2026 Presentations & Instructor Bios

News Desert U
Instructor: Teri Finneman

For the past seven years, KU faculty and students have provided local news to Eudora. Learn more in this session about the state of journalism today and steps being taken to help save community news.

Teri Finneman, Ph.D., is a journalism professor at KU and publisher of The Eudora Times, which she operates with KU students. She is an expert on rural local news and founder of the Journalism History podcast. She is co-author of Reviving Rural News and the upcoming book News Desert U

The Musical Hamilton
Instructor: Paul Laird

"The Musical Hamilton" will be a look at this popular, ground-breaking show, which opened on Broadway in 2015 and has played there, and many other places, ever since.  Emphases will be placed on the show's creation by Lin-Manuel Miranda and others, its reception, the score's extensive use of rap and other musical styles, and the plot's relationship with American history.

Paul Laird taught music history at the University of Kansas for thirty years. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of over twenty books, most of them related to some aspect of the life and music of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Schwartz, and aspects of the American musical theater. One of his books is Dueling Grounds: Revolution and Revelation in the Musical Hamilton, co-edited with Mary Jo Lodge. Laird frequently presents classes for the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning and the KU Mini-College. In 2021, Laird won the KU Chancellor's Club Career Teaching Award.

KU-phoria
Instructor: Curtis Marsh

One school is better than another because of a variety of measures: their academics, athletics, alumni and students, environment, traditions. The University of Kansas has it all. This presentation examines the stories that make KU better than the rest. 

Curtis Marsh has spent his 30-year career on campus, half of which was spent with KU Info, a program that answered any KU question imaginable. He is the co-founder of the KU Osher Institute and the past director of the DeBruce Center. Known on campus as "Mr. KU," his book, entitled "KU-phoria," is a collection of 60 stories that prove KU is the best.

The Smorgasbord of English
Instructor: Lisa McClendon

English is a constantly evolving language that has expanded over the centuries by borrowing words from all over. We’ll look at how words borrowed into English change – or don’t – illustrated by words for some of our favorite foods!

Lisa McLendon is associate dean for student success at the KU School of Journalism and Mass Communications, after running the Bremner Editing Center for 13 years. She mostly teaches editing classes, having worked as a newspaper copy editor for 12 years before coming to KU. Despite not making full use of her doctorate in Slavic languages and linguistics, she still loves grammar and learning about languages

The Role of the Landscape at KU
Instructor:  Joe Fearn

At the time of his presidency, Ronald Reagan was often viewed as a mere actor who had a simplistic anti-government domestic perspective and whose aggressive foreign and defense policy risked causing a war with the Soviet Union.  All of these very commonly held views were quite wrong.  Reagan wasn’t an anti-government extremist, but a principled and pragmatic small-government conservative, who often compromised to move forward his agenda.  He wasn’t a warmonger but actually had a coherent strategy for keeping the peace and winning the Cold War, largely based in sending messages through his major speeches and the defense buildup, to the Soviets, an approach that played a role in the end of the Cold War.  And he was not a mere actor but played a key role in creating his message.  Research from the Reagan Library, especially the Handwriting Files that have Reagan’s handwriting on them, confirms all of these judgments. 

Robert C. Rowland (PhD), is a Professor at the University of Kansas, where he teaches rhetoric and argumentation. He has won four university-wide awards for teaching, three college or university-wide awards for advising, and a national award for teaching from the National Communication Association.  His more than 100 published essays have appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Communication Theory, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Communication Monographs¸ other journals, and a number of edited books.  He has won several national awards for his articles, as well as for his overall research program in argumentation and political rhetoric. He has published four university press books, one of which (Shared Land/Conflicting Identity, with David Frank), won the Kohrs-Campbell Prize in rhetorical criticism, and is a former editor of the  Western Journal of Communication. Rowland presented the keynote on rhetoric at the Reagan Centennial, a keynote on the status of rhetorical criticism at the National Communication Association Conference on Rhetorical Criticism, and a keynote on argumentation at the International Society for the Study of Argumentation conference in the Netherlands in July 2023.  His most recent book, The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy, was published by the University Press of Kansas in the spring of 2021.  He received a distinguished scholar award from the rhetorical and communication theory division of the National Communication in November 2021 and a Distinguished Research Award from the International Society for the Study of Argumentation that was presented in July 2023.  He is the co-chair of a working group of scholars reassessing the rhetoric of President Reagan. 

How Galaxies Are Formed
Instructor: Greg Rudnick

Natural History Museum's Panorama Renovation
Instructors: Lori Schlenker

Bona fide Fakes in the Collection of the Wilcox Classical Museum
Instructor: Phil Stinson

The Wilcox Classical Museum is KU’s oldest museum collection. Known as the University’s “classical museum,” it was inaugurated by Professor Alexander Wilcox at the June Commencement in 1888 and originally occupied part of the second floor of Old Fraser Hall. The founders of the museum had the goal in mind of exposing students and Kansans alike to the ancient Greek and Roman arts in a time when travel to the great museums of Europe was not possible for most. It was the first of its kind in the region. The Nelson Gallery of Kansas City did not open until 1933. The museum and its collection were renamed for Professor Wilcox after his death in 1915. The collection was moved to storage in 1965, in the context of the closure and subsequent demolition of Old Fraser Hall.

After 20 years of controversial uncertainty, the museum’s collection was reconstituted, conserved, and restored under the steadfast direction of Professor Elizabeth “Betty” Banks. In 1988, on the centennial of the museum’s founding, the Wilcox Classical Museum was rededicated in the west wing of historic Lippincott Hall. Then, as today, the museum consists of the Mary Grant Gallery, which displays the cast collection, and an adjacent reading room, which doubles as a gallery for a study collection of ancient artifacts, coins, and inscriptions. 

The holdings today include approximately 500 ancient artifacts from around the ancient Mediterranean, 800 Greek and Roman coins, and 75 sculptural casts and reproductions. This presentation concerns the small (but growing) percentage of artifacts in the collection that are, to varying degrees, “inauthentic,” or “fake.” What constitutes a fake? What modern preconceived notions about authenticity, or the aura of the original, are at stake in venturing further into these questions with respect to the Wilcox Collection?

Phil Stinson is a member of the Classics Faculty at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is a trained architect, art and architectural historian, archaeologist, and museum administrator. In his early career, he served as the senior architect for the Harvard-Cornell excavations at Sardis in western Türkiye. He has also participated for over two decades as an architect and archaeologist with the NYU-Oxford excavations at Aphrodisias. His reconstruction drawings and illustrations of ancient Greek and Roman architecture and contexts for wall-painting have been widely published and exhibited. His first book on the Roman Basilica of Aphrodisias was published in 2016 by Reichert. A second book is currently in progress and aims to publish the architecture and archaeology of the Julio-Claudian Sebasteion at Aphrodisias. Since 2017, Phil has served as the curator and director of the Wilcox Classical Museum. He has organized two significant exhibits showcasing student work on the Wilcox’s past and future, and he is currently spearheading a proposal to relocate the museum from Lippincott Hall to Wescoe Hall.