Joseph Luzzi is Associate Professor of Italian and Director of Italian Studies , and Co-Director of the first year seminar pro-gram at Bard College. . He received his Ph.D. in Italian Litera-ture from Yale university in 2000. Since then he has written a book, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, which has re-ceived the Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association of America in 2009. He has also pub-lished reviews in the Los Angeles Times Book Review

*Part of the yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues”

In Roses in Winter Rebecca Laroche moves beyond recent readings of recipes, distillation and the procreation sonnets. Focusing closely on how one recipe book treats roses and various rose products, Laroche returns to the sonnets with a new appreciation of how roses in these poems are not merely distilled, but rather they grow. What is more, rose water and oil are not everlasting; they, too, fade, and, in their use, they must be replenished.

Special guest speaker, Dr. Ashley Currier, Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati

Dena Goodman is the Lila Miller Collegiate Professor, History and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan. A leading specialist in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern France, her monographs include Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (2009) and The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994), both with Cornell University Press.

A sophisticated democratic citizen must be able to vote in a way that is most representative of his/her own political views, in short they must be able to cast their votes “correctly”. The analysis of voting behavior in the new democracies can tell us a great deal about normalization of politics in these societies overtime.