New media and technology present us with an overwhelming bounty of tools for connection, creativity, collaboration, and knowledge creation - a true "Age of Whatever" where anything seems possible. But any enthusiasm about these remarkable possibilities is immediately tempered by that other "Age of Whatever" - an age in which people feel increasingly disconnected, disempowered, tuned out, and alienated. Such problems are especially prevalent in education, where the Internet often enters our classrooms as a distraction device rather than a tool for learning.

What is needed more than ever is to inspire our students to wonder, to nurture their appetite for curiosity, exploration, and contemplation. It is our responsibility to help them attain an insatiable appetite and pursue big, authentic, and relevant questions so that they can harness and leverage the bounty of possibility, rediscover the "end" or purpose of wonder, and stave off the historical end of wonder.

Tom Conley is Lowell Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media. In 2003, Dr. Conley won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in topography and literature in Renaissance France.

WHAT: “Feebler Voices?” Men in the American Women's Rights Movement, 1830-1890

WHO: Professor Hélène Quanquin, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3)

WHERE: Niles Gallery, Lucile Little Fine Arts Library

WHEN: Monday, August 27^th 3:00 pm

Professor Hélène Quanquin (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3) is a well-regarded historian of American culture with particular expertise on the history of feminism in the US, the history of American reform, and the history of masculinity in the US. Professor Quanquin will be on campus as part of the Global Connections initiative, a project which links courses at UK to courses taught at universities around the world. As part of this program, Professor Quanquin is team-teaching with Professor Kathi Kern History 405: The History of Women in the United States, 1900-present, offered this fall.

Professor Quanquin’s lecture is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the University of Kentucky History Department.