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Academics

Serving & Shaping Her World Speakers Series

Values, vision, and voice go hand in hand at Emma Willard School. As we prepare young women for lives of accomplishment, everything we do is guided by our five core values: meaningful choice; academic excellence; community and relationships; ethical decision-making; and women’s perspective. To complement our curriculum, we offer students regular opportunities to come together as a community and learn directly from speakers whose interests and accomplishments bring those core values to life. The Serving and Shaping Her World Speakers Series is the newest addition to our speakers and visiting artists series. Speakers in this assembly program explicitly address the global, women’s, artistic, ethical, health, and scientific perspectives. Classroom and advisee group pre- and post-assembly discussions help students assess and integrate the topics and consider what broadening their perspectives will bring to their lives as students and citizens of the world.

Below are the speakers scheduled for the 2008–2009 academic year. More to come!

Nancy Spector `77—November 19, 2008

Nancy Spector is curator of contemporary art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where she has organized exhibitions on conceptual photography, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle. She co-organized Moving Pictures and Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated). She was adjunct curator of the 1997 Venice Biennale and co-organizer of the first Berlin Biennale, also in 1997. Under the auspices of the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, she has initiated special commissions by Andreas Slominski, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Lawrence Weiner. She has contributed to numerous books on contemporary visual culture with essays on artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Luc Tuymans, Douglas Gordon, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Anna Gaskell. She is a recipient of the Peter Norton Family Foundation Curators Award.

Tony Hoagland—February 25, 2009

Tony Hoagland is the author of three volumes of poetry: Sweet Ruin, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and What Narcissism Means to Me. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment on the Arts, and the Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems and essays about poetry have appeared widely; he currently teaches in the graduate writing program of the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA program.

Nada Shabout, March 2009

Nada Shabout is an Iraqi-American art historian specializing in modern Iraqi art. She has been an assistant professor of art history at the University of North Texas since 2002, teaching Arab visual culture and Islamic art. She has been working on the documentation of modern Iraqi heritage, particularly the collection previously held at the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art, since her visit to Baghdad in June 2003. She has been organizing panels and presenting around the world on the state of Iraq's modern heritage following 2003, the relationship of identity and visual representations in modern and contemporary Iraqi art, and exhibitions of Middle Eastern arts in the west since 911.

Born in Scotland to a Palestinian mother and Iraqi father, Shabout and her family returned to Iraq when she was 6 years old, and she graduated from Baghdad High School for Girls. Shabout was trained in architecture at the New York Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Arlington, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, England. She earned BFA fine arts, MA, and PhD in the Humanities with a concentration in art history and criticism from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1999.

 

Emma students score higher than national average

Emma Willard students score on average 150 points higher than the national average for girls on the verbal section of the SAT, and 110 points higher on the math section.

 
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