Shared Seminar

In spring 2009, I will be teaching a seminar for our students pursuing a Master's degree in philosophy on "Mill's On Liberty," and I hope to include some of my Slovak students electronically in some of our discussions.

Here's John Stuart Mill, whose 1859 book On Liberty, has been enormously influential in shaping our thinking on free speech in the U.S.

In Bratislava, I taught a course I called "Free Speech in Contemporary Democracies," in which we studied On Liberty and examined several contemporary free speech controversies, including Nazi speech, hate speech, pornography, and the Internet. For the seminar next year, I hope to include several of my Slovak students electronically in some of the discussion of those contemporary issues. At a minimum, we can communicate by e-mail, but I'm also looking at ways to enroll my Slovak students as guests in "Beachboard" (our CSULB web-based classroom) so we can try real-time chatrooms and other discussions.

I will be contacting Slovak students and faculty colleagues this fall about participating in the class. I'd be happy to hear from people before then as well.

Review: Slovak National Ballet

My review of the 2007 fall season of the Slovak National Ballet was just published in [Washington] Dance View 25:2 (Spring 2008), 25-29. I'm mailing copies to the company's press office, as well as several other friends in Bratislava. It's only available in print, not on-line.

The Ballet's Press Office kindly sent a wide selection of marvelous photos, and four were printed with my review. I'm posting one here that was not used with the review.

This is Adrian Ducin in the role of James in La Sylphide. He's a very promising young soloist I singled out for discussion in the review.

I hope my review encourages some American visitors to central Europe to make the trip to Bratislava to see the company.

UPDATE-7/18/2008: I scanned the print review into a PDF file for my summer class, and posted it here: http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/Slovak_review.pdf

NOTE: Click on any image in this blog to see it full-size.