Tearrance A. Chisholm visits the slave cemetery during his stay at Sweet Briar.

Endstation Theatre Company and Sweet Briar College will host a reading of “In Sweet Remembrance” by playwright Tearrance A. Chisholm at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 27, in Pannell Gallery. A reception follows the event, which is free and open to the public.

Commissioned by Endstation, Sweet Briar and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, “In Sweet Remembrance” is a tribute to the significant role of the black community throughout the College’s history. Chisholm, who lives in Washington, D.C., has spent the past four summers researching Sweet Briar’s cultural and historical importance, resulting in an original play that, according to Endstation, “explores the landscape of its past, discovers the contours of its present and realizes its future.”

A cast of actors, including Sweet Briar students and hired professionals, will perform the manuscript in its entirety for the first time on March 27. Michael Stablein Jr., who heads the company’s Playwrights Initiative, will direct the reading and also play a small role. Beginning March 10 until the end of the month, Chisholm will be in residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts to revise and complete the play. His visit will also include on-campus workshops for students at Sweet Briar.

In his writing, Chisholm explores the many faces of the African-American experience. The theme of race as a double-edged sword of advantages and shortcomings permeates all of his works, including “Burning Books” (MU New Play Series), “Liddy’s Sammiches, Potions & Baths” (Arkansas Rep; Voices on the River), “Vulpicide” (MU New Play Series) and “A Month of Sundays” (Midwinter Madness Short Play Festival; NYC). Chisholm has also been published in interJACtions: 75 Monologues by some of America’s Finest Playwrights and Arcadia Magazine.

You can learn more about the Playwrights Initiative and “In Sweet Remembrance” on Tumblr.

— Janika Carey

Poet Dave Lucas leads a workshop during last year’s Creative Writing Conference.

Participants are in for a special treat as Sweet Briar College hosts its fifth annual Creative Writing Conference for undergraduate students, March 21-24. The conference coincides with the College’s Julia B. Waxter Environmental Forum, which will host a reading and conversation with bestselling novelist Barbara Kingsolver Thursday night.

Kingsolver isn’t technically part of the writing conference, but students will have the opportunity to attend her event, which is open to the public. As in previous years, the Creative Writing Conference also boasts several other public readings and craft talks by visiting writers, as well as closed workshops for participating undergraduate students from various states.

Allison Seay

In an effort to give each writer “a full-length showcase of their own,” morning craft talks are now combined with readings, said John Casteen, who teaches poetry at Sweet Briar and directs the conference. In the past, readings took place at a separate time, which made it more difficult for listeners to connect the two.

“It should be a great opportunity to see fresh young writers discuss the issues in their work while also showing the audience how they resolved those issues,” Casteen said.

This year’s featured presenters are novelist Valerie Sayers, chair of the English program at the University of Notre Dame, and poet Allison Seay, a current National Endowment for the Arts fellow.

“[Seay’s] first book, ‘To See the Queen,’ is one of the most fascinating first books of poetry I’ve seen in years,” Casteen said.

Other highlights include readings and craft talks by Emma Rathbone, a novelist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, as well as Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker Sierra Bellows, poets Dave Lucas and Leah Green, and fiction writer Aja Gabel. Dave Griffith, who teaches journalism and creative nonfiction at Sweet Briar, will also read and lead workshops, along with Casteen.

Valerie Sayers

While similar conferences take place at other institutions over the summer, Sweet Briar is the only college to offer an event like this for undergraduate students during the semester. To invite students to the conference, Sweet Briar professors work with colleges in the region and across the country to nominate students who show the most promise as writers.

About 60 students are expected this year, among them several participants from Sweet Briar, as well as Hollins University, the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, the University of Mary Washington, Lewis & Clark College and Central Connecticut State University, all of which have nominated students in the past. Newcomers to the program include Brown, Johns Hopkins, Colgate, Denison and John Carroll universities, Colorado College, and others.

Readings and craft talks are open to the public. For more information about the conference, please visit sbc.edu/creative-writing/creative-writing-conference, call (434) 381-6220 or email jcasteen@sbc.edu.

— Janika Carey

Edith Pearlman had published more than 250 works of fiction and nonfiction, including short stories, essays and travel writing.

Acclaimed short story writer Edith Pearlman will read from her latest book, “Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories,” at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 13, in Pannell Gallery at Sweet Briar College. The event is free and open to the public.

Spanning four decades of writing, the stories in this collection take readers around the world and back in time, from Jerusalem to Central America, from Tsarist Russia to London during the Blitz, from central Europe to Manhattan and from the Maine coast to a fictional suburb of Boston. While each story’s backdrop is different, all of them have one thing in common: the author’s interest in exploring complex characters and the relationships between them.

“I would like my audience to take away a feeling of having met new and interesting people who form some kind of connection and resolve some kind of problem,” Pearlman said. “I don’t try to send a message in my stories, though I do work on clarifying my own insight into my characters; and how to live under trying circumstances is a concern of mine.”

“Binocular Vision” received the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and The Story Prize. All well-deserved, says John Gregory Brown, Julia Jackson Nichols Professor of English and director of creative writing at Sweet Briar.

“Her stories are concise and incisive, but also surprising and graceful and powerful,” he said. “We’re very fortunate that she will be visiting Sweet Briar.”

While Pearlman’s following has been relatively small outside of literary circles, “Binocular Vision” put her on the map. Since she published it two years ago, more people recognize her on the street, she says, and she’s busier than ever traveling the country for readings and talks.

But some things never change.

“I am the same woman, always struggling with the story at hand.”

Pearlman is the recipient of the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of short fiction and the 2011 Wallant Award. She has published more than 250 works of fiction and nonfiction in national magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Her short essays have also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation, Yankee Magazine and Ascent. Her travel writing — about the Cotswolds, Budapest, Jerusalem, Paris and Tokyo — has been published in the New York Times and elsewhere.

Pearlman was born and raised in Providence, R.I., but now lives in Brookline, Mass. To learn more, visit edithpearlman.com. To watch a recent interview with Pearlman, visit creativewriting.blog.sbc.edu. To read her recent essay in The Boston Globe, click here.

— Janika Carey

The Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan

Cheryl Mares, Sara Shallenberger Brown Professor of English, spent the past week in New York City to prepare for a special honors class this spring.

“New York City in Literature and Art” is an interdisciplinary course that will introduce students to artistic interpretations of the city since the mid-19th century.

“The course focuses on the ways that New York City has captured artists’ and writers’ imaginations in the course of its evolution from a struggling colony on the tip of an island the native peoples called ‘Mannahatta’ to the world city that it is today,” said Mares, who majored in history as an undergraduate and later received her M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature.

Students will explore New York’s emergence as a metropolis through the lenses of immigration, segregation and mobility, cosmopolitanism and the neighborhood, queer New York and postmodernism. To better understand the city’s significance in literature and the visual arts, they will also have the opportunity to experience New York first hand during a three-day trip.

“The places we will be visiting … this spring are all related to the texts we will be reading for the course and the films, photos and paintings we will be viewing,” Mares said.

Having lived there for three years while in graduate school, and having returned many times since, Mares knows New York fairly well. But narrowing down the possibilities to what’s doable in just a few days takes some field research. To come up with a ‘map’ for the trip, the professor scoped the city through walking tours of lower Manhattan, Gramercy Park, Union Square, Harlem, Chelsea, the Lower East Side and the Villages.

“I have to make decisions as to which sites we will be visiting or viewing,” she said. “These could include neighborhoods, buildings, streets and avenues, parks and squares, museums, bridges, hotels, bars and other kinds of ‘cityscapes.’ ”

Cheryl Mares in the East Village

Mares wants her students to get a true ‘feel’ for New York — its geography and architecture, but also its culture and history. Immigration has played a crucial role in shaping New York City and its literary and artistic heritage, she says, adding yet another item — and a maybe-item — to her map of must-sees for the spring trip.

“I … want us to visit the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side to see how ‘the other half’ lived,” she said. “By way of contrast, we might consider the opulence on display at the Frick [Collection], which testifies to the concentration of wealth and power by the reigning elite of the time.”

In keeping with the theme of the class, the trip will offer students many different ways of looking at New York City, both metaphorically and literally.

“I would … like to take the students on a harbor cruise so that they have an experiential sense of the island of Manhattan as a physical entity and some idea of the importance of its great natural harbor for the city’s development,” Mares explained.

“And I’d like to take them up to the Top of the Rock [Observation Deck] at the Rockefeller Center or the top of the Empire State Building so that they have a panoramic overview of the city.”

While she won’t be able to show her class everything the city has to offer, students will have plenty of opportunity for in-depth research during the semester.

“Although we will be covering a lot of ground in the course, literally and figuratively, the students will have the chance to go into more depth in their research projects, and we will all benefit from their work when they give presentations based on their research at the end of the term.”

A Colorado native, Mares has been teaching at Sweet Briar since 1982, receiving tenure in 1995. In her classes, she focuses primarily on modern and contemporary fiction and poetry, including post-Colonial literature. Her research interests involve connections between literature, history and politics in contemporary fiction and in works by modernist writers, especially Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, on whom she has published a number of articles. Mares has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder and completed her M.A. and Ph.D. at Princeton University. For more information, visit mares.english.sbc.edu/.

— Janika Carey

CM Burroughs ’04 during a reading

Burroughs has been awarded fellowships and grants from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Cave Canem Foundation, Callaloo Writers Workshop and the University of Pittsburgh. She has received commissions from the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Warhol Museum to create poetry in response to art installations. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, including Callaloo, jubilat, Ploughshares, VOLT, Bat City Review and Sou’wester. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and has been teaching composition and poetry for seven years, currently as the Elma Stuckey Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College of Chicago.

Her debut collection, “The Vital System,” was released by Tupelo Press in September. On its website, the publisher praises Burroughs as a poet who is “already setting off sparks among readers across the globe.”

As the title of her collection suggests, “The body is the most significant figure of my poetry,” Burroughs says. “The beginning and end of all acts, the body is the harbor of all my thematic obsessions: vulnerability, modes of strength, the female body, and the ‘I’ in relation to all Others, namely the relationship of the ‘I’ to threatening and/or intimate Others.”

Fellow poet Douglas Kearney sees “vivid grief, livid vulnerability and bristling sensuality” in her texts, as well as “terrible resilience and dangerous vitality.”

These emotions are driven and enhanced by the poet’s deliberate use — and abuse — of linguistic conventions and imagery.

“The Vital System,” writes Laurie Sheck, is a “provocative” collection in which Burroughs engages with the page “as a visual field.” In it, Sheck adds, Burroughs “enacts the ways in which the very nature of thought is brokenness and disruption.”

Tupelo Press explains that “Burroughs’s compression of phrasing, subverted syntax, and ability to release a story through cinematically sequenced images allow her to expose particular tensions that are gendered and racial as well as essentially human.”

The cinema connection isn’t a coincidence. After all, the poet says that much of her inspiration comes from French movies.

“Godard films always draw contemplation,” she says. In 2011, Burroughs spent a month in France “in order to have quiet, the observatory quality of foreignness and to work on my second book.”

Burroughs says her poetic voice began developing when she was a student at Sweet Briar. Back then it wasn’t France, but the Central Virginia campus, that served as her “quiet place.”

“I used Sweet Briar’s landscape in order to have quiet, an open observation to what my poetry wanted to be, and cultivate a careful listening for who I was then and, perhaps, who I would become,” she remembers.

While at Sweet Briar, Burroughs, who graduated a year early, took advantage of many other opportunities. She was a resident advisor for two and a half years and held other leadership positions.

“I found it the perfect place to develop myself and to develop what have become decade-long friendships,” she says.

This will be her third time returning to campus.

— Janika Carey

“That’s not just remarkable for a small outfit like Birds of Lace,” says poet John Casteen, Finn’s teacher and mentor at Sweet Briar. “It’s unheard of for first books of poetry. … In the poetry world, this is a home run.”

Impressive, yes, but not unexpected, he says of his former student. He oversaw Finn’s honors thesis, which included “I Heart Marlon Brando,” the poem cycle that eventually earned her the Pushcart nomination.

“She’s a spectacular writer with a raw, gritty, ferocious talent, and it comes as no surprise to me or others who know her work that she has found such profound and early success,” Casteen says.

But Finn doesn’t find the terms success and failure “relevant,” she says. “It’s surprising to me, every time, when someone says they’ve read it and liked it, or even just that they’ve read it. I’m thrilled to have it exist, especially because the pages of the book are pink — I’m still a Sweet Briar girl.”

Finn guesses the appeal of “My Life Is a Movie” is a function of who is reading it and its “intentional kinship” to reality TV. Many events in the book are taken from her life.

She believes reality TV is such a cultural phenomenon because it’s decadent and escapist, but has elements of truth. People turn to it because they need it, she surmises, expressing her own pessimistic view of a disastrous economy, decaying cities, and a fear of love because “nothing is certain except artifice, consumerism — entertainment.”

“When I imagine my audience, they’re young, queer, probably in academia or just out of it and floundering in some city, somewhere, clutching a copy of ‘Les Fleurs du mal.’ I wanted to make a reality TV specifically for them.”

Finn is particular about whom she aims to please with her poetry, and it’s reflected in the non-traditional approach she has taken to publishing her works. She hasn’t much use for a poetry establishment she views as both ageist and sexist. One needn’t suffer through youth to have something to say and, furthermore, she believes it’s important for young people to “hear the legitimized voices of their peers.”

Finn knows her creative depths says reviewer Kari Larsen of Anobium, describing “My Life is a Movie” as a slim chapbook “with the kind of shimmering density that dances and transcends that giant, strapping books can never achieve. … ”

“Even when she is frightened,” Larsen writes, “look at what is wrought.”

“ ‘ …  I am standing on the wrong subway platform watching the sunshine like murderlight or morning-sex light in french films and this foreign man walks up to me and tells me I am beautiful and asks permission to ride the train with me like it is okay to be so earnestly romantic in the afternoon or I am a girl getting into a taxi alone and asking to be taken to the site of a disaster.’ ”

When it comes to publishing, Finn says she wants to work with people whose work she likes and respects. “I’d never want something in a magazine, however ‘prestigious,’ if I don’t respect the writing or the way they operate, and I only submit manuscripts to presses I actively read,” she says.

Though she has placed herself among contemporary poetry’s avant-garde, the establishment is watching. An interview with thethepoetry.com, in which she argues the objection to melodrama in poetics is a gender issue, was excerpted on a Poetry Foundation blog.

Hers is not the quickest route to a tenure-track teaching position, something she thinks she’ll want one day. And in some respects the establishment has been good to Finn. She went from Sweet Briar to the University of Notre Dame, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts in May. She immediately returned to New York City after spending last summer there on a Nicholas Sparks Fellowship and working for a big publishing house.

She snubbed subsequent 9-to-5 opportunities to immerse herself in the city’s bountiful poetry scene, freelance, bartend, and make art through poetry and playwriting, music and film. She’s deeply involved in The Poetry Society of New York, runs the inter-disciplinary performance series known as the Bratty Poets and occasionally blogs at ladyblogblah.

It’s all research for that “steady-ish” teaching gig down the road.

“I’ve had more amazing teachers than any one person could hope for, and I’m going to pass on all the knowledge and energy that has been given to me,” she says. “I feel like it’s really important, though, for students to get a perspective from way outside of academia, to have teachers who can show them many ways of making the same thing.”

Watch an extended trailer for “My Life is a Movie.”

— Jennifer McManamay

Traci Brimhall will read at Sweet Briar Sept. 26.

Sweet Briar College will host a reading by nationally acclaimed poet Traci Brimhall at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 26. in Pannell Gallery. The reading is free and open to the public.

Brimhall is the author of “Our Lady of the Ruins” — for which she received the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize — and “Rookery,” winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review and elsewhere. She has also received scholarships and fellowships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Disquiet International Literary Program. A former Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Brimhall is currently a doctoral candidate and King/Chávez/Parks Fellow at Western Michigan University, where she teaches creative writing.

In her latest collection, Brimhall investigates “the role of women as leaders, healers, mothers, and within communities,” she said. Following a group of women through post-war exile, “Our Lady of the Ruins” depicts “the ways in which they are haunted by God, empire and personal trauma.”

Fellow poet Carolyn Forché describes Brimhall’s latest book as “[p]oetry for the new century: awake to the world, spiritually profound, and radiant with lyric intelligence,” while Publisher’s Weekly categorizes her style as “… part Dylan Thomas, part saint’s legend and part Tolkien.”

Her debut collection received similar praise. In the online journal Blackbird, poet Sandra Beasley writes that Brimhall’s poems “dart deep into the canyons of the soul and emerge on the other side, bruised, but indomitable.”

Sweet Briar is just one stop on a tour that will take Brimhall to numerous public venues and universities across the country. Its environment, however, may remind the poet of her own undergraduate experience at a small liberal arts college in Yonkers, N.Y.

“I had amazing teachers and got to be a part of a wonderful community at Sarah Lawrence College, but what I am most grateful for are the friends I made there,” she said. “They helped me grow as a writer while we were in school together, and they’ve continued to be an amazing support system since we graduated.”

To learn more about her book tour and poetry, visit tracibrimhall.com. For more information about this event, contact John Gregory Brown at jbrown@sbc.edu or (434) 381-6434.

— Janika Carey

There’s the Lower Lake they used to swim in during the summers, and the campus gardens Sue adores. Part of the money is going toward preserving Sweet Briar’s natural and landscaped environment.

An avid gardener, Sue cultivates her love of nature in their home, as well. The Piephos’ living room is like a botanical garden, with a variety of plants climbing almost to the ceiling, and giant windows framing the greenery outside. The house, designed by local architect Hal Craddock in 1990, sits in a field above the lake. Local river stone embellishes the fireplace in the living room, which was built to face the fireplace in the historic boathouse.

While the connection between the two structures was Craddock’s idea, the Piephos put a lot of thought into the design of their home, as well. Making sure that it fit into the existing landscape was one important aspect. Utilizing its environment was another.

“[We wanted to] bring the outside in,” Sue explains, and she’s not just talking about plants. The living room windows face south, thus allowing for plenty of light and the use of solar energy. “The quarry tile and southern exposure of the solarium gives not only a delightful environment for my plants, but low energy bills in the winter. On a sunny day in mid-winter, the house gets warmer than our thermostat setting, and it is fun to feel like you are in the Caribbean on sunny days.”

All over the house, stacks of books rich with travel destinations, history and literature in foreign languages bear witness to the world outside of Sweet Briar. Not surprisingly, the Piephos have decided to reserve some of the endowment for international scholarships. It’s also a very personal connection: Their love story began at sea.

“We met on a boat going to Europe, between sophomore and junior years in college,” Sue says.

Sue stayed with a German family for six weeks to advance her knowledge of the German language, while Lee road-tripped across Europe in a Volkswagen convertible. They later met up in Paris and London.

“The experience in my case was transformative,” Lee says. “I learned a vast amount about people and cultures.” For Sue, this was her second time abroad; she spent ninth grade at the International School in Geneva, Switzerland, and traveled through Europe at that time.

The Piephos have since traveled to various places around the world, including Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Greece, Sweden, China, Central America, the Caribbean and the Middle East.

“We can appreciate how much you gain from going to another country, and I think you look at your country in a different way after you’ve been abroad for an extended period of time,” Sue says. “I think it’s an experience we want students to have — both foreign students coming here and Sweet Briar students going abroad.”

Another project dear to the Piephos’ hearts is the planned addition to Sweet Briar’s library. For many years, Cochran has served as an extension of Lee’s own library at home. A former English professor with a focus on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture, Lee still uses it frequently for his research, but also donates his own books to it.

“Historically, I’ve been a big supporter of the library,” he says. “It probably comes with the discipline. I’ve always thought that libraries have a special place. A library is and should be a cultural center of a college.”

Lee, who is the only professor to have won the Student Government Association’s Excellence in Teaching award twice, came to Sweet Briar in 1969 and retired from teaching in 2005 — two years before Sue stopped teaching chemistry.

When planning how to divide up the endowment, it was clear that the sciences should receive part of it, too. The discipline had grown up with the Piephos over the years.

“When I first came, the expectation for women in science was minimal,” says Sue, who started teaching in the early 1970s. “Most Sweet Briar students hadn’t had much science or math in high school. They didn’t have to take chemistry; eighty percent of students had never had chemistry, and fewer still physics or calculus.”

Today, most high schools require students to take classes in chemistry and other sciences, and the curriculum at Sweet Briar is much more investigative than it used to be. Sue was instrumental in introducing an intermediate lab course for juniors during the early 1990s.

“That really opened up our curriculum … now, there’s a lot of hands-on experience students can get,” she says. “I think science is a tough nut to crack at the big universities and the crazy thing is, these universities have the big graduate programs, but they themselves have surprisingly few majors so they have to recruit grad students from liberal arts colleges.”

Sweet Briar is one of them.

“We really put forth some excellent grads,” Sue says, and she also knows why.

“I think they get to know the faculty, and the faculty give them a lot of encouragement, but we don’t let them shortcut, we make them really do the work. We really expect a lot from the students. There’s sort of a can-do attitude here.”

Both Sue and Lee went to small liberal arts colleges themselves, Sue to Smith College and Lee to Kenyon College.

“We believe in liberal arts colleges, and we made that decision pretty early on in our lives,” Lee says.

But it’s not just the College’s academic and natural landscape they feel connected to. It’s the whole package. The community, they both say, is like family. And how could it not be, after spending most of their lives here? It’s a place that has nurtured them with its beauty, inspired through its intellectual community and provided lifelong friendships across the disciplines. It has given them the space they needed to do their research, and the luxury to focus on quality rather than quantity. It has allowed them to think outside the box.

“The College gives you an incredible amount of freedom to define both what you teach and your research,” Sue says. “We’ve seen the College really make a difference in people’s lives.”

At Sweet Briar, Sue and Lee had the freedom to shape their programs’ futures. Sue helped reform the sciences; Lee was instrumental in shaping the European civilization program (the foundation for the Medieval/Renaissance minor) and also started the film minor at the College. None of this, they say, would have been likely at a big university. Working at a small liberal arts college, they’ve been able to interact with everyone in the community on a personal level, including the students, many of whom they’re still in touch with.

“It’s always a pleasure when alums come back and you see what’s happened to them,” Lee says. “They wind up being interesting women. Sweet Briar turns out individuals.”

Sue agrees. “Sweet Briar is pretty darn unique.”

Contact: Janika Carey

The competitive eight-week program brings together students and faculty from all disciplines to create an intense academic experience for participants. Student researchers work one-on-one with a faculty mentor, in addition to meeting weekly for presentations given by faculty and students highlighting their ongoing research. The program begins on May 21, and continues through July 13.

The following students were awarded fellowships:

Spencer Beall ’14
Faculty sponsor: Marie-Thérèse Killiam, professor of French

CJ Campbell ’13
Faculty sponsor: Tony Lilly, assistant professor of English

Lydia Ethridge ’15
Faculty sponsor: Lynn Laufenberg, associate professor of history

Phoebe Jiang ’14
Faculty sponsor: Cammie Smith Barnes, assistant professor of mathematical sciences

A-Joo Kim ’13
Faculty sponsor: Padmini Coopamah, assistant professor of international affairs

Hannah Male ’13
Faculty sponsor: Kate Chavigny, associate professor of history

Caitlin Playle ’13
Faculty sponsor: Lynn Laufenberg, associate professor of history

Ellen Reid ’12
Faculty sponsor: Paige Critcher, assistant professor of studio art

Rachael Stein ’13
Faculty sponsor: Padmini Coopamah, assistant professor of international affairs

Weekly presentations begin  Thursday, May 24 and are open to the entire campus community. Faculty presentations through May and June will be in Guion A03. Student presentations in July will be held in the 1948 Theater. Abstracts of the students’ summer projects are posted on the Honors website.

The event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by Sweet Briar’s Lectures and Events Committee, the dean and the Honors Program.

Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and chair of the folklore and mythology program at Harvard University. She is the author of numerous critical essays and books, including “The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales.” The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Tatar has written for the New York Times, the New Republic and the Harvard Crimson. Her work has been featured on the Today Show and in Harvard Magazine and was reviewed by the New York Times. Tatar has also been interviewed by NPR.

“She is easily one of the world’s foremost authorities on fairy tales, folklore and the sex and violence contained therein,” said Laura Reinert, assistant professor of English at Sweet Briar. Reinert teaches medieval literature and fairy tales and has used one of Tatar’s textbooks in her “Origins of Fairy Tales” class.

Tatar’s talk comes at a time when fairy tales are back in style, with television series like “Once Upon a Time” and “Grimm” drawing large audiences, and two new film adaptations of “Snow White” coming out this year. In the past 15 years, young adult and children’s literature involving fantasy and fairy tale elements, such as “Harry Potter,” “Twilight” and, most recently, “The Hunger Games,” has contributed to this trend.

The lecture came together when one of Reinert’s students, Lauren Babineau, was looking for an outside reader for her senior honors thesis. Babineau will present “Grooming the Bride: Transformations in the ‘Beastly Bridegroom’ Category of Folklore” at 2 p.m. Friday, April 27, in the 1948 Theater.

“I had told Lauren that there was no harm in shooting for the stars and we agreed that Maria Tatar would be our absolute first choice if we could have any scholar in the world,” Reinert said.

She was able to establish contact with Tatar through Sweet Briar’s German professor Ron Horwege, who attended a summer program with Tatar 40 years ago in Berlin.

“We were stunned — and then ecstatic — that she agreed!” Reinert said. “I am thrilled that we have been able to give Lauren this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with the scholar in her field. Words cannot express how pleased and proud I am of Lauren.”

Contact: Janika Carey