Week Seven: August 3–10, 2024
Every summer Chautauqua Institution welcomes over 100,000 visitors, to celebrate community and prioritize personal growth. Many travel here to relax, renew and recharge on the shores of Chautauqua Lake. Join us for our historic 150 anniversary season and see for yourself why Chautauqua was, and continues to be, a cherished destination. Keep scrolling to explore Week Seven’s Theme: Wonder and Awe: A Week Celebrating Chautauqua’s Sesquicentennial.
Featured Entertainment and Events
Chautauqua Lecture Series
Wonder and Awe
A Week Celebrating Chautauqua’s Sesquicentennial
We’ve all experienced that which has taken our breath away, to use an expression. Whether some kind of premonition, a spiritual or religious experience, a feat of seeming magic, or something else beyond words, there are moments that leave us dumbfounded and seeking answers where there are no convincing ones. What are wonder and awe, what creates or instills them, and does it matter how we experience them — alone, with others, in reality or in some kind of liminal space? From the infinite to the infinitesimal, we peer at all that situates us on a scale of grandeur.
Psychologist Dacher Keltner opens the week on Monday, Aug. 5, 2024; a leading scholar in the study of emotion, he will discuss his latest book: Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. Beloved the world over, celebrated author Amy Tan took up nature journal sketching in 2016, and now she returns to the Amphitheater stage on Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2024, to discuss her latest work, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and the wonder and awe inspired by the natural world. StoryCorps CEO Sandra M. Clark speaks Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, as she contemplates the power of storytelling to inspire wonder and awe in listeners, readers and viewers. On Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, astrophysicist and founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration Feryal Ozel will discuss her groundbreaking work that led to the first photograph of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Finally, The Washington Post’s movie critic Ann Hornaday returns to Chautauqua to close the week on Friday, Aug. 9, 2024, with a celebration of film, the movies, and moviegoing as sources of “Wonder and Awe,” and how skilled filmmakers use a combination of cinematography, scripting, acting and scoring, and the scale of the screen itself, to elicit these feelings from viewers young and old alike.
Confirmed Lectures
Dacher Keltner
Dacher Keltner’s research focuses on the biological and evolutionary origins of compassion, awe, love and beauty; and power, social class and inequality. A professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, he is a leading scholar in the study of emotion and the author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. It is this book that will frame his Chautauqua Lecture Series debut as he opens a week dedicated to “Wonder and Awe — A Week Celebrating Chautauqua’s Sesquicentennial.”
Keltner serves as the faculty director of the Berkeley Greater Good Science Center and in 2020, along with Michael Pollan and others, co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. In addition, Keltner is chief scientific advisor at Hume AI, host of the podcast “The Science of Happiness,” has collaborated on projects at Facebook and Google, and served as a scientific consultant for Pixar’s film “Inside Out.”
Keltner is also the author of The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence; Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life; and The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness. He is also co-editor of The Gratitude Project: How the Science of Thankfulness Can Rewire Our Brains for Resilience, Optimism, and the Greater Good.
A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Keltner earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his doctorate from Stanford University.
Amy Tan
Born in the United States to immigrant parents from China, Amy Tan rejected her mother’s expectations that she become a doctor and concert pianist. She chose to write fiction instead. In keeping with her love of science in the wild and childhood love of doodling, Tan — who serves on the board of the American Bird Conservancy — took up nature journal sketching in 2016, and now the beloved writer best known for The Joy Luck Club returns to the Amphitheater stage for a week dedicated to “Wonder and Awe — A Week Celebrating Chautauqua’s Sesquicentennial.” She’ll discuss her latest work, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and the wonder and awe inspired by the natural world.
Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement, all New York Times bestsellers, as well as two children’s books and the nonfiction books The Opposite of Fate and Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. Her work has been translated into 35 languages and adapted for film, television and opera.
For her work, Tan has been nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the International Orange Prize. She is also the recipient of the Commonwealth Gold Award, the 2005 Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service, the 2021 Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and other honors. In March 2022 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was also awarded the 2021 National Humanities Medal by President Joe Biden in a ceremony at the White House.
Tan’s Chautauqua presentation coincides with “Amy Tan’s Backyard Birds,” an exhibition of her nature journals and sketches on display from June 8 to Aug. 25, 2024, at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in Jamestown, New York.
Sandra M. Clark
Sandra M. Clark is a leading voice in journalism and beyond, challenging norms and practices that create barriers to building trust and meaningful, sustainable connections with communities. Clark took the helm at StoryCorps as CEO in 2022, advancing the award-winning organization’s mission: to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world. It is this work and this mission that brings Clark to the Amphitheater stage for a week dedicated to “Wonder and Awe — A Week Celebrating Chautauqua’s Sesquicentennial,” as she contemplates on the power of storytelling to inspire wonder and awe in listeners, readers and viewers.
Prior to joining StoryCorps in early 2022, Clark was vice president for news and civic dialogue at WHYY in Philadelphia. There, she led the station’s news operation across all platforms and was at the forefront of expanding and diversifying its audiences and outreach to communities. Her innovative approaches to collaborating with grassroots information providers garnered national recognition. In addition, Clark worked with teams to grow revenue and build membership while amplifying the station’s branding and positioning. As managing editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer prior to joining WHYY, Clark was a member of both the executive and newsroom leadership team and led the paper to a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
A contributing trainer and mentor for the Maynard Institute, Clark has served on the board of the News Leaders Association and the advisory board for the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication.
Feryal Ozel
Feryal Ozel is the chair and professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology, where her research in astrophysics focuses on theoretical and computational studies of the properties, formation, and environments of black holes and neutron stars. A founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, an inaugural member of the EHT Science Council and lead of the EHT Modeling Working Group, Ozel developed new techniques to study black hole environments, made predictions of black hole images that guided the development of the EHT, and led efforts to constrain physics beyond General Relativity. In 2022, she led the announcement of the first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and it is this groundbreaking work peering at the “Wonder and Awe” of the cosmos that she’ll discuss for the Chautauqua Lecture Series.
Ozel is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the Science Academy of Turkey. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she was a professor of astronomy and physics and the associate dean for research at the University of Arizona. Additionally, Ozel was co-chair of NASA’s Next Generation Large Mission Concept Study for the Lynx X-ray Observatory and has served for three years as chair of NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee.
Ozel’s work has garnered numerous fellowships and awards, including the NASA Hubble Fellowship, the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award from the American Physical Society, the Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University and the Guggenheim Fellowship. With the EHT collaboration, she has been honored with a Diamond Achievement Award from the National Science Foundation, the Breakthrough Prize in Physics, and was recognized with the distinction of Breakthrough of the Year by Science in 2020. She received the Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society twice, with the EHT collaboration in 2020 and with the NICER collaboration in 2022.
Ann Hornaday
The movie critic for The Washington Post, Ann Hornaday returns to Chautauqua to close a week of sesquicentennial festivities with a celebration of film, the movies, and moviegoing as sources of “Wonder and Awe” — how skilled filmmakers use a combination of cinematography, scripting, acting and scoring, and the scale of the screen itself, to elicit these feelings from viewers young and old alike.
After working at Ms. Magazine as a researcher and editorial assistant, she became a freelance writer in New York City, where she eventually began to write about movies for The New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section and other publications. In 1995 she became the movie critic at the Austin American-Statesman in Austin, Texas, where she stayed for two years before moving to Baltimore to be the movie critic at The Baltimore Sun. She left the Sun in 2000 and began working at The Washington Post in 2002. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2008 and is the author of Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies.
Hornaday grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and graduated cum laude with a degree in government from Smith College. She is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and the Broadcast Film Critics Association.
Interfaith Lecture Series
Wonder and Awe – Reverence as a Response to the World
The profound experiences of our lives share a common thread. From the birth of a baby to the last breath of a parent, the wonderful and awe-inspiring events of our lives serve as markers on our spiritual journeys, from suffering to exhilaration. We experience wonder over the vast complexity of creation and stand in awe of the terrible power of nature and human cruelty. Faith is often forged through the deep and curious questions of childlike wonder, and tested by the struggle to understand what we experience and observe — that which leaves us in awe.
Confirmed Lectures
Dr. Sunita Puri
Dr. Sunita Puri is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts. She completed medical school and residency training in internal medicine at the University of California San Francisco followed by a fellowship in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at Stanford. She is the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed literary memoir examining her journey to the practice of palliative medicine, and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. A graduate of Yale University and the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Tricycle, Slate, JAMA, and JAMA- Internal Medicine. She and her work have been featured in the Atlantic, People Magazine, PBS’s Christian Amanpour Show, NPR, the Guardian, BBC, India Today, and Literary Hub. She is passionate about the ways that the precise and compassionate use of language can empower patients and physicians to have the right conversations about living and dying.
Rabbi Josh Feigelson
Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD has served as President & CEO of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality since February 2020. He received ordination from Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School in 2005 and served for six years as the Hillel Rabbi at Northwestern University, where he also earned a doctorate in Religious Studies. In 2011, Josh helped found and served as Executive Director of Ask Big Questions, an initiative of Hillel International, which won the inaugural Lippman-Kanfer Prize for Applied Jewish Wisdom. Most recently he served as Dean of Students at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Josh is a Wexner Graduate Fellow and was the founding co-chair of the Wener Fellowship Alumni Committee. He is the author of Eternal Questions: Reflections, Conversations, and Jewish Mindfulness Practices for the Weekly Torah Portion (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022) and the host of “Soulful Jewish Living: Mindful Practices for Every Day,” a podcast co-produced by Unpacked and IJS. Josh lives with his wife Natalie and their three sons in Skokie, IL.
Ubaydullah Evans
Ubaydullah Evans is ALIM’s first Scholar-in-Residence and now Executive Director. He converted to Islam while in high school. Upon conversion, Ubaydullah began studying some of the foundational books of Islam under the private tutelage of local scholars while simultaneously pursuing a degree in journalism from Columbia. Since then, he has studied at Chicagoland’s Institute of Islamic Education (IIE), in Tarim, Yemen, and Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, where he is the first African American to graduate from its Shari’a program. Ubaydullah also instructs with the Ta’leef Collective and the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) at times.
Weekly Chaplain
The Most Rev. Michael Bruce Curry
The Most Rev. Michael Bruce Curry is presiding bishop and primate of The Episcopal Church. At the church’s 78th General Convention in June 2015, he was elected to a nine-year term in this role and installed in November of that year; he serves as The Episcopal Church’s chief pastor, spokesperson, and president and chief executive officer.
Explore Performing and Visual Arts
The arts can sometimes bridge differences and illuminate perspectives as no other method can. Artistic expressions at Chautauqua — including professional and pre-professional offerings in classical and contemporary music, theater, opera, dance, visual arts and literary arts — aim to inspire, educate, entertain and engage a diverse and growing audience.
Places to Stay
If you love the events you see in Week Seven, ensure you have accommodations. Space on the ground is limited, and accommodations go fast find reservations at the Hotel or Private Accommodations.
Dining & Shopping
Make your Chautauqua experience memorable! Share a delicious meal at one of our many restaurants. Or take piece of Chautauqua home with you from our unique shops.