Acadia Senior College

Online via Zoom

Cyrano de Bergerac is one of the most read and performed classic plays outside of Shakespeare. This well-loved 19th-century French classic about the swordsman-poet with the nose too large to be taken seriously, was made into a 1950 film, for which Jose Ferrer won the Academy Award and a 1990 version starring Gerard Depardieu. The story was also adapted as a musical and as a movie (Roxanne) starring Steve Martin. We will read the translation by Anthony Burgess, discuss the play’s continued place in classic theater, and perhaps read some scenes aloud.

Online via Zoom

Join author and historian Earl Brechlin for a four-session class exploring some of the people, places and events that have made Maine, and Mount Desert Island, what it is today. Topics include legends and giants of the Great North Woods, the Mount Desert Island area in World War II, and Baxter State Park's hidden logging past. The last session will cover myths, legends, historical firsts, and the enormous talent of Maine’s early inventors, explorers and artists, drawing from Brechlin’s latest book Wild! Weird! Wonderful! Maine! Many of the areas discussed await your own discovery and exploration today.

Online via Zoom

This course will cross boundaries between politics, culture and business-labor relations by examining the changing images of mobs, riots, and notions of the public and crowd psychology. From the American Revolution through the Civil War Draft Riots and labor disorders in the late nineteenth century, mobs played an important role in establishing respectability and expressing political and economic frustrations. Crowds were also critical elements in the changing nature of entertainment and notions of acceptable or fun behavior. In contemporary times, with the rising impact of marketing and public relations, social media and Donald Trump, the uses of heroism and crowd psychology has had huge cultural implications about which we are still learning. Each class will require some reading while several will also involve viewing online films.

Online via Zoom

Born and raised in dissimilar cultures, both Henry James and Joseph Conrad settled in England to write fiction that transmuted nineteenth-century realism into the subjective impressions of psychologically ambiguous protagonists or narrators. This course will consider several tales by each of these precursors to Modernism, focusing on their controversial short novels, The Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness.

Online via Zoom

The course will cover such topics as free speech on campus, free speech on the internet, capital punishment, racial bias in jury selection, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, Sovereignty of the Native American nations, jurisdiction of the World Court and International Criminal Court over American citizens, the Ninth Amendment, Admiralty, and the Supreme Court's five worst decisions. Topics may change as political events suggest.

Online via Zoom

In this class, we will focus on the essential causes and mechanisms of virus infections, major cellular responses which have developed in nature to prevent or abort virus infections, and some critical discoveries of human science which resulted from efforts to prevent or control infectious diseases.

Undercroft of St. John Episcopal Church, Southwest Harbor

Learn the art of making window stars with transparent paper to brighten a winter day. In this class we will make colorful window stars as well as folded paper books to use as gifts.

NOTE: This course will be taught IN PERSON. Masks and social distancing per Maine CDC guidelines will be required, and all participants must sign ASC's Assumption of Risk form.