Lifelong Learning at Canisius

Spring 2020 Class Listings

Developing Skills for Success: A Course for Women

Schedule: Wednesday 1:00-2:30PM January 22- February 26, Health Science, Room 215 *In the event of a school closure, class will be extended 1 week
Professor: Dr. Judy Larkin, larkin@canisius.edu, Professor Emeritus, Psychology
Class Size: Maximum 10 students

Course Description: 
This is a course for women who want to build their self-confidence, feel more control over their lives, and develop skills for success.  It will be taught primarily through group discussion based on our reading and application of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  A major focus of the course is on self-discovery: our uniqueness, values, strengths, and goals – and development of interpersonal communication skills for success.  The goals of the course are for women to develop a better understanding of themselves and others, and to achieve their goals through improving their interactions with others in personal, social, and organizational settings.

Professor Bio:
“Success comes from persistence” -- That’s the message Dr. Larkin tells her students. After graduating from Vassar College, she spent 10 years, including marriage and 3 children, two separate year-long experiences in the Philippines, and numerous long distance commutes from Buffalo to Columbia University before she obtained her PhD in Psychology and began her teaching career at Canisius College.

Dr. Larkin has taught Introduction to Psychology to generations of students, plus courses and workshops in industrial/organizational psychology, leadership and motivation, and career decision-making. She has done research and written articles applying psychology to issues in business and education. Her current research and writing focuses on understanding what holds women back from stepping into the spotlight and striving for success.

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Jesus: From Messiah to God

Schedule: Thursday, 1:00-2:30 p.m., January 30, February 6, 13, 20, 27, and March 5
Professors: Dr. Rebecca Krawiec, Professor and Chair, Department of Religious Studies and Theology and Dr. Matthew Mitchell, Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies and Theology

Course Description: For Christians Jesus is the Messiah (or Christ), a savior, the Son of God who is fully God. How did these views and beliefs develop in the first centuries of Christianity? This course examines the Jewish beliefs about Messiahs and Saviors leading to the views of Jesus in the four Gospels of the New Testament. It then looks at the social implications of teaching a divine Jesus versus traditional Roman notions of the human and divine. It concludes with the Council of Nicea and the controversies surrounding a fully divine Son of God.

Professor Bio: Dr. Krawiec received her undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1990 and her PhD in religious studies from Yale University in 1996. She is the author of Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery: Female Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2002), which examines the lives of women in a monastery under a male leader, Shenoute. More recently, Krawiec published articles on issues of literacy and social memory in a range of forms of monasticism associated with Egypt in the fourth and fifth centuries. She is chair of the religious studies and theology Department at Canisius College. She specializes in courses on the New Testament and early Christian history, as well as women and religion more generally.

Dr. Mitchell holds a PhD from Temple University’s Department of Religion. His PhD focus was in Biblical Studies and Greco-Roman Rhetoric. Dr. Mitchell loves the Ancient Mediterranean world (Greece, Rome, Egypt, Syria, Israel, and Palestine): its history, religions, cultures, and most of all its literature. He has brought this enthusiasm and passion for antiquity to undergraduate classes in programs as varied as Honors, Jewish Studies, Classics, and Religious Studies. He has published internationally in many of the most highly respected scholarly journals in the world, and has authored articles across the fields of New Testament, Hebrew Bible, Patristics, and Popular Culture, as well as one scholarly monograph.

Seminar Topics

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Climate Justice and Community Engagement: Addressing the Climate Crisis

Schedule: Wednesdays, 6pm - 7:30pm, March 11, (no 18 spring break), 25, and April 1, April 8, April 22
Professor: Dr. Erin E. Robinson

Course Description: This course will explore climate justice and community engagement through a grassroots perspective. Course material will cover the social and historical trajectory of climate change including the social construction of science, denial movements, impacts on refugee and migration patterns, and strategies and tactics for engagement at the local, regional, national, and global scale; as well as a review of the UN Sustainability Goals and practices and the classification of a climate in crisis.

Instructor Bio: Erin E. Robinson is Chair and Professor of Sociology at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where she also directs the program in Environmental Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University at Buffalo where she researched social movement mobilization patterns in communities facing environmental hazards. Her research involves ethnographic field methods and the use of frame analysis as both a research tool and mode of analysis in social movement research. Her primary research interests are environmental sociology, community mobilization, grassroots networking and collaboration, and social construction of risk. Her first book, Community Mobilization or Environmental Problems: How a Grassroots organization Forms and Works, addresses these interests. Her current work surrounds community capacity to organize around issues of air pollution and environmental justice, investigating the relationship between community mobilization and individual empowerment through narratives and storytelling.

Instructor Email: robinso5@canisius.edu
Instructor Phone Number: 716-888-2748

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Medieval Mystics: Women of Faith, Love and Writing

Schedule: Tuesday 9:30 AM- 11 AM February 4- March 17
Professor: Johanna Fisher, Professor of English/ Women Studies, fisherj@canisius.edu, 716-888-2650

Course Description: This course explores four medieval women through the sacred and secular work they created. Hildegard von Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Christine de Pizon and St. Clare of Assisi all left an incredible body of work that focused on spiritual matters, health, music, fine arts and history. Through our engagement with these important artifacts we will come to appreciate their sense of the divine, love [both spiritual and erotic] , and their challenge to the limitations of their gender and the physical spaces they occupied. These women challenged the society of their day that defined limited roles for women in a patriarchal world that often sanctioned those women who dared to redefine what it meant to be a person and a woman. The course is taught as a seminar. 

Professor Bio: Professor Johanna Fisher is an adjunct professor in the English and Modern Languages Dept. Her work is in Medieval Literature with an emphasis on the representations of women in medieval texts. She is also co-Director of the Women and Gender Studies Program. 

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Arthur: The Once and Future King

Schedule: Thursday, 5:30-7:00 p.m., March 26, April 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30
Professor: Dr. Kara Maloney, Adjunct Professor, Department of English

Course Description: King Arthur has starred in numerous films, inspired multiple epics and romances, and sits at the center of more conspiracy theories than most figures in history. Dubbed “The Once and Future King” by Thomas Malory in the 15th century, King Arthur has inspired our imaginations for over a millennium. This six-session course will look at the mythical King Arthur from his mysterious origins to his current state of popularity and examine his impact on modern society. We will consider the earliest examples of King Arthur, his immense popularity in the Middle Ages, and why his place in history doesn’t actually matter. With the theme of “Once and Future King,” we will look at his once and our future. Course readings will include medieval Arthurian chronicle and romance, modern fictional adaptation, as well as a viewing of Monty Python’s the Holy Grail.

Professor Bio: Dr. Maloney earned her PhD in Medieval Literature from Binghamton University in 2015. She focuses on King Arthur and medieval romance across the British Isles and France. When she isn’t teaching First Year Writing, she enjoys traveling with her family, and reading whatever she can get her hands on. One of her favorite pastimes is bringing history into her daughter's elementary school classroom.

Lecture Topics

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Three American Geniuses: Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Frank Lloyd Wright

Schedule: Wednesdays, 1-2:30, beginning Jan. 22 and going through Feb. 26
Professor: Bob Butler, Professor Emeritus

Course Description: An exploration of how these self educated men rebelled against conventional concepts of art and produced revolutions in fiction , poetry , and architecture . We will examine how each figure produced distinctively American forms of expression centered in uniquely American values grounded in radical forms of freedom and independence . Important biographical parallels will be studied closely as well as the cultural times in which they lived.

Instructor Bio: Dr. Robert Butler is an Emeritus professor at Canisius College where he has taught a wide range of courses in English , American , and African American literatures . He has published 7 books and 45 articles on a broad range of writers , including Theodore Dreiser , John Dos Passos ,Richard Wright , Ralph Ellison , Toni Morrison ,Alice Walker , Percival Everett , and Colson Whitehead . His teaching awards include the Kenneth Koessler Distinquished Faculty Award , The Fr. Thomas award for outstanding teaching , and the College Honors Professor of the Year.

Instructor Email: butlerr@canisius.edu

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