Program Postponed: Unfortunately, the August 15 Concord Museum Forum with Sara Atwood on Black Devil and Gentle Cloud: Ruskin and Emerson at Odds, has been postponed.

We are working to reschedule this Forum, and will post updated information as soon as possible.

John Ruskin and Ralph Waldo Emerson are among the ‘representative men’ of the Victorian period and have by now assumed a place alongside the sort of Great Men whom they esteemed. Our current debates about education, nature, and labor echo with Ruskinian and Emersonian notions, from self-culture and self-reliance to mutuality and the value of work. We continue to face many of the problems with which they wrestled and to seek answers to the questions they asked. Explore the ways in which Ruskin’s and Emerson’s vision of the world and of human nature, diverged, leaving each man convinced that the other’s understanding was misguided and incomplete.

Speaker Sara Atwood’s work has appeared in The Ruskin Review and Bulletin, Nineteenth-Century Prose, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and Carlyle Studies Annual. Her book, Ruskin’s Educational Ideals, was published by Ashgate in 2011. She is a contributor to the Yale University Press edition of Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (2013), Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave 2017), John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education (Anthem Press 2018), William Morris and John Ruskin: A New Road on Which the World Should Travel (University of Exeter Press 2019) and Victorian Environmental Nightmares (Palgrave 2019). She has lectured widely on Ruskin, both in the US and abroad, focusing particularly on education, the environment, and language. Dr. Atwood lives in Oregon, where she is an adjunct lecturer in English literature and writing at Portland State University and Portland Community College.

$5 Member | $10 Non-Member. This program is supported in part by the Sally Lanagan Fund and grants from the Concord Cultural Council, the Lexington Council for the Arts, and the Lincoln Cultural Council –  local agencies which are supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.

Register here.