New round of Meet the Author talks continues on Feb. 8

Released on January 11, 2006
Contact: nealon@brandeis.edu

The Meet the Author series has hosted 19 authors since it was created two years ago this February, among them two Pulitzer Prize winners with Brandeis connections: David Hackett Fischer, University Professor and Earl Warren Professor of History; and Thomas Friedman, ’75, author of several best-selling, award-winning books and renowned columnist for the New York Times.

Associate Politics Professor Jytte Klausen on Jan. 24 talked about her important new book, The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe.

Here are the other three events scheduled for this spring '06 semester, along with brief descriptions of the books being featured. Each of the events is at 4 p.m. in the Shapiro Campus Center atrium. They are free and open to the public. Refreshments, too.

Feb. 8
Dawn Skorczewski
Teaching One Moment at a Time: Disruption and Repair in the Classroom. This book, says the University of Massachusetts Press, explores the “delicate negotiation” between teacher and student that determines success or failure in writing courses. Skorczewski’s focus is on the role of the teacher in shaping this classroom dynamic, particularly the ways in which theoretical presuppositions and personal expectations influence the responses elicited from students. Skorczewski is director of University writing and associate professor of English at Brandeis.

March 28
Evelyn Murphy
Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men – And What to Do About it (with E.J. Graff).
According to Simon & Schuster, this former Massachusetts lieutenant governor and member of the Women Studies Research Center at Brandeis exposes the discrepancy between what women and men earn, “and how it affects us all.” The book reveals that the wage gap is not going away on its own. And it explains how to close the wage gap.

April 4
Marc Brettler
How to Read the Bible.
In its description of this book, the Jewish Publication Society of America (the publisher) calls Brettler a master Bible scholar and teacher. “Marc Brettler argues that today's contemporary readers can only understand the ancient Hebrew Scripture by knowing more about the culture that produced it. And so Brettler unpacks the literary conventions, ideological assumptions, and historical conditions that inform the biblical text and demonstrates how modern critical scholarship and archaeological discoveries shed light on this fascinating and complex literature.

Brettler surveys representative biblical texts from different genres to illustrate how modern scholars have taught us to "read" these texts. Using the "historical-critical method" long popular in academia, he guides us in reading the Bible as it was read in the biblical period, independent of later religious norms and interpretive traditions. Understanding the Bible this way lets us appreciate it as an interesting text that speaks in multiple voices on profound issues.”
Brettler is chairman of the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis and Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies.