News
Check out our news section to learn about all that's going on at Elmira College.
Grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, Elmira College provides a collaborative and supportive environment that enables students to become active learners, effective leaders, responsible community members, and globally engaged citizens.
The legacy of academic excellence at Elmira College runs deep with a heritage and culture that have been forward-thinking from day one, as the first college for women with a course study equivalent to men's.
At Elmira, you’ll have opportunities that shape your future, raise your sights and equip you with targeted tools and skills to succeed in the professional world. Join a community that’s close-knit, fun-loving, and just the right amount of quirky.
Elmira College makes a private education more affordable than you realize, with a number of ways to get the financial assistance you may need. Our financial aid office can guide you through options, including scholarships, grants, loans, and work-study programs.
Elmira College includes meeting students from around the world, participating in Elmira traditions, completing community service projects, and hopping into a pickup kickball game.
Elmira College provides you with a foundation for future success.
The home of the three-time NCAA National Champion Elmira College Soaring Eagles.
Elmira College alumni stay connected and engaged with the College long after they graduate.
Gifts to Elmira College ensure excellent academic and co-curricular opportunities for generations of EC students.
Check out our news section to learn about all that's going on at Elmira College.
Looking for registration deadlines, spring break or when grades are due? Our academic calendar has all of the important events for this academic year.
Looking for a small, close-knit campus filled with incredible, hands-on learning opportunities? Our Admissions Office can help make Elmira College YOUR place.
The EC campus map can help you find your way around campus and find the best parking spot.
Internal dashboard for EC news, events, resources, and more. Log-in required.
With over 35 majors and minor areas of concentration, Elmira College lays the foundation for a diverse, cross discipline education, encouraging you to both specialize and explore.
Info For
Stereoscopic image of Elmira Water Cure, taken by C.Tomlinson (c.1880)
The Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) at Elmira College will hold its second lecture in the 2026 Spring Trouble Begins Lecture Series, which takes place on Wednesdays throughout May at the historic Barn at Quarry Farm. Located at 131 Crane Road, the lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures begin at 7:00 p.m. and the remaining lectures will be held on May 13, May 20, and May 27.
The second lecture is a talk by award-winning author John Jeremiah Sullivan. His 2011 essay collection, Pulphead, was named one of the 100 best books of the 21st century by the New York Times Book Review. He is the recipient of several awards and honors, including the Whiting Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
In his presentation titled “Mr. Clemens and the Cure: the Rediscovery of a Lost Twain Reminiscence,” Sullivan will discuss an obscure text he found that was written by Dr. Adele Gleason, who had grown up in Elmira, New York, at her family’s well-known hydropathic “water cure” sanitarium. She had written an obituary-essay just days after Twain’s death, and it appeared in a British military newsletter published in Lahore, Pakistan, which was then part of India. The roughly 1,000-word essay is intimate, detailed, moving, eccentric, and admiring. It includes multiple unfamiliar anecdotes of Twain’s life and personality, as well as stray glimpses of his wife, daughters, and friends.
Equally interesting to Sullivan were the details he learned about Gleason. Like Twain, Gleason was highly interested in dreams and the possibility of telepathic communication via the dream state. She was a passionate person, a world traveler, famed for her beauty, and deeply involved in progressive causes. She was also a lesbian who fought to live openly in a repressive society.
Sullivan’s lecture will attempt to weave together three threads: Gleason’s life and work, the legacy of her remarkable family and of the institution they built in Elmira, and the uniqueness of her perspective on Twain. What can we learn about “Mr. Clemens” by seeing him through the lens of such a brilliant and unusual mind?
7:00 p.m., Wed., May 20: “Seeing Double: Two Poets on their Quarry Farm Stays” Michael Czarnecki and James Plath
7:00 p.m., Wed., May 27: “The Politics of Illustrating Children in Twain’s Adaptation Network” Maggie Morris Davis, Illinois State University
In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain's October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire's Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College's campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.
