“A Brave New World” students visit Boston’s North End
Students in Leslie Eckel’s SF1148 “Brave New Worlds” explored Boston’s North End, stopping at Mike’s Pastry to sample their famous cannoli.
Tag: Leslie Eckel
“Brave New Worlds” Tour of the Museum of Fine Arts
After watching the film Midnight in Paris (2011), which highlights art museums and monuments in and around Paris, including the Musée Rodin and Monet’s garden at Giverny, students in Professor Leslie Eckel’s Honors Seminar for Freshmen “Brave New Worlds” toured the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on October 4, 2016.
Together, the class explored the Art of Europe galleries, concentrating on the works of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Degas, and van Gogh. In Midnight in Paris, director Woody Allen brings many of these famous figures to life as the characters travel through time to meet their literary and cultural idols in Parisian scenes from the 1920s era of the Lost Generation and then – surprisingly – the 1890s of the Belle Époque.
This seminar examines stories of travel, exile, and cosmopolitanism against the backdrop of the city of Boston and encourages students to consider studying abroad during their college experiences at Suffolk.
Student Adrianne Cormier reflects, “Our trip to the MFA has been a new kind of travel experience for me because I was able to see how people perceived the world at different points throughout history. You are able to ‘travel’ to specific places through art, much like literature.”
An imaginative adventure indeed!
submitted by Professor Leslie Eckel, October 2016
Boston – Out and About
We reside in the heart of Boston — one of the most vibrant cities in America. Through the Seminar for Freshmen Program, students are immersed in Boston’s rich historic and cultural life.
The Boston Theatre Scene seminar, taught by prof. Richard Chambers, is different every semester. Why? Because it takes the current Boston theatre season as its syllabus. Students not only study and discuss the scripts of the plays currently performed. They get to see these plays, take backstage tours and meet producers, directors, actors, designers, playwrights and critics.
Film Adaptation course, taught by prof. Monika Raesch, tours the past film locations in Boston.
Prof. Leslie Eckel’s Brave New Worlds class explores what it means to be a perceptive traveler and a citizen of the world. The class motto, supplied by Marcel Proust, can equally apply to world travel and to college life: “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Professor Gerald Richman takes his class Beacon Hill: Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy, to the Boston Black Heritage Trail, the African Meeting House, the Otis House, the Moakley Archive and Institute, the Vilna Shul, the State House, and other important landmarks of this historic neighborhood.