Academic Calendar
Looking for registration deadlines, spring break or when grades are due? Our academic calendar has all of the important events for this academic year.

The Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) at Elmira College will host the second of three lectures on August 2. Part of the 2023 Park Church Summer Lecture Series, the talks are held at the historic Park Church at 208 W. Gray Street. They offer a chance to visit a site where Twain and his family were loyal congregants while engaging in a lively discussion. Each lecture begins at 7:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
At the August 2 talk, Bernard Joseph Dobski, Professor of Political Science at Assumption University, will offer a political study of Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc in his speech titled “Twain’s Machiavellian Princess: Personal Recollections and Political Philosophy.” Dobski contends that the novel represents a dramatic portrayal of the origins of modern politics, allowing the reader to reflect in new ways on the tensions between moral freedom and determinism, a deeply-rooted theme in Twain’s works.
You can attend the third lecture on August 16, which features Stephen Rachman, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Titled “The Monetary Imagination of Mark Twain: From the Nevada Mines to the £1,000,000 Bank-Note,” Rachman will discuss Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain’s preoccupations with money and the role this plays in his creative life, his inventive use of language, his critiques of culture and politics and race, and the deeper imaginative patterns that shaped his work. This talk will cover the full span of Twain’s works to demonstrate his obsessions with money and speculation, but also show how he came to use his imaginative powers in monetary terms, the coinage of his brain, circulating like currency throughout his work.
If you missed the July 12 lecture featuring Alexander Ashland, Assistant Professor of English at Viterbo University, a recording of the presentation is available here.
The Park Church Lecture Series is sponsored by CMTS and Park Church. They and The Trouble Begins series are made possible by the support of the Mark Twain Foundation, Katherine Roehlke, and generous gifts from individual donors.