Stephen King and Amy Tan to headline the 2011 Fall for the Book Festival.

Kate Haulman, associate professor of history at American University, discusses The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America, and explains how clothing once had the power to affect social order and even political authority.

Associate professor of Law at Vanderbilt University and author of The Invisible Line, Daniel Sharfstein shares the stories of three multi-racial American families to explain why racial identity in the U.S. is not as simple as black and white.

Mason economics professor and author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent in More Fun and Less Work than You Think, Bryan Caplan reads with Tyler Cowen, Chair of economics that Mason and author of the book The Great Stagnation: How America Are All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.

Join Professor of Legal History, Joyce Malcolm and Professor of Government and Politics, David Ericson for a discussion on the 14th Amendment.

Free

Steven Bernstein, author of The Confederacy’s Last Northern Offensive, Jane Censer, author of The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865 – 1895, Chris Hamner, author of Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776 – 1945, and Charles Mauro, author of A Southern Spy in Northern Virginia, provide fresh perspectives on The Civil War during this sesquicentennial year. Sponsored by Gale Cengage Learning.

Seminar Topic TBD

Dorothy Noyes, author of Fire in the Placa, winner of the Book Prize of the Fellows of the American Folklore Society, shares how the study of folklore contributes to her research on European immigrant communities in the United States. 

Garret Peck, who leads the Temperance Tour of Prohibition-related sites in the nation's capital, shares stories from Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t, his book about the exuberant and crime-filled speakeasies that once numbered in the thousands.

Poet, painter and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths — praised for her stunning lyric grace and earthly and epic gravity — reads from her recent collections, The Requited Distance and Miracle Arrhythmia.

Advanced Writing Workshop - Mondays

Dopamine, Parkinson's Disease and Habit Learning. Presented by Kim Blackwell, Professor, Molecular Science; Krasnow Insitute for Advanced Study.

Free

One of Scotland’s leading folklorists — and singers! — Margaret Bennett explores traditional Scottish customs and rites of passage over four centuries in Scottish Customs: From the Cradle to the Grave.