Discourse & Process Chat with Eve Kahn
June 8, 2020
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
We have made the difficult decision to cancel this year’s in-person lecture series.
However, we are delighted to offer free online conversations with each of our eight planned authors in a new program we're calling Discourse & Process. Moderated by Julie Scelfo, past Lecture Series presenter and author of The Women Who Made New York, these conversations will provide insight into each author's book and their research and writing process.
This online program will be streamed live via Zoom.
Revolutionary artist Mary Rogers Williams (1857—1907), a baker's 
daughter from Hartford, Connecticut, biked and hiked from the Arctic Circle to Naples, exhibited from Paris to Indianapolis, trained at the Art Students League, chafed against art world rules that favored men, wrote thousands of pages about her travels and work, taught at Smith College for nearly two decades, but sadly ended up almost totally obscure. The book reproduces her unpublished artworks that capture pensive gowned women, Norwegian slopes reflected in icy waters, saw-tooth rooflines on French chateaus, and incense hazes in Italian chapels, and it offers a vivid portrayal of an adventurer, defying her era's expectations.
The journalist and historian Eve M. Kahn, who wrote the weekly Antiques column for The New York Times from 2008 to 2016, contributes regularly to the Times as well as to Apollo and The Magazine Antiques. Based in Manhattan, she helps lead scholarly nonprofit groups including the Art Glass Forum | New York, the Grolier Club, and the Victorian Society’s New York chapter. Her first book, Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907 (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), explores the painter’s life, works, and well-preserved paper trail. Since Kahn found Williams’s archive and artworks in 2012, in a Connecticut boathouse, interest has surged in other undeservedly overlooked women painters of Williams’s era.
Julie Scelfo is a journalist, author and justice advocate who helps people discover the forces that help shape human thinking. Previously, Scelfo was a staff writer for The New York Times, and a Correspondent at Newsweek where she covered breaking news. Scelfo is the author of The Women Who Made New York, a collection of intersectional biographies that reveal how it was women — and not just men — who built one of the world’s greatest cities.
Scelfo earned a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude from Barnard College, Columbia University, and a Master’s degree in Media Ecology from New York University. She lives in New York City, is a frequent public speaker and has made numerous appearances on television, radio and podcasts.
You can purchase books online here to support our authors.
Discourse & Process Chats Schedule
June 8 – Eve Kahn, author of Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams
June 15 – Katherine Smyth, author of All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
June 22 – Donna Rifkind, author of The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood
June 29 – Jenn Shapland, author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir
July 6 – Kerri Greenidge, author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter
July 13 – Kimberly Hamlin, author of Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener
July 20 – Michael Gorra author of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War
July 27 – Nick Basbanes, author of Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Mount is a Massachusetts Cultural Council UP designated organization welcoming participants of all disabilities. Please contact The Mount at 413-551-5100 or by email, info@edithwharton.org, to discuss accommodations needed to participate fully in this event.
Free