ABOUT
Sara Miller McCune is the publisher and chairman of Sage Publications, located in Thousand Oaks, CA, as well as the president of the McCune Foundation of Montecito. She established the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment in 1997. The endowment supports programming and events in the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Conference Room on the sixth floor of the HSSB, and enhancements to the room. Programs which focus on the intersection of the social sciences and the humanities, as well as other interdisciplinary programs, are supported by the endowment.
Past Events
2011 - 2012
Talk: The People in Power are Nothing to Fear: Jessica Mitford and the Public Good
Leslie Brody (Creative Writing, University of Redlands)
Tuesday, April 24 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSS
Over the course of her long and adventurous life, Jessica Mitford was an investigative journalist, civil rights activist, vivid raconteur and champion of outsiders and underdogs. You find that her admirers and detractors use the same words to describe her: muckraker, subversive, mischief-maker, tease, and nuisance. In a series of literary exposés like The American Way of Death, The Trial of Dr. Spock (about conspiracy laws during the Vietnam era) and Kind and Usual Punishment (about the necessity of prison reform), Mitford fearlessly defied authority figures. It was a habit she’d cultivated reaching back to the 1930’s, when as the daughter of English aristocrats she had repudiated wealth and privilege to run away to the Spanish Civil War with Winston Churchill’s nephew, Esmond Romilly. The inscription on the Mitford family coat of arms was “God Careth for Us”, but embarrass the powerful, mock the hypocrite and shift the complacent were always mottos more to Decca’s taste.
Leslie Brody’s memoir Red Star Sister was awarded the 1999 PEN Center USA West prize for Creative Nonfiction.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment as part of its Public Goods series.
2008 - 2009
Talk: Rebel Without a Cuisine: Julia Child and the Making of the American Cook
Laura Shapiro
Wednesday, May 13 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Julia Child is most often celebrated as the TV star who introduced Americans to the glories of French cuisine. But while her training and expertise were French, Julia couldn’t stand the word “cuisine” (sometimes she spelled it “kweezeen”), and she happily threw off what she called the “straitjacket” of French tradition whenever it seemed superfluous. At the heart of her cooking was the renegade spirit of an American original. What was truly revolutionary about her TV programs wasn’t the recipes, it was her attitude towards food itself. Laura Shapiro is the author of Julia Child: A Life, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, and Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. She has written for Newsweek, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Granta, and Gourmet.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment.
Talk: The Evolution of the Mediterranean Diet from the Middle Ages
Allen James Grieco (History, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies)
Monday, February 23 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
The concept of the Mediterranean diet is a modern invention; the Middle Ages and Renaissance had some very different food values. The lecture is a look at the recent construct and its relationship with overview of medieval and Renaissance diets. It ties the diets of the present and the past together. Allen J. Grieco is the Lila Acheson Wallace Assistant Director for Gardens and Grounds & Scholarly Programs at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence) and is presently a Visiting Professor in History at Harvard University.
Sponsored by Medieval Studies, the IHC’s Mediterranean Studies RFG, the Dept. of History, the Dept. of French and Italian, Renaissance Studies, and the IHC’s Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment.