety precautions people should take
to minimize their risk of personal injury or death.
We describe various ways to get a weather warning
and the difference between a watch and a warning
for the various weather conditions we face regularly
here in Iowa.
Jeff Johnson, is the Warning and Coordination
Meteorologist for the National Weather Service in
Des Moines, IA. Born and raised in Colorado, Jeff
gained an appreciation and respect for weather at an
early age. As a young teenager, Jeff lived through
the Thompson Canyon Flood of 1976 where over
140 people died in the most devastating flash flood
in Colorado history. Jeff graduated from the
University of Northern Colorado in 1986 with a
degree in meteorology.
After college, Mr. Johnson started his National
Weather Service career in Jackson, Kentucky in
1987. In 1989 he was transferred to the Omaha,
Nebraska office and then to the Des Moines, Iowa
office in 1992 as a Senior Forecaster. In 1994, Jeff
started his current job as Warning Coordination
Meteorologist in the Des Moines, Iowa National
Weather Service office. While at the National
Weather Service, Des Moines, Jeff has experienced
the 1993 and 2008 major floods, numerous tornado
events including the Parkersburg EF5 tornado, and
too many winter storms to mention. Recently, Jeff
has served as the Acting Meteorologist in Charge at
the Des Moines office since the summer of 2013.
July 9, 16
The Dustbowl
Mike Guenther
The Dustbowl of the 1930s was arguably the worst
environmental crisis in American history. In this
course, we will explore how scientists,
policymakers, public intellectuals, farmers, artists,
and writers have tried to make sense of these
disasters. The first session will look at how
contemporaries linked the dust storms to larger
debates over the economic and moral sustainability
of the nation. The “dirty thirties”, as they were
dubbed, was a time of reflection and debate when
many Americans questioned their faith in faith in
capitalism, individualism, technological progress,
and a providential nature whose resources were
inexhaustible. We will explore how these topics
informed not only the political and policy responses
that came out of Washington, but also how different
communities grappled with these issues in music,
popular literature, murals, photographs, and film.
The second session of the course explores the
continuing legacy of the Dustbowl, in particular,
how our modern understanding of these dust storms
has changed markedly over time as new research and
concerns have colored the way we understand both
the causes and ultimate lessons of the Dustbowl.
Mike Guenther, Assistant Professor of History,
received his B.A. from the University of Virginia,
and his M.A. and Ph.D from Northwestern
University. His research examines the social and
political dimensions of science in the eighteenthcentury British Empire. His broader fields of interest
include environmental history, science and
technology studies, print culture, and the age
of Enlightenment. He is also seeking to close the gap
between his avid interest in gardening and the
meager results he seems to encounter each summer.
His latest publication, Tapping Nature's Bounty:
Science and Sugar Maples in the Age of
Improvement, was published in 2012.
July 23, 30
A Time to be Born and a Time to Die: Aging
and Social Justice
Karla Erickson
Understandings of the body, risk, healing and the
very experience of health and illness are shaped by
the social, cultural, political and historical contexts
in which people live. In this course we will examine
the spectacular diversity that exists in how illnesses
are experienced and interpreted across cultures. We
will explore how the spread of Western biomedicine
has impacted local perceptions of health and
practices of healing and will examine how western
medicine itself is a cultural system. Particular
attention will be paid to health-provider/patient
interactions and the potential misunderstandings and
barriers to communication that can arise when both
parties work from different systems of meaning.
Karla Erickson, Associate Professor of Sociology,
is a feminist ethnographer of labor. She studies
interaction and community in market exchanges. Her
first book, The Hungry Cowboy, was about a Cheerslike restaurant, and her second single-authored
book How We Die Now studies how residents and
workers in a Midwestern elder community manage the
challenges of longer lives and slower deaths. She
serves on the board of Grinnell Regional Medical
Center and Grinnell Community Day Care and
Preschool. Professor Erickson received her Ph.D. in
the Department of American with a minor in Feminist
Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2004, her
M.A. in Liberal Studies from Hamline University in
1998 and her B.A. in English and Women's Studies at
Illinois Wesleyan in 1995.