Andrea Tarnowski Speaks at the 30th Annual New Hampshire Humanities Dinner

new_hampshire_humanities_logo_in_color_for_print.jpg

This past Thursday,  October 10th, 2019, New Hampshire Humanities held their 30th annual dinner fundraiser, of which Dartmouth College was a lead sponsor. 

The event usually highlights an invited speaker whose work and writing pertain to the humanities. Previoius keynote speakers include authors, philosophers and historians such as Susan Stamberg, Steven Pinker and Annette Gordon-Reed. This year, however, New Hampshire Humanities elected to hear from voices in our own community who have been impacted by their initiatives. The theme was "Tell us your story..." and event programming featured creative individuals from around the state of New Hampshire, guided by professional storyteller Tricia Rose Burt. 

Speakers included poet and New Voices mentor Ewa Chrusciel, fiddle-playing storyteller Jordan Tirell-Wysocki, and living history actor Gwendolyn Quezaire-Presutti, as well as Associate Director of the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College, Andrea Tarnowski.

Professor Tarnowksi is Director of the course sequence Humanities 1 and 2 and an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature. Her speech addressed the importance of engaging with stories outside of our own expereince to the full becoming of one's self; 

The best feeling in the world may be listening so intently, and connecting so completely to what a storyteller is saying that we forget, in fact, that we even have a self. Our individual perspective, our "stance", our biases, our worries, fall away before the offering of the story. We stop--or temporarily suspend--the seeking of ourselves, and instead, we invite, recieve, welcome others.

Follow this link to listen to Professor Tarnowski's full speech and the entire program of the New Hampshire Humanities annual dinner: https://livestream.com/mfi/30thAnnualDinner