September 20, 2011
Penn State Laureate Linda MIller to speak at Greater Allegheny campus. Linda Patterson Miller, Penn State Humanities Laureate for 2011-12, will be a guest at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 28, in the Ostermayer Room at Penn State Greater Allegheny. Drawing upon her research and writing on American literature and art, particularly of the 20th century, Miller incorporates vintage photographs and primary documents to explore a range of topics.
Miller will be visiting two English classes (Modern American Literature; Science Fiction) to discuss her work on the Lost Generation on the French Riviera. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald and Ada MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, and other literary and artistic luminaries, were all there on the Riviera in the 1920s -- most often at Gerald and Sara Murphy?s Villa America. Miller?s video presentation and discussion illustrates how the lives and art of this ?lost generation? embodied both the inventiveness of the Jazz Age and the tragedies that followed in the wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
The same evening, in a presentation open to the community as well as the campus, Miller will drawn upon some 200 American diarists, illustrating how these spirited storytellers defined an American past that is ever evolving and reinventing itself.
Miller (bachelor of arts, Hope College; master's of art, Ohio State University; doctorate, University of Delaware) is professor of English at Penn State Abington, where she has taught American literature since 1984, earning teaching awards including the Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching (2004). Miller publishes in all areas of American studies, but her specialty is early 20th-century American literature and art. In addition to many published articles, Miller is presently completing another book on the American expatriate artists in France "The Summer of ?26," and her "Reading Hemingway: In Our Time" (Kent State University Press) is forthcoming. Miller has lectured nationally and internationally on modernist art as it relates to American literature and art, and she is a popular speaker and book discussion leader.
This program is free and open to the public. For more information, email [email protected].