FW: Event to recognize Autism Awareness Month at Duke 4/27
Beth Hutson
FYI
Beth Hutson
Program Coordinator
GCF Family Support Services
115 Market St.,Suite 201
Durham, NC 27701
Phone: 919-667-1067
Fax: 919-560-3018
email: bhu...@gcffamilysupportservices.org
Website: www.gcffamilysupportservices.org
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Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2015 10:32 AM
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Subject: {ASNC-DurhamCounty} Event to recognize Autism Awareness Month at Duke
All,
Duke is hosting the following event to recognize April Autism Awareness Month. The Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development, and the Duke Neurohumanities Research Group are co-sponsoring a presentation by Tito Mukhopadhyay and Ralph Savarese on April 27th from 7:00 – 8:00 PM at the Full Frame Theatre in Durham. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required and can be completed at this website: http://www.dibs.duke.edu/events/2015/04/1383-lecture-with-tito-and-soma-mukhopadhyay . Be sure to register early as seating is limited.
Tito Mukhopadhyay and Ralph Savarese have been reading and discussing literature by Skype for years. Mukhopadhyay, who has been described as “severely autistic,” types his comments on the sidebar while Savarese, who has been described as “neurotypical,” speaks. The former has never been allowed in a regular school; the latter is an English professor. In 2012-2013, they read Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick, two chapters a week for seventeen months. In the fall of 2014, they visited Arrowhead, where Melville wrote Moby Dick, and Mystic Seaport, home of the Charles Morgan, the world’s oldest wooden whaling vessel. Engaging issues of perception, sensory processing, and unrecognized competence in autism, they will recount their illuminating journey.
Tito Mukhopadhyay is the author of four books, including How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move?, and the subject of both a 60 Minutes profile and a BBC documentary. A new book, Plankton Dreams: What I Learned in Special-Ed is forthcoming from Open Humanities Press in late 2015. Of Mukhopadhyay, Oliver Sacks once wrote, “It has usually been assumed that deeply autistic people are scarcely capable of introspection or deep thought, let alone of poetic or metaphor leaps of the imagination… Tito gives the lie to all of these assumptions and forces us to reconsider the condition of the deeply autistic.”
Ralph James Savarese is the author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption and co-editor with his wife, Emily Thornton Savarese, of the first collection devoted to the concept of neurodiversity. Winner of the Hennig Cohen Prize for the best essay on Herman Melville, he has published some twenty-five articles on autism. In 2012-2013 he was a Humanities-Writ-Large fellow at Duke’s Institute for Brain Sciences. He teaches at Grinnell College in Iowa.
Let me know if you have any questions, Shelagh