English Language Meeting – February 23, 2022 (Online)
When: February 23, 2022
Speaker: Fr. Tom Lucas, SJ
Topic: Dancing with the Darkness: Art in the time of Plague
Location: Online
Advanced registration is required. Click here to register.
The Social “hour” begins at 7 pm. Presentation begins at 7:30
About the Speaker:
Father Lucas is an internationally recognized expert in Jesuit art history and is well known as a liturgical designer and artist. As a graduate student, he designed and directed the restoration of the sixteenth century rooms of St. Ignatius in Rome and curated an exhibit on Jesuit architecture at the Vatican Library. After serving for three years as the National Secretary for Communications at the US Jesuit Conference, he joined the faculty at the University of San Francisco in 1995. There he was founding chair of the Fine and Performing Arts and founding director of the Thacher Gallery at USF (1998) and the Kalmanovitz Sculpture Terrace (2008).
In 2013, Father Lucas was named Rector of the Jesuit Community at Seattle University, where he also served as university distinguished professor and curator of the University Art Collection. He began a new assignment in 2021 as pastor of St. Ignatius Loyola Parish in Sacramento, California, where he continues his art and teaching work.
Father Lucas has made several presentations to the Dante Society in the past. Dante Society members will remember his talk on the restoration of the rooms in Rome where St. Ignatius lived and died as well as well as his talk on the scavi under St. Peter’s Basilica.
About the Presentation:
Father Lucas will present an illustrated slide lecture on the impact of the Black Death on 14th Century art, particularly in Italy, as the gentle spring of early naturalism gave way to sterner realism and flights of dramatic and sometimes horrific fancy.
Gabriella Vagnoli was born in Pisa, Tuscany, home of the famous Leaning Tower. She grew up in a multicultural family thanks to her Brazilian mom and remembers teaching Italian for the first time as a child to her Brazilian cousins. She obtained a Laurea in English and Spanish Language and Literature at the Università degli Studi di Pisa and during her college years spent a year in the University of Reading, UK, studying mainly the works of Shakespeare. After obtaining a Certificate as a Teacher of Italian (DITALS II) at the Università per Stranieri di Siena, she has taught in a full immersion school in Florence, a children's full immersion program in Chicago and a Community College in Illinois.
Tiziana was born and raised in Sardinia, a beautiful Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. She has always been passionate about foreign languages and cultures, and studied French and German at the Scuola Superiore Interpreti e Traduttori in Milan, where she obtained her first Foreign Languages and Interpreter BA degree. She then pursued her MA in English and German Language and Literature at IULM, one of the most prestigious universities in Milan, Italy for Language and Communication studies.
Nicla is a native of Napoli, Italy. She has a Laurea in Materie Letterarie (degree in humanities) and a Laurea in Pedagogia (degree in Education) from the Università degli Studi di Cassino. She earned her M.A in Italian and her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington. She has published articles and book chapters on gender and theater as well as politics and religion in Counter-Reformation Italy and in the last years, has been teaching Italian literature, language, and culture in different institutions. In addition to teaching in our program, Nicla is authorized to cover the role of esaminatrice and intervistatrice in our PLIDA Examination Board.